opposition in their good works. The farmers thought that education, even to the limited extent of learning to read, would be fatal to agriculture, and the clergy, whose neglect she was making good, accused her of Methodist tendencies. In her old age, philanthropists from all parts made pilgrimages to see the bright and amiable old lady, and she retained all her faculties till within two years of her death, dying at Clifton, where the last five years of her life were spent, on the 7th of September 1833.
See The Life of Hannah More, with Notices of Her Sisters (1838), by the Rev. Henry Thompson. The article in the Dict. Nat. Biog. is by Sir Leslie Stephen. Some letters of Hannah More, with a very slight connecting narrative, were published in 1872 by William Roberts as The Life of Hannah More. See also Hannah More (1888), by Charlotte M. Yonge, in the “Eminent Women” series, and Hannah More (New York and London, 1900), by “Marion Harland.” Letters of Hannah More to Zachary Macaulay were edited (1860) by Arthur Roberts. The contemporary opposition to her may be seen in an abusive Life of Hannah More, with a Critical Review of Her Writings (1802), by the “Rev. Archibald Macsarcasm” William Shaw, rector of Chelvey, Somerset).
MORE, HENRY (1614–1687), English philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist school, was born at Grantham in 1614. Both his father and his mother, he tells us, were “earnest followers of Calvin,” but he himself “could never swallow that hard doctrine.” In 1631 he was admitted at Christ’s College, Cambridge, about the time Milton was leaving it. He immersed himself “over head and ears in the study of philosophy,” and fell for a time into a scepticism, from which he was delivered by a study of the “Platonic writers.” He was fascinated especially by Neoplatonism, and this fascination never left him. The Theologia germanica also exerted a permanent influence over him. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1635, his master’s degree in 1639, and immediately afterwards was chosen fellow of his college. All other preferment he refused, with one exception. Fifteen years after the Restoration he accepted a prebend in Gloucester Cathedral, but only to resign it in favour of his friend Dr Edward Fowler, afterwards bishop of Gloucester. He would not accept the mastership of his college, to which, it is understood, he would have been preferred in 1654, when Cudworth was appointed. He drew around him many young men of a refined and thoughtful turn of mind, but among all his pupils the most interesting was a young lady of noble family. This lady, probably a sister of Lord Finch, subsequently earl of Nottingham, a well-known statesman of the Restoration, afterwards became Lady Conway, and at her country seat at Ragley in Warwickshire More continued at intervals to spend “a considerable part of his time.” She and her husband both appreciated him, and amidst the woods of this retreat he composed several of his books. The spiritual enthusiasm of Lady Conway was a considerable factor in some of More’s speculations, none the less that she at length joined the Quakers. She became the friend not only of More and Penn, but of Baron van Helmont and Valentine Greatrakes, mystical thaumaturgists of the 17th century. Ragley became a centre not only of devotion but of wonder-working spiritualism.[1] From this, his genius suffered, and the rationality which distinguishes his earlier is much less conspicuous in his later works. He was a voluminous writer both in verse and in prose, but his works, except the Divine Dialogues (1688), are now of little interest. This treatise, animated and sometimes brilliant, is valuable for modern readers in that it condenses his general view of philosophy and religion.
Henry More represents the mystical and theosophic side of the Cambridge movement. The Neoplatonic extravagances which lay hidden in the school from the first came in his writings to a head, and merged in pure phantasy. He can never be spoken of, however, save as a spiritual genius and a significant figure in British philosophy, less robust and in some respects less learned than Cudworth, but more interesting and fertile in thought, and more genial in character. From youth to age he describes himself as gifted with a buoyant temper. His own thoughts were to him a never-ending source of pleasurable excitement. This mystical elevation was the chief feature of his character, a certain radiancy of thought which carried him beyond the common life without raising him to any artificial height, for his humility and charity were not less conspicuous than his piety. The last ten years of his life were uneventful. He died on the 1st of September 1687, and was buried in the chapel of the college he loved.
Before his death More issued complete editions of his works, his Opera theologica in 1675, and his Opera philosophica in 1678. The chief authorities for his life are Ward’s Life (1710); the prefatio generalissima prefixed to his Opera omnia (1679); and also a general account of the manner and scope of his writings in an Apology published in 1664. The collection of his Philosophical Poems (1647), in which he has “compared his chief speculations and experiences,” should also be consulted. An elaborate analysis of his life and works is given in Tulloch’s Rational Theology, vol. ii. (1874); see also R. Zimmermann, Henry More und die vierte Dimension des Raums (Vienna, 1881). (For his ethical theory, as contained in the Enchiridion Ethicum, see Ethics.)
MORE, SIR THOMAS (1478–1535), English lord chancellor, and author of Utopia, was born in Milk Street in the city of London, on the 7th of February 1478. He received the rudiments of education at St Anthony’s School in Threadneedle Street, at that time under Nicolas Holt, held to be the best in the city. He was early placed in the household of Cardinal Morton, archbishop of Canterbury. Admission to the cardinal’s family was esteemed a high privilege, and was sought as a school of manners and as an introduction to the world by the sons of the best families in the kingdom. Young Thomas More obtained admission through the influence of his father, Sir Thomas, then a rising barrister and afterwards a justice of the court of king’s bench. The usual prognostication of future distinction is attributed in the case of More to Cardinal Morton, “who would often tell the nobles sitting at table with him, where young Thomas waited on him, whosoever liveth to trie it shall see this child prove a notable and rare man.”[2] At the proper age young More was sent to Oxford, where he is said vaguely to have had Colet, Grocyn and Linacre for his tutors.[3] All More himself says is that he had Linacre for his master in Greek. Learning Greek was not the matter of course which it has since become. Greek was not as yet part of the arts curriculum, and to learn it voluntarily was ill looked upon by the authorities. Those who did so were suspected of an inclination towards novel and dangerous modes of thinking, then rife on the Continent and slowly finding their way to England. More’s father, who intended his son to make a career in his own profession, took the alarm; he removed him from the university without a degree, and entered him at New Inn to commence at once the study of the law. After completing a two-years’ course in New Inn, an inn of chancery. More was admitted in February 1496 at Lincoln’s Inn, an inn of court. “At that time the Inns of Court and Chancery presented the discipline of a well-constituted university, and, through professors under the name of readers and exercises under the name of mootings, law was systematically taught” (Campbell). In his professional studies More early distinguished himself, so that he was appointed reader-in-law in Furnival’s Inn; but he would not relinquish the studies which had attracted him in Oxford. We find him delivering a lecture to audiences of “all the chief learned of the city of London.”[4] The subject he chose was a compromise between theology and the humanities, being St Augustine’s De civitate. In this lecture More sought less to expound the theology of his author than to set forth the philosophical and historical contents of the treatise. The lecture-room was a church, St Lawrence Jewry, placed at his disposal by Grocyn, the rector.
Somewhere about this period of More’s life two things happened which gave in opposite directions the determining impulse to his future career. More’s was one of those highly susceptible natures which take more readily and more eagerly than common minds the impress of that which they encounter on their first contact with men. Two principal forms of thought and feeling were at this date in conflict, rather unconscious than declared, on English soil. Under the denomination of the “old learning,” the sentiment of the middle ages and the idea of Church authority was
