"The child here waiting at table, whomever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man." It was thus that the early patron of More, Cardinal Morton, sagaciously contemplated on the precocity of More's boyhood. His prompt natural humour broke out at the Christmas revels, when the boy, suddenly slipping in among the players, acted an extempore part of his own invention. Yet this jocund humour, which never was to quit him to his last awful minute, at times indulged a solemnity of thought, as remarkable in a youth of eighteen. In the taste of that day, he invented an allegorical pageant. These pageants consisted of paintings on rolls of cloth, with inscriptions in verse, descriptive of the scenical objects. They formed a series of the occupations of childhood, manhood, the indolent liver, "a child again," and old age, thin and hoar, wise and discreet. The last scenes exhibited more original conceptions. The image of DEATH, where under his "misshapen feet" lay the sage old man; then came "the Lady FAME," boasting that she had survived death, and would preserve the old man's name "by the voice of the people." But FAME was followed by TIME, "the lord of every hour, the great destroyer both of sea and land," deriding simple "Fame;" for "who shall boast an eternal name before me?" Yet was there a more potent destroyer than TIME; Time itself was mortal! and the eighth pageant revealed the triumph of ETERNITY. The last exhibited the poet himself, meditating in his chair--he "who had fed their eyes with these fictions and these figures." The allegory of Fame, Time, and Eternity, is a sublime creation of ideal personifications. The conception of these pageants reminds one of the allegorical "Trionfi" of Petrarch; but they are not borrowed from the Italian poet. They were, indeed, in the taste of the age, and such pageants were exhibited in the streets; but the present gorgeous invention, as well as the verses, were the fancies of the youthful More. MORE in his youth was a true poet; but in his active life he soon deserted these shadows of the imagination. A modern critic has regretted, that, notwithstanding the zeal of his biographers, we would gladly have been better acquainted with MORE'S political life, his parliamentary speeches, his judicial decrees, and his history as an ambassador and a courtier. There is not, however, wanting the most striking evidence of MORE'S admirable independence in all these characters. I fix on his parliamentary life.