ormers.

Sir Thomas More's Utopia was written in the years 1515-16, when its
author's age was about thirty-seven. He was a young man of twenty when
Columbus first touched the continent named after the Florentine Amerigo
Vespucci, who made his voyages to it in the years 1499-1503. More wrote
his Utopia when imaginations of men were stirred by the sudden
enlargement of their conceptions of the world, and Amerigo Vespucci's
account of his voyages, first printed in 1507, was fresh in every
scholar's mind. He imagined a traveller, Raphael Hythloday--whose name
is from Greek words that mean "Knowing in Trifles"--who had sailed with
Vespucci on his three last voyages, but had not returned from the last
voyage until, after separation from his comrades, he had wandered into
some farther discovery of his own. Thus he had found, somewhere in those
parts, the island of Utopia. Its name is from Greek words meaning
Nowhere. More had gone on an embassy to Brussels with Cuthbert Tunstal
when he wrote his philosophical satire upon European, and more
particularly English, statecraft, in the form of an Ideal Commonwealth
described by Hythloday as he had found it in Utopia. It was printed at
Louvain in the latter part of the year 1516, under the editorship of
Erasmus, and that enlightened young secretary to the municipality of
Antwerp, Peter Giles, or AEgidius, who is introduced into the story.
"Utopia" was not printed in England in the reign of Henry VIII., and
could not be, for its satire was too direct to be misunderstood, even
when it mocked English policy with ironical praise for doing exactly
what it failed to do. More was a wit and a philosopher, but at the same
time so practical and earnest that Erasmus tells of a burgomaster at
Antwerp who fastened upon the parable of Utopia with such goodwill that
he learnt it by heart. And in 1517 Erasmus advised a correspondent to
send for Utopia, if he had not yet read it, and if he wished to see the
true source of all political evils.

Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis," first written in Latin, was published in
1629, three years after its author's death. Bacon placed his Ideal
Commonwealth in those seas where a great Austral continent was even then
supposed to be, but had not been discovered. As the old Atlantis implied
a foreboding of the American continent, so the New Atlantis implied
foreboding of the Australian. Bacon in his philosophy sought through
experimental science the dominion of men