MORE seems to have descried the speck of the Reformation, while others could not view even the gathering cloud in the political horizon. He and Roper were conversing on their "Catholic prince, their learned clergy, their sound nobility, their obedient subjects, and finally that no heretic dare show his face." More went even beyond Roper in his commendation; but he proceeded, "And yet, son Roper, I pray God that some of us, as high as we seem to sit upon the mountains, treading heretics under our feet like ants, live not the day that we would gladly be at league and composition with them, to let them have their churches quietly to themselves, so that they would be contented to let us have ours quietly to ourselves." Roper, somewhat amazed, alleged his reasons for not seeing any cause which could produce such consequences. The zeal of the juvenile Catholic broke out into "a fume," which More perceiving, with his accustomed and gentle artifice exclaimed merrily, "Well, son Roper, it shall not be so! it shall not be so!" No one was more sensible than MORE that to gain over the populace it is necessary to descend to them. But when raillery passed into railing, and sarcasm sunk into scurrility, in these unhappy polemical effusions, our critics have bitterly censured the intolerance and bigotry of Sir THOMAS MORE. All this, however, lies on the surface. The antagonists of MORE were not less free, nor more refined. MORE wrote at a cruel crisis; both the subjects he treated on, and the times he wrote in, and the distorted medium through which he viewed the new race as the subverters of government, and the eager despoilers of the ecclesiastical lands, were quite sufficient to pervert the intellect of a sage of that day, and throw even the most genial humour into a state of exacerbation. Our sympathies are no longer to be awakened by the worship of images and relics--prayers to saints--the state of souls in purgatory--and the unwearied blessedness of pilgrimages--nor even by the subtle inquiry, Whether the church were before the gospel, or the gospel before the church?--or by the burning of Tyndale's Testament, and "the confutation of the new church of Frere Barnes:" all these direful follies, which cost Sir Thomas More many a sleepless night, and bound many a harmless heretic to the stake, have passed away, only, alas! to be succeeded by other follies as insane, which shall in their turn meet the same fate. Those works of MORE are a voluminous labyrinth; but whoever winds its dark passages shall gather many curious notices of the writer's own age, and many exquisite "merrie tales," delectable to the antiquary, and not to be contemned in the history of the human mind. The impending Reformation was hastened by a famous invective in the form of "The Supplication of Beggars." Its flagrant argument lay in its arithmetic. It calculated all the possessions of the clergy, who though but "the four-hundredth part of the nation, yet held half of the revenues."