or rather of its propensity to accumulate falsities and forgeries, even amidst surrounding reformation and refinement In Roper and Harpsfield there is scarcely any thing fanatical; Stapleton, who wrote (in 1588) about thirty years afterwards, and at a distance from the scene of action, being in exile at Douay, has detailed several miraculous stories[1]: but Mr. More, Sir Thomas's great grandson, whose life of his ancestor came out in the year 1627, goes much farther; (one very short specimen may be found in the note[2]). May we not easily believe that, but for the iniquity of the times, in another generation Sir Thomas More would have been canonized[3]?"
The character of Sir Thomas More has been variously estimated by writers of various parties, but all allow him to have been endowed with many virtues; and the only serious and unrefuted
- ↑ Some of these are copied by the writer of the Life published by Dr. Wordsworth, and called forth his animadversions; the following is a specimen: "One time as his nurse (and this much to be noted) rid over a water, having this young babe in her arms, she was, by reason of the stumbling of her horse, in danger of drowning. And that she might the better save herself and the child, on a sudden she did cast the child from her over the hedge. She after coming to the place with great feare found the child without bruise or hurt smiling and laughing on her. This, no question, was no obscure presage of his future holiness."
- ↑ It was credibly reported, that two of John Haywood's sons, Jasper and Ellis, having one of the teeth of Sir Thomas More between them, and either of them being desirous to have it to himself, it suddenly to the admiration of both parted in two!" More's Life of Sir Thomas More, p. 304.
- ↑ Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Biography, Vol. 2. p. 60.
