of
Milman's-row, which is parallel with, but further from town than
Beaufort-row, and affords a grateful shade in the summer time. We
resolved to walk quietly round, and then enter the chapel. How strange
the changes of the world! The graves of a simple, peace-loving,
unambitious people were lying around us, and yet it was the place which
Erasmus describes as "Sir Thomas More's estate, purchased at Chelsey,"
and where "he built him a house, neither mean nor subject to envy, yet
magnificent and commodious enough." How dearly he loved this place, and
how much care he bestowed upon it, can be gathered from the various
documents still extant.[1] The bravery with which, soon after he was
elected a burgess to parliament, he opposed a subsidy demanded by Henry
the Seventh, with so much power that he won the parliament to his
opinion, and incensed the king so greatly, that, out of revenge, he
committed the young barrister's father to the Tower, and fined him in
the fine of a hundred pounds! That bravery remained with him to the
last, and with it was mingled the simplicity which so frequently and so
beautifully blends with the intellectuality that seems to belong to a
higher world than this. When he "took to marrying," he fancied the
second daughter of a Mr. Colt, a gentleman of Essex; yet when he
considered the pain it must give the eldest to see her sister preferred
before her, he gave up his first love, and framed his fancy to the
elder. This lady died, after having brought him four children; but his
second choice, Dame Alice, has always seemed to us a punishment and a
sore trial. And yet how beautifully does Erasmus describe his mode of
living in this very place: "He converseth with his wife, his son, his
daughter-in-law, his three daughters and their husbands, with eleven
grandchildren. There is not a man living so affectionate to his children
as he. He loveth his old wife as if she were a young maid; he persuadeth
her to play on the lute, and so with the like gentleness he ordereth his
family. Such is the excellence of his temper, that whatsoever happeneth
that could not be helped, he loveth, as if nothing could have happened
more happily. You would say there was in that place Plato's academy; but
I do his house an injury in comparing it to Plato's academy, where there
were only disputations of numbers and geometrical figures, and sometimes
of moral virtues. I should rather call his house a school or university
of Christia