But while, in his final choice, he seemed to belong rather to the old world than to the new, he had absorbed all the best spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and he belonged as a social reformer to an age in the far future. The _Utopia_, it is true, was the work of his youth, and it is doubtful if much of it was meant seriously, and certain that some was distinctly contrary to its author's mature convictions. But nevertheless it sets forth an exquisite ideal picture of equality in opportunity and of simplicity of life. Its whole tone speaks a protest against the selfishness and the competition of the age that degraded art and divided society. And this protest was enforced by the asceticism of the author's own life and the purity of his household. More's life was not a long one. He was born on February 7, 1478. His family was "honourable, not illustrious." His father came to be an eminent judge. As a boy he went to school in London, and then was taken into the household of the famous Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord High Chancellor of England, the statesman who advised the best measures of Henry VII., who began to reform the monasteries, who heavily taxed the rich and took care for the poor. There the young More was known as a bright lad, who would often speak a piece in Christmas games for the guests' entertainment with a wit and readiness which made the Archbishop prophesy for him a great career. He went to Oxford; he studied at New Inn, and then at Lincoln's Inn. He became a lawyer; he went into Parliament; he lectured publicly in London on theology. When a young man he was widely known as a scholar and a wit. He was a friend of all the learned men of his day, a member of that little circle of students to which Colet and Grocyn and Linacre belonged. Though he plunged into practical life, politics, and law, and exchanged epigrams with the best wits of the time, his deepest thoughts were always with religion. He was near becoming a Carthusian; he had serious thoughts of refraining from marriage; he lived very strictly, and was with difficulty won from a solitary life. When he decided to marry and conform outwardly to the customs of the society of his day, he did not abandon the secret rules by which his personal life was restrained. He was outwardly of the world, but in spirit he was always a recluse.