At his meals he was very abstemious, norever eat but of one dish, which was most commonly powdered beef, or some such salt meat. In his youth he abstained wholly from wine; and as he was temperate in his diet, so was he heedless and negligent in his apparel. Being once told by his secretary Mr. Harris, that his shoes were all torn, he bad him tell his man to buy him new ones, whose business it was to take care of his cloaths, whom for this cause he called his tutor. His first wife's name was Jane Cole, descended of a genteel family, who bore him four children, and upon her decease, which in not many years happened, he married a second time a widow, one Mrs. Alice Middleton, by whom he had no children. This he says he did not to indulge his passions (for he observes that it it harder to keep chasti [...]y in wedlock than in a single life,) but to take care of his children and houshold affairs. Upon what principle this observation is founded, I cannot well conceive, and wish Sir Thomas had given his reasons why it is harder to be chaste in a married than single life. This wife was a worldly minded woman, had a very indifferent person, was advanced in years, and possessed no very agreeable temper. Much about this time he became obnoxious to Henry VII. for opposing his exactions upon the people. Henry was a covetous mean prince, and entirely devoted to the council of Emson and Dudley, who then were very justly reckoned the caterpillars of the state. The King demanded a large subsidy to bestow [Page 36] on his eldest daughter, who was then about to be married to James IV. of Scotland. Sir Thomas being one of the burgesses, so influenced the lower house by the force of his arguments, (who were cowardly enough before not to oppose the King) that they refused the demands, upon which Mr. Tiler of the King's Privy-Chambers went presently to his Majesty, and told him that More had disappointed all their expectations, which circumstance not a little enraged him against More. Upon this Henry was base enough to pick a quarrel without a cause against Sir John More, his venerable father, and in revenge to the son, clapt him in the Tower, keeping him there prisoner till he had forced him to pay one hundred pounds of a fine, for no offence. King Henry soon after dying, his son who began his reign with some popular acts, tho' afterwards he degenerated into a monstrous tyrant, caused Dudley and Emson to be impeached of high treason for giving bad advice to his father; and however illegal such an arraignment might be, yet they met the just fate of oppressors and traitors to their country,
The chief merit of this poem, no doubt, consists in that surprising vein of fabulous invention, which runs through it, and enriches it every where with imagery and descriptions, more than we meet with in any other modern poem. The author seems to be possessed of a kind of poetical magic, and the figures he calls up to our view rise so thick upon us, that we are at once pleased and distracted with the exhaustless variety of them; so that his faults may in a manner be imputed to his excellencies. His abundance betrays him into excess, and his judgment is overborn, by the torrent of his imagination. That which seems the most liable to exception in this work is the model of it, and the choice the author has made of so romantic a story. The several books rather appear like so many several poems, than one entire fable. Each of them has its peculiar knight, and is independent of the rest; and tho' some of the persons make their appearance in different books, yet this has very little effect [Page 106] in concealing them. Prince Arthur is indeed the principal person, and has therefore a share given him in every legend; but his part is not considerable enough in any one of them. He appears and vanishes again like a spirit, and we lose sight of him too soon to consider him as the hero of the poem. These are the most obvious defects in the fable of the Fairy Queen. The want of unity in the story makes it difficult for the reader to carry it in his mind, and distracts too much his attention to the several parts of it; and indeed the whole frame of it would appear monstrous, were it to be examined by the rules of epic poetry, as they have been drawn from the practice of Homer and Virgil; but as it is plain, the author never designed it by these rules, I think it ought rather to be called a poem of a particular kind, describing in a series of allegorical adventures, or episodes, the most noted virtues and vices. To compare it therefore with the models of antiquity, would be like drawing a parallel between the Roman and Gothic architecture. In the first, there is doubtless a more natural grandeur and simplicity; in the latter, we find great mixtures of beauty and barbarism, yet assisted by the invention of a variety of inferior ornaments; and tho' the former is more majestic in the whole, the latter may be very surprizing and agreeable in its parts.
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Our author married the daughter of Sir William Erskine, Baronet, cousin german to the earl of Marr, then Regent of Scotland; by her he had one son, who died his Majesty's Resident in Nova Scotia in the life time of his father, and left behind him a son who succeeded his grandfather in the title of earl of Stirling. 2ff7e9595c
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