In this garden were the stocks for heretics, and the “Jesus tree,” or tree of troth, whereat they were flogged; for More was fond of suppressing heresy, and failing that, he used to suppress the heretics, by flinging them into prison. The resolute old Catholic denied that he had ever laid hands on a dissident, but it is certain that some one did so by his orders. Near his house he had put up the “newe buildinge, for the entertainment of distressed old men and women;” and therein was a small chapel, where he spent much time, praying, and scourging himself with a knotted cord; wearing next his skin the hair shirt which is still preserved in the convent of Spilsberg. He was fond of assisting in the service at the old church, carrying the cross in the procession, and doing divers duties “like a parish clerk.” One day the Duke of Norfolk, coming out to dine with him, “fortuned to finde him in the quier with a surplisse on his backe, singinge:” at the sight of which servile service, the good worldly duke was moved to wrathful remonstrance. All this rigidity in religion was but the natural stand of a strong character against the drift of the times and the current that was carrying crowds down with the king; and it narrowed none in the least this man’s broad spirit, nor touched for the worse his quaint, gentle humour, his fine wit, his sweet and wholesome nature. It was he who had said, in better balanced days:—“A man may live for the next world, yet be merry withal:” his was the dainty description of Jane Shore in her youth:—“Proper she was and fair; nothing in hir body that you would have changed, but if you would have wished hir somewhat higher;” and his that pitiful picture of her old age and misery. It was of him that Erasmus wrote these beautiful words: “There was not any man living who was so affectionate to his children as he; and he loveth his old wife as well as if she were a young maid.” Nor was she only “old,” but, in the words of More’s grandson, “of good yeares, of no good favour nor complexion, nor very rich; her disposition very near and worldly.” Moreover, she was his second wife; and to her—selfish, grasping, hard, nagging—this man grandly gave unswerving devotion to the very last. His was, indeed, an ideal household into which I like to look; all dwelling together in affectionate amity; father, mother, the son and his wife, the three daughters—“the Moricæ”—and their husbands, with all the grandchildren; and the orphan girl, Margery Giggs, adopted as a daughter by More, “and as dear to him as if she were his own.” There is work for all, and “no wrangling, no idle word was heard; no one was idle,” Erasmus tells us. All the female folk study too—a rare thing then, for More was centuries ahead of his time in his larger views of woman’s education, as he—the greatest minister of Humanism—was in political and in mightier matters. Pithily he put it: “It mattereth not, in harvest time, whether the corn