Montesinos.—­If he had fallen into your hands you would have made a stock-fish of him.

Sir Thomas More.—­Perhaps so.  I had not then I learnt that laying men by the heels is not the best way of curing them of an error in the head.  But the King protected him.  Henry had too much sagacity not to perceive the consequences which such a book was likely to produce, and he said, after perusing it, “If a man should pull down an old stone wall, and begin at the bottom, the upper part thereof might chance to fall upon his head.”  But he saw also that it tended to serve his immediate purpose.

Montesinos.—­I marvel that good old John Fox, upright, downright man as he was, should have inserted in his “Acts and Monuments” a libel like this, which contains no arguments except such as were adapted to ignorance, cupidity, and malice.

Sir Thomas More.—­Old John Fox ought to have known that, however advantageous the dissolution of the monastic houses might be to the views of the Reformers, it was every way injurious to the labouring classes.  As far as they were concerned, the transfer of property was always to worse hands.  The tenantry were deprived of their best landlords, artificers of their best employers, the poor and miserable of their best and surest friends.  There would have been no insurrections in behalf of the old religion if the zeal of the peasantry had not been inflamed by a sore feeling of the injury which they suffered in the change.  A great increase of the vagabond population was the direct and immediate consequence.  They who were ejected from their tenements or deprived of their accustomed employment were turned loose upon society; and the greater number, of course and of necessity, ran wild.

Montesinos.—­Wild, indeed!  The old chroniclers give a dreadful picture of their numbers and of their wickedness, which called forth and deserved the utmost severity of the law.  They lived like savages in the woods and wastes, committing the most atrocious actions, stealing children, and burning, breaking, or otherwise disfiguring their limbs for the purpose of exciting compassion, and obtaining alms by this most flagitious of all imaginable crimes.  Surely we have nothing so bad as this.

Sir Thomas More.—­The crime of stealing children for such purposes is rendered exceedingly difficult by the ease and rapidity with which a hue and cry can now be raised throughout the land, and the eagerness and detestation with which the criminal would be pursued; still, however, it is sometimes practised.  In other respects the professional beggars of the nineteenth century are not a whit better than their predecessors of the sixteenth; and your gipsies and travelling potters, who, gipsy-like, pitch their tents upon the common, or by the wayside, retain with as much fidelity the manners and morals of the old vagabonds as they do the cant, or pedlar’s French, which this class of people are said to have invented in the age whereof we are now speaking.