and Scaliger. The Platonists, whose works he next studied, coincided more with the peculiar turn of his mind; and he read with delight Ficinus, Plotinus, Trismegistus, and the rest of them. A volume of mystical divinity

He was born at Grantham in Lincolnshire, in the year 1614. His father, Alexander More, a zealous Calvinist, took anxious care to educate his son in his own sentiments; and the after-life of the young student being passed in combating these opinions, has made him anxious to record that a master was selected for him of rigid Calvinistic opinions. At this period, an uncle of his prevailed upon his father to send him to Eton. He relates his departure for Eton, and his father's parting injunction not to desert those religious principles in which he had been carefully instructed. But the young enquirer had already taught himself to regard the doctrine of predestination as taught by his father and his tutor to be inconsistent with any adequate notions of the justice and goodness of God. At Eton he had the opportunity of expressing his opinions aloud; and the theologian tells of a dispute between him and his uncle, in which at the age of fourteen he stoutly maintained his own opinions though chidden by his uncle and menaced with correction for his "immature forwardness in philosophising."

In spite of this controversial divinity the boy was religious, and contemplative; he tells us, that from his earliest childhood an inward sense of the divine presence was so strong upon him and so habitual, that he did then believe and feel there could be no thought or word hidden from God. At Eton his progress in Greek is described as unusual. In due time he was removed to Cambridge and placed under a tutor, not a Calvinist.

"And now," says he, "a mighty and almost immoderate thirst after knowledge possessed me throughout, especially for that which was Natural, and above all others, that which is said to dive into the deepest causes of things, and Aristotle calls the first and the highest philosophy or wisdom."

In this temper he read, before he took his first degree, Aristotle, Cardan,

about this time fell into his hands and gave him great delight. The authorship of this work is doubtful; but it has been ascribed with great probability to Lauterus, a Dominican monk, who was styled the illuminated divine; and in whose writings Luther was fond of acknowledging that he had found more "solid and sincere theology than in all the scholastic doctors of all the universities put together."

"That precept," says More, giving an this author so mightily inculcates, namely, account of this period of his life," which that we should thoroughly put off and extinguish our own proper will; that being thus dead to ourselves we may live alone to God and do all things whatsoever by his instinct or plenary permission, was so connatural as it were, and agreeable to my most intimate reason and conscience that I could not of anything whatsoever be more clearly or certainly convinced."

lence at this period, by which, howMore speaks of his habitual indo

ever, he seems to mean little more than his unwillingness to commit to writing the result of his studies; for with the fullest strife of all its powers, his mind seems to have been engaged on the highest subjects that can be proposed to human investigation. writing his contemplations, he repreresult of his natural constitution, sents as in a manner a necessary which," to use his own words,

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"freeing me from all the servitude of those petty designs of ambition, covetousness, and pleasing entanglements of the body, I might either lie first for ever in an inactive idleness, or else be moved by none but very great objects, amongst which the least was the contemplation of this outward world, whose several powers and properties, touching variously on my tender senses, made to me such enravish

ing music, and snatched away my soul into so great admiration, love and desire of a nearer acquaintance with that principle from which all these things did flow, that the pleasure and joy that frequently utterable, though I have attempted to accrued to me from hence, is plainly un

leave some marks and traces thereof iu

my philosophical poems. But being well advised by the dictates of my own con

science and clear information of those holy oracles which we all deservedly reverence that God reserves his choicest secrets for the purest minds, and that it is uncleanness of spirit, not distance of place, that dissevers us from the Deity. I was fully convinced that true holiness was the only safe entrance into divine knowledge, and having an unshaken belief of the existence of God and of his will, that we should be holy even as he is holy; there was nothing that is truly sinful that could appear to me, assisted by such a power to be unconquerable which therefore urged me seriously to set myself to the task. Of the experience and events of which enterprize my second and

third canto of the life of the soul is a real and faithful record. My enjoyments then encreasing with my victories, and innocency, and simplicity, filling my mind with ineffable delight in God and his creation, I found myself as loath to die, that is, to think my soul mortal, as I was when I was a child to be called to go to bed in summer evenings, there being still light enough as I thought to enjoy my play, which solitude put me upon my first search into the nature of the soul which I pursued chiefly by the guidance of the school of Plato, whose philosophy to this very day I look upon to be more than human in the chief strokes thereof."

More pursued his studies so intently that he soon reduced himself to "great thinness of body." His language was coloured with the expressions of the mystical divines. He spoke of his experiences and his communications with the divine spirit with such fervour that his enthusiasm was made a ground of objection to him when he was candidate for a fellowship; and he was nearly rejected till they, in whose hand the election was, were satisfied by those who knew him intimately, that that the same student was a pleasant companion and "in his way, one of the merriest Greeks they were acquainted with." His earliest publication was "Psychozoia, or the first part of the song of the soul; containing a Christiano-Platonical display of life." In a few years after, he reprinted it with the other poems of which we purpose to give an account. The volume was inscribed to his father.

"You deserve," says the young poet, "you deserve the patronage of better poems than these; though you may lay a more proper claim to them than any, you having from my childhood tuned mine ears to Spenser's rhymes; entertaining us on winter nights with that incompara

rable piece of his The Fairy Queen,' a poem as richly fraught with divine morality as phansie."

The first of these poems, Psychozoia, is a bold effort to present to the reader's conceptious the Platonic Triad. He expresses great anxiety that his reader should not regard him as doing more than explaining the theology of Plotinus, and the later Platouists. Like Coleridge in our own day, he regards the doctrine of the Trinity as a truth deducible from the idea of God, even without revelation. But while he thinks it aids the argument for the doctrine that "the Platonists, the best Christians, the best of all that do proand divinest of philosophers, and the fess religion, do both concur that there is a Trinity;" he yet adds, "in what they differ I leave to be found out according to the safe direction of that infallible rule of faith, the Holy Word." The Platonic Triad, then and not any mystery of revelation—is the subject of the poem. But our Platonist does not seek to conceal that he is a Christian, and in this way the language of two systems becomes insensibly blended,-we think unwisely, though assuredly not irreverently.Platonism becomes with More an alle

gory, under which he veils some points of Christianity, as Spenser, under the name of Pan, sings of our Lord, as Paul-the illustration is More'stransfers what Aratus says of Jupiter to God himself:

Πάντη δε Διος κεχρημεία πάντες Του γὰρ και γενος εσμεν

More-though he disclaims contending for the identity of the thought, yet is anxious to show that the corres pondence of names and attributes, in the Platonic scheme, with those in the books of the New Testament, imply some agreement of nature,-that there is such similitude that one may conve niently be regarded as the symbol of the other, and that it is no unnatural digression in the poet, if the lower forms of the Platonic schools suggest to him analogies, more or less obscure, by which he may recall to the minds of his hearers spiritual truths, and perhaps persuade some spirits that even with respect to the highest truths, God was not left without a witness among the Gentiles.

In a preface to his first poem, More exhibits the parallelism of titles be

longing to the second Unity of each Triad.

The verbal resemblances, at least, are very remarkable. In the Platonic scheme God is spoken of as making the world by his Word. The visible and outward creation is formed according to the Wisdom of God, or the Intellectual World. In their language, this Intellectual World is the idea of the outward creation. In their language, too, the Logos is the Redeemer of the lapsed world, viz. mankind,-whom be restores again into man; i. e. into wisdom and righteousness.

«Take in the whole Trinity," says More, "and you shall find a strange concordance and harmony betwixt the nature of each hypostatis (person) in either in their order. Atove, or Ahad, [ATOVE is the Good-AHAD, One,] is simply the first principle of all beings, the father of all existences, and the universal creation is but his family, and therefore, he has a right of imposing laws on the whole creation. The natural creation keepeth this law, but man breaks it; however, it is still propounded to him, and when it takes hold of him strikes him with dread and horror, hence his external compliance with the law through fear and force as it were. And this," says More, "I conceive is to be under the law that makes nothing perfect. This God vouchsafes, sometimes, to second with the gift of his Son. oogtes brou λoys TeToys Vies, as Philo, the Platonist, calls him. He cleanseth us of our sins, he healeth us of our infirmities, shapes us from an inward vital principle (even as the ratio seminalis figures out a tree) into a new life and shape, even into the image of God."

More now quotes from Aristotle his judgment of those who are eminently good in themselves, living from a vital principle of morality within. Κατα των

τοιούτων ουκ εστι νόμος, αυτοι γαρ εισι νόμος

Against such there is no law, for they are themselves a law ; the very words of the Apostle. And in the same passage Aristotle says, they are no more under the law than a deity can be under the law,—for 'tis as if they should take upon them to rule Jupiter himself, and share his kindgdom.

The last hypostasis in the Platonic Triad is Uranore, or Psyche, whom Plotinus calls the celestial Venus, from whom is born the heavenly CupidDivine Love. In this More again sees a correspondence with Christian truth; but he entreats his reader to remember that the happiness of man

is not to know the essence, but to feel the influence of the Divinity, and to be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, is of more consequence than to understand all curious and acute school-tracts.

Before we transcribe any part of the Psychozoia we find it necessary to say that Psyche is the soul of the world— that then she is described as the soul of all Alterity. The meaning may be thus explained: as the seed of a plant hath the whole tree, branches, leaves, and fruits at once, in one point, after a manner closed up, but potentially, so eternity is said by the Platonist to have all the world indivisible present at once, and that actually. As the seminal form spreads out itself, and the body it animates into distant branches, from the quiet and silent seed, (orig

aquaros aux) so doth Psyche, the soul of the world, make that actual in time and succession which could not be here below in bodies at once. This the Platonists called alterity. When our readers have reconciled themselves to the names which More gives his allegorical persons and places,-names supplied to him either from the rabbinical Hebrew, and the dialect of the Cabbalists, from the Greek of Plotinus, and from the Latin of his interpreters→→ we think they will admire the extreme freedom of his style. His vocabulary is neither abundant nor very poetical, but is distinguished for great clearness, reader giving fair attention, can be at so that on a very difficult subject no any loss for his meaning.

that Spenser is most interesting to It has been said-untruly we thinkthose readers who forget, or who have never attended to the allegory. However this be, the contrary is certainly the case with More. The poet is lost in the philosopher-he in fact deals with subjects which are beyond the range of fancy-which refuse the aid of ordinary illustration-and his best praise is, that he succeeds in fastening his reader's watchful attention upon the operations of his own mind. The opening of the poem gives no unfavourable specimen of his manner. Let not the reader be deterred by the half-dozen scholastic words which, with a moment's attention, will cease to interrupt his progress, but give More the benefit of the same attention which he would to any other writer, either of our own or any other country, whose style is not yet quite familiar :