TWO IDEAL COUNTRIES
Tins new " Broadway " edition of the Utopia is a reprint from the first edition of Ralph Robinson's translation. In his introduction Mr. Goitein considers the inconsistencies in Sir Thomas More's character. Even now it is impossible to escape feeling his personal charm. We can almost hear his accents when he talks with his daughter Meg. It is only the more painfully disconcerting to remember that this exquisite humanist was guilty of ruthless severity in his religious sentences, and deserved at such times to be called, what Froude names him, " a merciless bigot." We are glad that the Roman Church beatified him in 1886, yet we cannot think that those who suffered at his hands, if they were aware of the latter-day proceedings, would have arisen to call him blessed. Mr. Goitein tries to account for More's inconsistency in the light of modern psychology. He finds his clue in the reverence that More gave to his - father, even at the times when he hardly deserved it. The same instinct showed itself when like a patriarch he gathered his children and children's children around him. If a father is sacred, the Holy Father is sacrosanct, and woe to the sacri- ligious wretch who rebelled against him.
The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon, written in 1662, a hundred years after the Utopia takes us into a new world and a new time. All the writers of the early seventeenth century were under the glamour of the new geographical discoveries, and any traveller who could talk of " Afric's monsters, Guiana's rarities " was sure of a welcome at court. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis is too slight to arise to the height of the occasion, but it is sufficiently lively as it tells of a people whose trade is not for gold, silver, jewels, or silks, but " for God's first creature, which was light." We have seen many of Bacon's guesses fulfilled. His Atlanteans could fly in the air, and " give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper.".
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