for the love of God and profit of His Church and that he had dedicate unto Him all his works, his studies, and his doings, and sith he saw that sith God is almighty they could not miscarry but if it were either by His commandment or by His sufferance, he verily trusted sith God is all good that He would not suffer him to have that occasion of heaviness."

His curious learning was put to a curious use. He clung passionately to the idea of the unity of knowledge, the unity of truth. Thus he gave himself to an attempt to reconcile Platonic, neo-Platonic, and neo-Pythagorean opinions with Christianity. The difficulty of explaining the extraordinary complications into which Pico's strange jumble of erudition led him is very considerable. Confused he certainly was by his linguistic and cabalistic vagaries; but heretical, so far as he can be understood, he was not. He died at peace with the Church, and was buried in a Dominican habit in Savonarola's own San Marco, where the plain marble tablet that records his virtues and his fame may still be seen. is rather from the writings of others, and especially from the touching little biography which More translated, little from his own books, that we learn his mental and physical semblance. Almost all those who write about him dwell upon his rare physical beauty. It was the special goodness of God, they say, that kept him pure in his later life. He

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was born, indeed, to be above sensual temptations; his mind was essentially that of a mystic, and, having once tasted the joys of the spiritual life, he could never abandon them. There is much in his sayings and doings that reminds one of Molinos and his followers

"Of outward observances," says his nephew, Gian Francesco, "he gave no very great force-we speak not of those observances which the Church commandeth to be observed, for in those he was diligent, but we speak of those ceremonies which folk bring up, setting the very service of God aside, which is, as Christ saith, to be worshipped in spirit and in truth. But in the inward affects of the mind he cleaved to God with very fervent love and devotion." And worthy of Pascal are those famous words of his to Poliziano—

"Love God, while we be in this body, we rather may than either know Him or by speech utter Him : and yet had we rather alway by knowledge never find the thing that we seek than by love possess the thing which also without love were in vain found."

Typical as Pico was of the best side of the Italian Renaissance, no better influence could have touched More at the turning-point of his life, and his translation of the biography, with the letters and poems, marks a definite influence on the life of the English statesman. He was engaged on it, there seems no doubt, at the very time when he abandoned the idea of becoming a Carthusian and decided to live in the world, a student, a lawyer, a man of affairs, but always before all things a Christian. More had

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assimilated a great deal of the Italian culture of his age without adopting its vices. He was an "Italianate Englishman" in a different sense from that which the expression bore fifty years after his death. He had a genuine love of learning for its own sake and was a strenuous champion of the Greek as well as the Latin classics. He was himself already well acquainted with the chief savants and littérateurs of Europe, and his introduction of Pico to the English reader was probably undertaken with the intention of making England alive to the importance of the movement in Italian thought, as well as of showing how the progress of learning and inquiry was intimately bound up in the noblest lives with religion.

There is much similarity between Pico and More. Both were keen classical scholars, tinged with the mysticism of Renaissance imaginings, men of wide human interests, bent on bringing the Divine Spirit into every sphere of human thought. What has been said with such fine clearness of Pico's position is almost equally true of More's—

"This high dignity of man"-which was the characteristic belief of both Italian and Englishman in the revival of learning-" thus bringing the dust under his feet into sensible communion with the thoughts and affections of the angels, was supposed to belong to him, not as renewed by a religious system, but by his own natural right; and it was a counterpoise to the increasing tendency of medieval religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice this or that element in it, to keep the degrading or

painful accidents of it always in view. It helped man onward to that reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body, the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renaissance fulfils."

Like the Italian Humanist, More was penetrated with the sense of the beauty and the mystery of life. Rich colours and the strange recesses of occult investigation, the quaintness of old world learning, and the pure human beauty of classic ideals of literature and art, the thrilling chords of music and the simple innocence of animal life, the triumph of self-sacrifice, the joys of friendship and of love, the thoughts of Plato and the divine mysteries of the Christian religion, appealed each in their turn to his sensitive consciousness, and ascetic though he was his inner contemplation never blinded him to the loveliness of human life. Pico was as far removed from the ignorant bigotry satirized in the Letters of obscure men as from the scarce veiled Paganism of many disciples of the New Learning. To him it did not seem that Christianity was less true because Paganism was so beautiful, and the same thought was never absent from the mind of More.

The kinship of soul was natural. Powerfully influenced himself by the story of Pico's life, it was natural that More should desire to share the benefit with others. He accordingly published a translation of the Life and Works,1 which he dedicated as a New

1 "The Life of John Picus, Earl of Mirandula, a great Lorde of Italy, an excellent connyng man in all sciences, and vertuous of lining: with divers Epistles and other workes of y' sayd John Picus, full of greate science, vertue and

Year's gift to his "right entirely beloved sister in Christ Joyeuce Leigh."

The life begins with mention of the noble ancestry of Pico, and passes on to his extraordinary aptitude for study, reaching its chief interest with the chapter on his famous challenge at Rome. "There nine hundred questions he proposed of diverse and sundry matters, as well in logic and philosophy as in divinity, with great study picked and sought out as well of the Latin authors as of the Greeks; and partly set out of the secret mysteries of the Hebrews, Chaldees, and Arabies, and many things drawn out of the old obscure philosophy of Pythagoras, Trismegistus, and Orpheus, and many other things strange to all folk (except right few special excellent men), before that day not unknown only but also unheard." The story then tells how disappointment and failure attended this hardy challenger, and how he was led to think more especially of the religious life than he had yet done: how he burned five books of love-verses, "with other like fantasies he had made in his vulgar tongue": how he studied the sacred Scriptures and gave himself to prayer and almsgiving, purposing to walk from town to town, crucifix in hand, preaching Christ; how he died, and how the holy friar Savonarola glorified his memory. To this simple story were added two letters to his nephew Gian

wisedome whose life and woorkes bene worthy and digne to be read, and often to be had in memory. Translated out of Latin into Englishe by Maister Thomas More," occupies pp. 1-34 in More's English Works. It has also been edited by Mr. J. M. Rigg, London, 1890.