More's influence was rather political than educational or religious. In 1516 he issued A Description of the Republic of Utopia (Nowhere). The first part of this work is a treatise on the miseries of the people, the second an attack in disguise on the political and social vices of the time. In this ideal state the people chose their prince for life, they chose the royal council, they avoided war; their welfare was the object of all government; they possessed better homes, shorter hours of work, property in common, freedom of speech, intellectual and social happiness. The Utopia was first written in Latin and not translated into English until 1551.

With this group of scholars, known as the "Oxford Reformers," Henry VIII at first identified himself. He saw in their work nothing revolutionary ; he believed their purpose to be the purification of the church, not separation from it. He made Colet court preacher, More under-sheriff of London and afterward chancellor, and gave Erasmus a professorship at Cambridge. Both the king and the reformers were at this time devotedly attached to the Orthodox church and had no sympathy with any one who, like Luther in Germany, was ready to create a schism in the church by separating from it.

JOHN COLET.

Dean of St. Paul's. From the drawing by Holbein.

But Henry VIII was not destined to be a Renaissance king. He was too fond of power, too ready to enter on wars and to juggle with diplomacy. In the years that were to come, instead of following the teaching of the Oxford reformers and favoring peace and toleration, he became hard, cruel, vindictive, intolerant, and full of ingratitude.

HENRY VIII AS A PATRON OF LEARNING.

From Vertue's engraving for the Oxford Almanac of the year 1748. Wolsey stands at the king's left hand.

In no one particular did the England of Henry VIII resemble the Utopia of which Thomas More had dreamed, and it is, therefore, little wonder that the first revival of learning in England should have come to an early and untimely end.