into a pretty sizeable volume; but are no more to be received as genuine, than the facts they adduced to countenance.  An under-sheriff of London, aged but twenty-eight, and recently marked with the displeasure of the crown, was not likely to be furnished with materials from any high authority, and could not receive them from the best authority, I mean the adverse party, who were proscribed, and all their chiefs banished or put to death.  Let us again recur to dates.(3) Sir Thomas More was born in 1480:  he was appointed under-sheriff in 1508, and three years before had offended Henry the Seventh in the tender point of opposing a subsidy.  Buck, the apologist of Richard the Third, ascribes the authorities of Sir Thomas to the information of archbishop Morton; and it is true that he had been brought up under that prelate; but Morton died in 1500, when Sir Thomas was but twenty years old, and when he had scarce thought of writing history.  What materials he had gathered from his master were probably nothing more than a general narrative of the preceding times in discourse at dinner or in a winter’s evening, if so raw a youth can be supposed to have been admitted to familiarity with a prelate of that rank and prime minister.  But granting that such pregnant parts as More’s had leaped the barrier of dignity, and insinuated himself into the archbishop’s favour; could he have drawn from a more corrupted source?  Morton had not only violated his allegiance to Richard; but had been the chief engine to dethrone him, and to plant a bastard scyon in the throne.  Of all men living there could not be more suspicious testimony than the prelate’s, except the king’s:  and had the archbishop selected More for the historian of those dark scenes, who had so much, interest to blacken Richard, as the man who had risen to be prime minister to his rival?  Take it therefore either way; that the archbishop did or did not pitch on a young man of twenty to write that history, his authority was as suspicious as could be.

(3) Vide Biog.  Britannica, p. 3159.

It may be said, on the other hand, that Sir Thomas, who had smarted for his boldness (for his father, a judge of the king’s bench, had been imprisoned and fined for his son’s offence) had had little inducement to flatter the Lancastrian cause.  It is very true; nor am I inclined to impute adulation to one of the honestest statesmen and brightest names in our annals.  He who scorned to save his life by bending to the will of the son, was not likely to canvas the favour of the father, by prostituting his pen to the humour of the court.  I take the truth to be, that Sir Thomas wrote his reign of Edward the Fifth as he wrote his Utopia; to amuse his leisure and exercise his fancy.  He took up a paltry canvas and embroidered it with a flowing design as his imagination suggested the colours.  I should deal more severely with his respected memory on any other hypothesis.  He has been guilty of such palpable and material falshoods, as, while they destroy his credit as an historian, would reproach his veracity as a man, if we could impute them to premeditated perversion of truth, and not to youthful levity and inaccuracy.  Standing as they do, the sole groundwork of that reign’s history, I am authorized to pronounce the work, invention and romance.