PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE.

Our life is turned

Out of her course, wherever man is made
An offering, or a sacrifice, a tool

Or implement, a passive thing employed
As a brute mean, without acknowledgment
Of common right or interest in the end;
Used or abused as selfishness may prompt.
WORDSWORTH.

THE object of works like the Utopia is very commonly misunderstood. People are apt to imagine, because the form in which the principles appear has been created by the author, that the principles themselves likewise partake of a visionary character, and have no reference to society as it actually exists. The attempt to exhibit them in action seems fatal to their vitality. They are supposed to be adapted to the use of no community, because the community in whose social condition the author has chosen to exemplify their necessary operation, is disguised by a fanciful name, or perhaps has no existence.

But this is an unphilosophical mode of judging. In most cases men who create imaginary common

wealths are careful to introduce no institution, which has not somewhere been put in practice, and received the sanction of experience. They proceed exactly according to the system of landscapepainters, who, from various picturesque features actually observed in nature, compose an ideal scene, more beautiful, perhaps, than any combination of the elements they ever witnessed; or, at least, more complete when artificially isolated, and viewed apart; which is almost impossible in nature itself. Precisely so is it with ethic delineators. They study society in its history and progressive developement, and from among the rules which it has prescribed itself in different circumstances, select what appear to them the wisest, and linking them together by an imaginary vinculum, give birth to a state, a form of government, a code of laws, and a system of manners, such as in their totality never existed, though not necessarily repugnant to the human constitution or the regular dispensations of Providence.

This is preeminently true in the case of Sir Thomas More. He has nowhere, I think, imagined a law which was not really enacted and found to work well in some ancient community; he has conceived no form of manners, even where he departs from established customs most widely, for which he could not, or for which I cannot, adduce historical or philosophical authority; he recommends no practices which have not already prevailed, advocates no maxims which have not, in some country or other, been adopted as principles of action, ad

vances no opinions which would require more than a very moderate portion of ability to defend.

Not that I by any means pretend he is always right. Far from it. I disagree with him in many places, as they who read my notes will perceive. Yet even where he errs, his errors, I think, are those of a great man, intent on promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number; and with this view venturing daringly on the adoption or revival of practices shrunk from by the timid, or made the object of sneer and sarcasm by the vulgar. His opportunities, however, for acquiring correct notions, and testing theory by experience, were such as fall to the lot of few. Engaged for many years in public business, initiated in all the mysteries of state-craft, he was enabled to observe closely and narrowly the operation of those principles, by which contemporary politicians were guided; and his large acquaintance with history, rendered easy the comparison between existing institutions, and those which society had made experiment of and laid aside, whether from fickleness, or because its wants required the change.

For this reason the opinion of Sir Thomas More, preserved in the UTOPIA, will always appear worthy of consideration to persons above the puerile habit of judging all things by the prejudice current in their particular coterie. Historians, however, little acquainted with his works, but re-echoing the remarks of some strainer after originality, affect to form a mean estimate of his intellect. They lose sight altogether of the times in which he ap

peared. They forget how dense were the clouds. which then filled the horizon, obstructing the golden rays of truth, that sought to find a passage to the earth. Dwelling on an eminence to which they have not been raised by their own exertions, but by the progressive artificial elevation of the whole platform of society, they conceive themselves entitled to look down upon the Chancellor of Henry the Eighth, because certain truths, now popular, failed to gain admittance into his mind, and certain errors, now exploded, maintained their footing there.

But if all the truths contained in the UTOPIA were expanded and placed in their proper light, it would appear a bold work even now; to say nothing of the errors, which are full as bold and startling as the truths. A strong sympathy with the many always brings its punishment along with it in a monarchy. It subjects the individual who entertains it to suspicion at court, and even in general society. He has dared to suffer his feelings to overstep the limits prescribed by fashion-has tacitly declared himself member of a community more comprehensive than that of the exclusivehas adopted humanity at large in opposition to the humanity of the aristocracy, and is supposed to belong, in sentiment and preferences, to the great circle whose interests he espouses. And

there is no one who does not know that a declaration of this kind is still attended with many inconveniences, if not with serious detriment and loss. How much more so, then, must this have been

the case in the days of Sir Thomas More! Nevertheless, though fully alive to all the evils and dangers to which the advocacy of popular government was likely to expose him, he fearlessly, with his eyes open, lent the sanction of his name to a theory of Reform, to adopt the mildest term, more radical and sweeping than any known to the history of legislation, from the days of Lycurgus to the present.

Many, indeed, may conceive that by its very extravagance it was rendered innoxious and unobjectionable. For even princes and nobles would discover little danger in a scheme which strikes at the root of all property and all luxury; which leaves the ambitious nothing to aspire to; the avaricious nothing to crave; the sensualist and voluptuary nothing to sigh after, nothing to covet; the vain, and idle, and time-waster, nothing but the prospect of toil, shared with the rudest and meanest members of the community. Milton speaks of Plato's Republic as an intellectual debauch, indulged in after dinner in the Groves of the Academy. Had he expressed an opinion of the UTOPIA, it is probable, considering the different geniuses of the men, that it would have been little more favourable; for Sir Thomas More had, in the strict sense, but a scanty share of the poet in his temperament, while Milton was "of imagination all compact." It is, therefore, somewhat surprising to find him among the censurers of Plato, who assuredly, whatever faults he might fall into, did not err on the side of dryness and commonplace, which the ima