Writers who decide on other men and on other times by the spirit of their own, try human affairs by a false standard. MORE was at heart a monk. He wore a prickly hair-shirt to mortify the flesh; he scourged himself with the knotted cord; he practised the penance; and he appeals to miraculous relics as the evidences of his faith! I give his own words in alluding to the Sudarium, that napkin sent to king Abgarus, on which Jesus impressed the image of his own face: "And it hath been by like miracle in the thin corruptible cloth kept and preserved these 1500 years fresh and well preserved, to the inward comforts, spiritual rejoicing, and great increase of fervour in the hearts of good Christian people." To this he joins another similar miraculous relic, "the evangelist Luke's portrait of our blessed Lady, his mother."[8] Such were considered as the evidences of the true faith of the Romanists; but MORE with his relics was then dealing in a damaged commodity. Lord Herbert has noticed the great fall of the price of relics at the dissolution of the monasteries: some which had been left in pawn no one cared to redeem. "The History of King Richard the Third," which first appeared in a correct state in this folio, has given rise to "historic doubts" which led to some paradoxes. The personal monster whom MORE and SHAKSPEAKE exhibited has vanished, but the deformity of the revolting parricide was surely revealed in the bones of the infant nephews. This, the earliest history in our vernacular literature, may still be read with delight. As a composition the critical justice of Lord Orford may be cited. "Its author was then in the vigour of his fancy, and fresh from the study of the Greek and Roman historians, whose manner he has imitated." The details in this history of a prince of the house of York, though they may be tinged with the gall of the Lancastrian Cardinal Morton, descend to us with the weight of contemporary authority. It is supposed that MORE may have derived much of the materials of his history from his early patron, but the charms which still may retain us are the natural yet dramatic dialogue--the picturesque touches--and a style, at times, whose beauty three centuries have not wrinkled--and the emotions which such vital pages leave in the reader's mind.[9]