The "UTOPIA" of Sir THOMAS MORE, which being composed in Latin is not included in this great volume of his "Workes," may be read by the English reader in its contemporary spirited translation,[10] and more intelligibly in Bishop Burnet's version. The title of his own coinage has become even proverbial; and from its classical Latinity it was better known among foreigners even in Burnet's day than at home. This combination of philosophy, politics, and fiction, though borrowed from the ideal republic of Plato, is worthy of an experienced statesman and a philosopher who at that moment was writing not only above his age, but, as it afterwards appeared, above himself. It has served as the model of that novel class of literature--political romances. But though the "Utopia" is altogether imaginary, it displays no graces of the imagination in an ingeniously constructed fable. It is the dream of a good citizen, and, like a dream, the scenes scattered and unconnected are broken into by chimerical forms and impracticable achievements. In times of political empiricism it may be long meditated, and the "Utopia" may yet pass through a million of editions before that new era of the perfectibility of the human animal, the millennium of political theorists, which it would seem to have anticipated. This famous work was written at no immature period of life, for MORE was then thirty-six years of age. The author had clear notions of the imperfections of governments, but he was not as successful in proposing remedies for the disorders he had detected. A community where all the property belongs to the government, and to which every man contributes by his labour, that he may have his own wants supplied; a domestic society which very much resembles a great public school, and converts a citizen, through all the gradations of his existence, from form to form; and where every man, like an automatical machine, must be fixed in his proper place,--supposes a society of passionless beings which social life has never shown, and surely never can. The art of carrying on war without combating, by the wiliness of stratagems; or procuring a peace by offering a reward for the assassination of the leaders of the enemy, with whom rather than with the people all wars originate; the injunction to the incurable of suicide; the paucity of laws which enabled every man to plead his own cause; the utmost freedom granted to religious sects, where every man who contested the religion of another was sent into exile, or condemned to bondage; the contempt of the precious metal, which was here used but as toys for children, or as fetters for slaves;--such fanciful notions, running counter to the experience of history, or to the advantages of civilised society, induced some to suspect the whole to be but the incoherent dreams of an idling philosopher, thrown down at random without much consideration. It is sobriety indulging an inebriation, and good sense wandering in a delirium.