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| Style | Easy and flowing, without pedantry and without vulgarisms; rivaling in purity his great antagonist, Tyndale; so graphic in description that many of the learned received the Utopia as a true history ... so buoyant in tone, that in the grave and sullen pages of polemics, it jests, smiles, rails, or drifts into ludicrous ribaldry; for, on questions of religious reform, More was a madman, and sarcasm was at any moment liable to pass into scurrility. |
| Rank | A scholar, a lawyer, a theologian, a wit, a politician without ambition, a lord-chancellor who entered and resigned his office poor, a sage whose wisdom lay concealed in his philosophical pleasantry, a theorist and a seer, a martyr who laid his head upon the block, to seal his conscience with his blood ... an author who missed the full immortality of his genius by the infelicity of his subjects, but whose massive folio remains a monument of our language in its pristine vigor; memorable as the first in prose to gauge the means of striking the attention, to study the art of arrangement and effect; hence, in the order of time, the first of our great English prose writers. |
| Character | Of keen irregular features, gray restless eye, tumbled brown hair,
careless in gait and dress, -- the outer pictures the inner man, cheerful,
witty even to recklessness, kindly, half-sadly humorous, throwing the veil
of laughter and of tears over the tender reverence of the soul ... Among
his children, he was a loving companion and a wise teacher ... Fond of
their pets and their games as they themselves. He would take scholars and
statesmen into his garden to see his girls' rabbits or watch the gambols
of their favorite monkey. "I have given you kisses enough', he wrote them,
'but stripes hardly ever.' In conversation and writing, humor was his constitutional
temper. At the most solemn moments of his life, he was facetious. In the
Tower, denied pen and ink, he writes to his daughter Margaret, and tells
her, 'This letter is written with a coal'; but that, to express his love,
a peck of coals would not suffice ...
His character presents many opposite and, unhappily, some inconsistent qualities. Beneath the sunny nature lay a stern inflexibility of resolve ... He laughed at the superstition and asceticism of the day, yet every Friday scourged his body with whips of knotted cords, and by way of further penance wore his hair-shirt next to his lacerated skin. Once an opponent of abuses in the Church, when the Reformation was sprung, he went violently back to the extreme of maintaining the whole fabric of idolatry. Playful and affectionate in his own household, his abuses of power are a cloud on his memory ... Theoretically opposed to sanguinary laws, he spared no pains to carry the most sanguinary into execution |
| Influence | To him belongs the merit of having struck out, in advance of his age, ... a new path in literature, - that of political romances, wherein his successors - among them, Swift - were to be indebted largely to his reasoning and inventive talents ... the comprehensive dreams of the Utopia have haunted every nobler soul. Excellence is perpetual, and all of it exists in vision before it exists in fact ... There is a large class of persons with whom the idea of making the world better and happier is ever regarded with distrust and contempt. He who entertains it is an impractical dreamer .. of which the moral , to the wise, is: Look kindly upon the 'vagaries' of the 'dreamer' and the 'fanatic'; reflect that what was folly to our ancestors, is wisdom to us, and that another generation may successfully practice what we now reject as impossible or regard with an incredulous smile. |
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