is very severe on the sports of the gentry; the Utopians count “hunting the lowest, the vilest, and the most abject part of butchery.” He quotes the words of the “Republic” in which the philosopher is described “standing out of the way under a wall until the driving storm of sleet and rain be overpast,” which admit of a singular application to More’s own fate; although, writing twenty years before (about the year 1514), he can hardly be supposed to have foreseen this. There is no touch of satire which strikes deeper than his quiet remark that the greater part of the precepts of Christ are more at variance with the lives of ordinary Christians than the discourse of Utopia.[1]
The “New Atlantis” is only a fragment, and far inferior in merit to the “Utopia.” The work is full of ingenuity, but wanting in creative fancy, and by no means impresses the reader with a sense of credibility. In some places Lord Bacon is characteristically different from Sir Thomas More, as, for example, in the external state which he attributes to the governor of Salomon’s House, whose dress he minutely describes, while to Sir Thomas More such trappings appear simply ridiculous. Yet, after this program of dress, Bacon adds the beautiful trait, “that he had a look as though he pitied men.” Several things are borrowed by him from the “Timæus;” but he has injured the unity of style by adding thoughts and passages which are taken from the Hebrew Scriptures.
The “City of the Sun,” written by Campanella (1568–1639), a Dominican friar, several years after the “New Atlantis” of Bacon, has many resemblances to the “Republic” of Plato. The citizens have wives and children in common; their marriages are of the same temporary sort, and are arranged by the magistrates from time to time. They do not, however, adopt his system of lots, but bring together the best natures, male and female, “according to philosophical rules.” The
- ↑ “And yet the most part of them is more dissident from the manners of the world nowadays than my communication was. But preachers, sly and wily men, following your counsel (as I suppose) because they saw men evil-willing to frame their manners to Christ’s rule, they have wrested and wried his doctrine, and, like a rule of lead, have applied it to men’s manners, that by some means at the least way, they might agree together” (p. 66).
suppositions, very wittily invented in the small logicals, which here our children in every place do learn. Furthermore, they were never yet able to find out the second intentions; insomuch that none of them all could ever see man himself in common, as they call him, though he be (as you know) bigger than was ever any giant, yea, and pointed to us even with our finger” (p. 105).
