There are other directions in which the classical revival influenced writing that need not detain us here.  The attempt to transplant classical metres into English verse which was the concern of a little group of authors who called themselves the Areopagus came to no more success than a similar and contemporary attempt did in France.  An earlier and more lasting result of the influence of the classics on new ways of thinking is the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, based on Plato’s Republic, and followed by similar attempts on the part of other authors, of which the most notable are Harrington’s Oceana and Bacon’s New Atlantis.  In one way or another the rediscovery of Plato proved the most valuable part of the Renaissance’s gift from Greece.  The doctrines of the Symposium coloured in Italy the writings of Castiglione and Mirandula.  In England they gave us Spenser’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and they affected, each in his own way, Sir Philip Sidney, and others of the circle of court writers of his time.  More’s book was written in Latin, though there is an English translation almost contemporary.  He combines in himself the two strains that we found working in the Renaissance, for besides its origin in Plato, Utopia owes not a little to the influence of the voyages of discovery.  In 1507 there was published a little book called an Introduction to Cosmography, which gave an account of the four voyages of Amerigo.  In the story of the fourth voyage it is narrated that twenty-four men were left in a fort near Cape Bahia.  More used this detail as a starting-point, and one of the men whom Amerigo left tells the story of this “Nowhere,” a republic partly resembling England but most of all the ideal world of Plato.  Partly resembling England, because no man can escape from the influences of his own time, whatever road he takes, whether the road of imagination or any other.  His imagination can only build out of the materials afforded him by his own experience:  he can alter, he can rearrange, but he cannot in the strictest sense of the word create, and every city of dreams is only the scheme of things as they are remoulded nearer to the desire of a man’s heart.  In a way More has less invention than some of his subtler followers, but his book is interesting because it is the first example of a kind of writing which has been attractive to many men since his time, and particularly to writers of our own day.

There remains one circumstance in the revival of the classics which had a marked and continuous influence on the literary age that followed.  To get the classics English scholars had as we have seen to go to Italy.  Cheke went there and so did Wilson, and the path of travel across France and through Lombardy to Florence and Rome was worn hard by the feet of their followers for over a hundred years after.  On the heels of the men of learning went the men of fashion, eager to learn and copy the new manners of