randola.
Free-thinker as the bigots who listened to his daring speculations termed
him, his eye would brighten and his tongue falter as he spoke with friends
of heaven and the after-life. When he took office, it was with the open
stipulation "first to look to God, and after God to the King."

In his outer bearing indeed there was nothing of the monk or recluse. The
brightness and freedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the young
scholar with his gay talk, his winsomeness of manner, his reckless
epigrams, his passionate love of music, his omnivorous reading, his
paradoxical speculations, his gibes at monks, his schoolboy fervour of
liberty. But events were soon to prove that beneath this sunny nature lay
a stern inflexibility of conscientious resolve. The Florentine scholars
penned declamations against tyrants while they covered with their
flatteries the tyranny of the house of Medici. More no sooner entered
Parliament in 1504 than his ready argument and keen sense of justice led
to the rejection of the demand for a heavy subsidy. "A beardless boy,"
said the courtiers,--and More was only twenty-six,--"has disappointed the
King's purpose"; and during the rest of Henry the Seventh's reign the
young lawyer found it prudent to withdraw from public life. But the
withdrawal had little effect on his buoyant activity. He rose at once into
repute at the bar. He wrote his "Life of Edward the Fifth," the first work
in which what we may call modern English prose appears written with purity
and clearness of style and a freedom either from antiquated forms of
expression or classical pedantry. His ascetic dreams were replaced by the
affections of home. It is when we get a glimpse of him in his house at
Chelsea that we understand the endearing epithets which Erasmus always
lavishes upon More. The delight of the young husband was to train the girl
he had chosen for his wife in his own taste for letters and for music. The
reserve which the age exacted from parents was thrown to the winds in
More's intercourse with his children. He loved teaching them, and lured
them to their deeper studies by the coins and curiosities he had gathered
in his cabinet. He was as fond of their pets and their games as his
children themselves, and would take grave scholars and statesmen into the
garden to see his girls' rabbit-hutches or to watch the gambols of their
favourite monkey. "I have given you kisses enough," he wrote to his little
ones in merry