surrounded her father, fell on his neck and kissed him. He gave her his blessing with many tender and loving words, and then passed on. But she could not bear to let him go, and once more burst through the crowd of armed men, and clasping her father's neck, kissed him again and again, until at last ' with a full and heavy heart she was fain to depart from him, the beholding whereof,' says Roper, was to many that were present so lamentable that it made them for very sorrow thereof to weep.' And Erasmus in his account tells us that even the guards were moved to tears at the sight of her love and grief. On the 5th July More wrote his last letter to Margaret, with a charred stick, sending messages and such little gifts as he had about him to the different members of his family, and bidding them all farewell, since he hoped to die the next day, which would be the eve of the Translation of St. Thomas of Canterbury and the octave of St. Peter's festival. 'Therefore,' he writes to this darling child, 'to-morrow long I to go to God. I never liked your manner towards me better than when you kissed me last, for I love when daughterly love and dear charity hath no leisure to look to worldly courtesy. Farewell, my dear child, and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends, that we may merrily meet in heaven' (p. 428).

And the next morning, when Sir Thomas Pope came with tears in his eyes to tell him he must die that day, he thanked him and begged him to ask the king as a last favour that his daughter Margaret might be present at his burial. Then he went out to die, as calmly as other men go home to bed. To the last his old sense of humour never failed him.

'The scaffold,' says Roper, 'was very unsteady, and putting his feet on the ladder, he said merrily to the Lieutenant (Sir Edmund Walsingham, Lieutenant-Governor of the Tower), "I pray thee, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself." Then desired he all the people to pray for him, and to bear witness with him that he should there suffer death in and for the faith of the Catholic Church.'

This is Roper's account. Erasmus, adds that he exhorted

The French report, copied by

the people to pray for the king, that God would send him good counsel, and protested that he died his faithful servant, but especially the servant of God. He then knelt down, and, according to Stapleton, recited the psalm Miserere, which had always been his favourite prayer. The executioner as usual asked pardon, and he kissed him, saying cheerfully, "Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thy office. My neck is very short; take heed, therefore, thou strike not awry, for saving of thine honesty" (p. 434).

Then he blindfolded himself, and moved his beard carefully on one side as he laid his head on the block. 'Pity that should be cut,' he was heard to murmur; that has never committed treason.' So he died. His body was buried, as he had desired, by Margaret Roper, in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula in the Tower. His name is now inscribed on the memorial tablet near the door, and immediately below we read the names of Anne Boleyn, of her brother, Lord Rochford, and of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, who, next to the king, had been the three chief instruments of his death, and who were so soon to share his fate and lie in the same grave. Margaret Roper, we know, obtained possession of her father's head after it had been exposed on a stake on London Bridge, and kept it reverently while she lived. Erasmus tells us that it was easily recognized, because the face was almost as fair as in life. For this pious act Margaret herself was summoned before the council and accused of keeping her father's head as a relic, as well as his writings. She replied, with a courage worthy of her cause, that she had rescued her father's head that it might not become the food of fishes, and that she had only kept a few of his writings, besides familiar letters, which were her daily comfort. Fortunately, she had powerful friends at court, and she was allowed to go home in peace. 'Carrying her love beyond the grave,' says Sir James Mackintosh,' she desired that the head might be buried with her when she died. The remains of this precious relic are said to have been since observed in the burial-place, lying on what had been her bosom.' But this beautiful legend is hardly borne out by facts. A leaden-shaped box, apparently containing a head, does indeed rest in the vault of the Roper family at St. Dunstan's Church, Canterbury; but Margaret herself was buried with her mother in the vault prepared by Sir Thomas More during his lifetime in the old church at Chelsea. She only survived her father nine years, and died in 1544. Her husband lived thirty-four years longer, and by his last will desired that he might be buried at Chelsea, 'in the vault with the body of my dearly-beloved wife (whose soul our Lord pardon), where my father-in-law, Sir Thomas More (whose soul Jesus bless), did mind to be buried.' But, for some reason unknown to us, his children buried him in the family vault at St. Dunstan's, Canterbury.

The 'right fair' house at Chelsea passed into other hands, and was finally pulled down by Sir Hans Sloane in 1740. Not a trace now remains of that home of Christian virtue and wisdom which had stirred the wonder and roused the admiration of VOL. XXXIV.-NO. LXVII.

G

Erasmus. And what of Erasmus himself? A cruel pang rent his heart when the news of these terrible events reached him at Bâle, and he heard that More, dearest to him of mortals, had died on the scaffold. We know that he treasured up every detail of his beloved friend's last moments, and himself published a full account of More's trial and execution. under the assumed name of Covrinus Nucerinus. His own strength was failing fast, he was ill and suffering, and knew that he had not long to live. But, as with a heavy heart and trembling hand he laboured at his treatise on Ecclesiastes, the old memories of his youth came back upon him with sudden force, and he paid a last tribute to the friend he had loved so well in these mournful words :

'We lament the loss of our merchandize in a shipwreck. What merchandize, however, is so precious as to admit of comparison with a real friend? The present time has been very cruel to me, since it has deprived me of so many greatly valued friends, first Warham, more lately Mountjoy, Fisher, Thomas More-whose breast was whiter than snow, to whom in point of genius none of all the distinguished men whom England has brought forth in the past or will bring forth in the future can ever bear the least resemblance.'

ART. IV. THEOLOGY AND MORALITY IN
MODERN FICTION.

1. The History of David Grieve. By Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD. In 3 vols. (London, 1892.)

2. The Wages of Sin, a Novel. By LUCAS MALET. (London, 1891).

3. Darkness and Dawn; or Scenes in the Days of Nero, an Historic Tale. By F. W. FARRAR. (London, 1891.)

AMONG the old Evangelical party, which did so much to keep alive the flame of piety in England during the early years of the present century, it was almost an axiom that the novel was an evil thing-a thing to be abhorred of all good Christians. 'Novels in prose,' wrote Legh Richmond to his daughters, 'I need not now forbid. Ignorant as you are of their bad tendency by experience, you, I am persuaded, trust me on that head, and will never sacrifice time, affection, or attention to them.' His biographer, Mr. Grimshaw, is careful to impress upon the reader that Mr. Richmond himself' sought his ma

terials, not in the region of fancy, but in the less questionable sources of fact and reality.'' It required all the popularity and unimpeachable character of Hannah More to reconcile the religious world to ' Cœlebs in Search of a Wife,' though the tale was so obviously 'serious' that it was called by some 'a dramatic sermon'; and it is partly, no doubt, in reference to this most harmless work that the same Mr. Grimshaw alludes doubtfully to a class of publications which profess to convey religious truths under the garb of fiction.'

Narrow-minded as all this may sound, it should not be forgotten that the majority of novels then known furnished at least an excuse for the prejudices of these good people. Of course there were exceptions; but it is not unreasonable to form one's judgment on the rule, not on the exception. Unfortunately the law of action and reaction, and the law of demand and supply came in here. Novels of an evil tendency raised the prejudices of good people, and the prejudices of good people tended to create novels of evil tendency. For novel-writers, like other candidates for public favour, catered for their own public; if the condemnation of good people went without saying, they wrote for those who, not to put too fine a point upon it, were not good. If they could not please the 'serious,' they must try to please the 'worldly.'

'Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.'

Those who halted between two opinions, and were half-serious and half-worldly, would read their novel on the sly, and put it away as a guilty thing in the presence of their serious friends.

The spell was broken by Sir Walter Scott. It was he who not only raised the novel to an unprecedented popularity, but also set it on a pedestal, made it respectable, taught people not to be ashamed of reading it. He was perfectly justified by facts in the satisfaction he expressed towards the end of his life: I am now drawing to the close of my career; I am fast shuffling off the stage; I have been, perhaps, the most voluminous writer of the day, and it is a comfort to me to think that I have tried to unsettle no man's faith, to corrupt no man's principle.' Not that he succeeded in satisfying the Evangelicals. They always regarded the Waverley Novels with suspicion; but he contributed in no slight degree to loosen the hold which Evangelicalism had upon the nation, among other ways by demonstrating practically the fallacy of its indiscriminate protest against novels. Good and senLife of Rev. Legh Richmond, by Rev. T. S. Grimshaw, p. 303.

sible people rebelled against the theory that novel-reading was necessarily a waste, or worse than a waste, of time when novel after novel poured forth from the press in rapid succession, every one of which was capable of affording instruction, as well as pleasure, to the most highly-cultured men and women, while it might be read without a blush by the most innocent of school-girls, and could harmlessly satisfy that craving for adventure which alone will induce the average school-boy to take up a book at all for his own amusement The enormous demand for these books, which really gave to most of their readers a fresh experience of literature, appears from a remark of Constable in 1822, that 'a new novel from the author of Waverley put down for the time every other literary performance,' and by the statement in 1829 that the monthly sale of the novels was thirty-five thousand. Readers of Miss Austen will remember how that admirable novelist protests indignantly in Northanger Abbey against the light esteem in which novels were held, and declares that her craft is an injured body' (p. 22). She could not have made this complaint twenty years later. A silent revolution had been going on in public opinion upon the subject, and the author of the revolution was Sir Walter Scott. The great wizard of the North touched the novel with his magic wand, and it lost all its moral unwholesomeness and all its intellectual weakness. In fact, Sir Walter did for the novel what Addison had done for the essay a century before he gave it a recognized status in the literary world.

The Waverley Novels would quite come under discussion in connexion with the subject suggested by the title of this article; for the writer did not in the least shrink from touching upon delicate questions of theology and morality. On the contrary, he gave great offence in some quarters by his 'free handling' (to use a modern phrase) of the grave theological questions at issue between the Puritans and their adversaries. In some of his best-drawn characters the theological element was the most prominent feature; but though there is never the slightest doubt as to the direction in which his own sympathies lay, though some of his most humorous descriptions are those of grotesque and extravagant forms which religion took, no candid person will contend that he ever wrote in an irreligious tone, or ever tried to unsettle men's faith in the great verities of the Christian religion. It is the same with regard to morality. In what many consider his masterpiece, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, he certainly does not evade delicate matters, which, alas! no true picture of real life can