have maintained the very opposite of this. They have rever-
enced the heroism of his death and the beauty of his home life,
but have almost always denied the consistency of his political
thinking. Yet from the verdict of Froude and Acton and
Creighton and Lindsay and Sidney Lee (not to mention living
historians) an appeal can be made to the writings of More him-
self and to the records of those who knew him.

This Prologue aims at giving an account of those records,
and weighing their biographical value.

More's first formal biographer, Nicholas Harpsfield, des-
cribed his hero as 'our noble new Christian Socrates'. The
parallel is obvious. Three years after More's death, Reginald
Pole, the future Cardinal-Archbishop, had drawn the com-
parison; it is three years since one of our leading classical
scholars spoke of Socrates as 'the man of all men in ancient
times likest More in disposition, as in destiny'. ¹ And those who,
in the years between, have emphasized one or other point of
resemblance between More and Socrates, are too many to
record here.

But one vital difference there is, which makes the compiling
of a life of More the less impossible task. More, unlike Socrates,
was a writer, and though some important things have been
lost, there still remains to us a great mass of his works. An
elaborate life of More could be put together, even though we
had nothing to guide us save the words he has written.

Our second source of information about More comes from
the fact that people who knew him felt, as those felt who knew
Socrates, or as those felt who knew St. Francis of Assisi, that
they must record what they could remember of the words and
acts and character of their hero. Socrates and More were
friends of the young; and the young passed on the story of their
friend. Here again much has been lost; accident and neglect
have combined to destroy the remembrances of the one young
man who probably entered most closely into More's life and
thoughts. Nevertheless, so much remains that a life of More

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