“A dauntless soul erect, who smiled at death,” is Thomson’s fitting phrase. And Erasmus wrote: “All lament his death as the loss of their own father or brother. I myself have seen tears come from those men who never saw More. . . . How many souls hath that axe wounded which cut off More’s head!” Where they buried his body has always been matter of conjecture. In a record, printed in 1726, his great-grandson says: “His trunke was interred in Chelsey Church, near the middle of the south wall;” but other records tell us that it was inhumed beneath the Tower Chapel; and it seems certain that no one will ever really know the truth about this. We do know, however, that his head was exposed on a spike above London Bridge, “where as traytors’ heads are sett upon poles; having remained some moneths there, being to be cast into the Thames, because roome should be made for diverse others, who in plentiful sorte suffered martyrdome for the same supremacie.” It was taken away by Margaret Roper, by bribery or stealth; “least—as she stoutly affirmed before the Councell, being called before them for the same matter—it should be foode for fishes; which she buried where she thought fittest.” This spot was found—in 1835, after just three centuries of doubt—to be in the vault of the Roper family in St. Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury: and there his head remains to-day “in a leaden box something in the shape of a bee-hive, open in the front, and with an iron grating before it.” In my visits to Canterbury, as I stroll down its delightful old street to St. Dunstan’s, I pause always in front of the ancient carved stone gateway—all that is left of the Roper mansion—fancying I see that devoted daughter hurrying home, secretly and by night, carrying her beloved burden in a silver casket: carrying it all the way in her own hands, fearful of entrusting it to those of any other. Most lovable as well as most learned among women—“her humility equal to her learning,” “no woman, that could speak so well, did speak so little,” says old Fuller in his “Worthies”—Margaret Roper holds her high place among the Fair Women of England, and her story is very near the first in the Legend of Good Women. “Morn broadened on the borders of the dark, Ere I saw her, who clasped in the last trance Her murder’d father’s head.”