So wrote Ellis Heywood of the external beauty of the scene. Of the inner harmony Erasmus had written years before to Ulrich von Hutten:--"More has built himself a house at Chelsea. There he lives with his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, his three daughters and their husbands, with eleven grandchildren. There is not a man alive so loving as he: he loves his old wife as if she were indeed a young maiden." For Dame Alice, whom More had wedded very soon after the death of his first child-wife, was _nec bella nec puella_--neither a beauty nor a girl. And besides these, in the year when little Margaret, according to Miss Manning, began to write in her "fayr Libellus" which her tutor, Master Gunnel, gave her, there were dwelling in the house the aged father, Sir John More, good judge and humorous man, with his third wife. "And the household," said Erasmus, "was a very 'platonic academy'--were it not," he adds, "an injustice to compare it with an academy where disputations concerning numbers and figures were only occasionally mingled with discussion on the moral virtues. I should rather call his house a school of Christianity; for though there is no one in it who does not study the liberal sciences, the special care of all is piety and virtue. No quarrelling or ill-tempered words are ever heard, and idleness is never seen." In such a household it was that Margaret, More's dearest and most heroic child, was nurtured:-- "As it were An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet." She was one of those fine souls to whom come alike learning and love, and in whom religion shows its fairest fruits. Holbein draws her with a Seneca in her hand, but not far away is her prayer-desk. All the children answered to their father's careful culture, for it is an idle tale that makes young John More but a silly fellow. Elizabeth, who married Mr. Dancey, Cecily, who became the wife of Giles Heron, a ward of her father's, the step-daughter Alice, who became Lady Alington, and the adopted child, Margaret Giggs, whom young Clement, sometime their fellow-scholar, wedded, were all instructed in humane letters. But Margaret was the flower of them all. To her her father wrote when she was still but a child:-- "I cannot tell you, dearest Margaret, how pleasant to me are your most delightful letters. Now, as I was reading them there chanced to be with me that noble youth, Reginald Pole--not so highly ennobled, indeed, by birth as by learning and every virtue. To him your letter seemed a miracle, even before he knew how you were beset by shortness of time and other hindrances. And hardly would he believe that you had no help from your master, till I told him seriously that you had not only no master in the house, but that also there was no man in it that had not more need of your help in writing than you of his."