it will impart to them a liberty which they will not easily surrender; and her people once free, the seizure of the territories of unoffending nations will be a "game" at which her monarchs "will not play." England! Conquer the world with that volume! Then, "Far Iceland shall thy love revere, While Hecla lifts her threat'ning steep; And ages hence thy gift shall cheer The gloom of Lapland's winter sleep; "And when yon tribes have ceased to rove, As, round his knee, his children smile, Was sent them from the Western Isle." SIR THOMAS MORE.* SIR THOMAS MORE afforded one of the many thousand instances, which are to be found, of a son inheriting not only his father's name and estate, but also some traits of his character. Both Sir John More the father, and Sir Thomas More the son, were well known for their humorous sayings; though only one of those of the former has been preserved, and it ought to be well weighed by all bachelors. He said that "he would compare the multitude of women which are to be chosen for wives unto a bag full of snakes, having among them a single eel: now if a man should put his hand into the bag he may chance to light on the eel; but it is a hundred to one he shall be stung by a snake." Whether Sir John More had caught an eel, or been stung by a snake when he dipped his hand into the bag, we do not know; but we should guess that the mother of such a noble-minded, straight-forward, yet sweet-tempered man as Sir Thomas proved to be, had neither been eel nor viper, but must more likely have fulfilled De Foe's description of a perfect helpmeet, who, he says, "is all sweetness and softness, love, wit, and delight." But whatever his mother was, he was born in the year 1480, when Edward IV. was king. While a lad he attended as page on the Lord Chancellor Morton, who, we are told, * The lecturer cannot but express his obligation to the admirable Biography of More in Lord Campbell's "Lives of the Chancellors." much delighted in him for his towardliness, and would say of him unto divers of the nobility who at sundry times dined with him, "This child here, waiting at the table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous rare man." While he was studying at Oxford his father kept him very short in his allowance, "suffering him scarcely to have so much money in his own custody as would pay for the mending of his apparel; and for his expenses, he would expect of him a particular account; "a sensible enough expectation too, I should say, though this very particular account of his son's expenses must have been a very particularly brief one, if he could barely pay for having his coat patched. However, in after life Sir Thomas rejoiced at having been thus "curbed from all vice, and withdrawn from gaming and naughty company." After leaving Oxford, he was called to the bar, and then he had a narrow escape of being buried for the rest of his life in a convent. Like many other young Roman Catholics his imagination was set on fire by the tales he read of the extraordinary piety and asceticism of St. Augustine, and other early saints, and he was seized with an enthusiastic wish to follow their example. But with that thorough sound sense which he always displayed, he thought he would try whether the monastic discipline suited him before he took it upon him for life. So he wore a sharp hair shirt next his skin, whipped himself every Friday, put a log under his head instead of a pillow, and, in short, as one of his old biographers says, "he used his body as if it were an ass, with strokes and hard fare, lest provender might pride it, and so bring his soul, like a headstrong jade, to the bottomless pit of hell." But after fair trial, he, thorough Roman Catholic as he always was, came to the conclusion that such hardships did not make for piety. And here I may notice that one cannot but marvel that a man of such piety and wisdom should have been found on the |