1518. It was reprinted at Paris and Vienna, but was not printed in
England during More’s lifetime. Its first publication in this country
was in the English translation, made in Edward’s VI.’s reign (1551) by
Ralph Robinson. It was translated with more literary skill by Gilbert
Burnet, in 1684, soon after he had conducted the defence of his friend
Lord William Russell, attended his execution, vindicated his memory,
and been spitefully deprived by James II. of his lectureship at St.
Clement’s. Burnet was drawn to the translation of “Utopia” by the same
sense of unreason in high places that caused More to write the book.
Burnet’s is the translation given in this volume.

The name of the book has given an adjective to our language—we call an
impracticable scheme Utopian. Yet, under the veil of a playful fiction,
the talk is intensely earnest, and abounds in practical suggestion. It
is the work of a scholarly and witty Englishman, who attacks in his own
way the chief political and social evils of his time. Beginning with
fact, More tells how he was sent into Flanders with Cuthbert Tunstal,
“whom the king’s majesty of late, to the great rejoicing of all men,
did prefer to the office of Master of the Rolls;” how the commissioners
of Charles met them at Bruges, and presently returned to Brussels for
instructions; and how More then went to Antwerp, where he found a
pleasure in the society of Peter Giles which soothed his desire to see
again his wife and children, from whom he had been four months away.
Then fact slides into fiction with the finding of Raphael Hythloday
(whose name, made of two Greek words [Greek text] and [Greek text],
means “knowing in trifles”), a man who had been with Amerigo Vespucci
in the three last of the voyages to the new world lately discovered, of
which the account had been first printed in 1507, only nine years
before Utopia was written.

Designedly fantastic in suggestion of details, “Utopia” is the work of
a scholar who had read Plato’s “Republic,” and had his fancy quickened
after reading Plutarch’s account of Spartan life under Lycurgus.
Beneath the veil of an ideal communism, into which there has been
worked some witty extravagance, there lies a noble English argument.
Sometimes More puts the case as of France when he means England.
Sometimes there is ironical praise of the good faith of Christian
kings, saving the book from censure as a political attack on the policy
of Henry VIII. Erasmus wrote to a friend in 1517 that he should send
for More’s “Utopia,” if he had not read it, and “wished to see the true
source of all political evils.” And to More Erasmus wrote of his book,
“A burgomaster of Antwerp is so pleased with it that he knows it all by
heart.”

H. M.

DISCOURSES OF RAPHAEL HYTHLODAY, OF THE BEST STATE OF A COMMONWEALTH