were sown by a man or a woman.” At his table—his dining-hour was doubtless late, for he urges this boon among the other wise innovations of his “Utopia”—met the “best society” of England, and famous foreign guests. Perhaps it was here that Erasmus sat, greatest of scholars and divines, himself easily first of all that notable band; admiring, as he owns, Grocyn’s vast range of knowledge, and Linacre’s subtle, deep, fine judgment; seeming to hear Plato speak, as he listens to Colet—him who founded St. Paul’s School—and wondering “did nature ever frame a disposition more gentle, more sweet, more happy,” than that of his host! From this home, More was taken to a prison, by his good King. He had refused, by countenancing Henry’s divorce, to debase himself and his great office, and had stepped down from it on May 16, 1533, with even greater joy than he had stepped up to it on Wolsey’s disgrace, four years previously. So he retired to this Chelsea mansion with but one hundred pounds a year income left to him; after so many years of high and of lucrative office. Here he bothered no more about public concerns, but busied himself with the welfare of his household, preparing his family and himself for the end which he saw coming. It came soon enough; and when he refused to violate his conscience by acknowledging Henry’s supremacy over that of the Pope as the head of the Church, and by taking the oath of succession (under which Anne Boleyn’s children were to be acknowledged the lawful heirs to the crown), he was carried down the river to the Tower; and there imprisoned for a whole year, in the very cell, it is said, wherein he had sat as grand inquisitor, aforetime racking heretics. “Very nigh Heaven,” he said it was, looking up contentedly from this narrow tenement. At nine o’clock of the morning of July 16, 1535, he was led to the block on Tower Hill and there beheaded. You may walk there and look on the place to-day: but lately found and fixed on, railed in and paved. His courage and his constancy had never once failed him, save as he was being brought back to his cell after his trial in Westminster Hall; when his favourite daughter, Margaret Roper, waiting among the crowd on Tower Wharf—learning his sentence by the token of the blade of the headsman’s axe turned towards him—broke through the guards, and clung to his neck, kissing him and sobbing, “Oh, my father!” with no other words uttered. Then for a moment the father in him was unmanned, as he moaned, “My Meg!” and kissed her for the last time. On the morning of his execution he was cheerful and even jocular: “I pray you, master Lieutenant,” said he at the scaffold-steps, “see me safe up, and for my coming down I can shift for myself.” He put aside his beard out of the axe’s reach—“for _it_ has never committed treason”—and so laid his reverend head on the block; too noble a head to drop in so worthless a cause.