Sir Thomas More.—­Is there no message to him from Walter Landor’s friend?

Montesinos.—­Say to him, since you encourage me to such boldness, that his letters could scarcely have been perused with deeper interest by the persons to whom they were addressed than they have been by one, at the foot of Skiddaw, who is never more contentedly employed than when learning from the living minds of other ages, one who would gladly have this expression of respect and gratitude conveyed to him, and who trusts that when his course is finished here he shall see him face to face.

Here is a book with which Lauderdale amused himself, when Cromwell kept him prisoner in Windsor Castle.  He has recorded his state of mind during that imprisonment by inscribing in it, with his name, and the dates of time and place, the Latin word Durate, and the Greek [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].  Here is a memorial of a different kind inscribed in this “Rule of Penance of St. Francis, as it in ordered for religious women.”  “I beseech my deare mother humbly to accept of this exposition of our holy rule, the better to conceive what your poor child ought to be, who daly beges your blessing.  Constantia Francisco.”  And here in the Apophthegmata, collected by Conrad Lycosthenes, and published after drastic expurgation by the Jesuits as a commonplace book, some Portuguese has entered a hearty vow that he would never part with the book, nor lend it to any one.  Very different was the disposition of my poor old Lisbon acquaintance, the Abbe, who, after the old humaner form, wrote in all his books (and he had a rare collection) Ex libris Francisci Garnier, et amicorum.

Sir Thomas More.—­How peaceably they stand together—­Papists and Protestants side by side.

Montesinos.—­Their very dust reposes not more quietly in the cemetery.  Ancient and modern, Jew and Gentile, Mahommedan and Crusader, French and English, Spaniards and Portuguese, Dutch and Brazilians, fighting their own battles, silently now, upon the same shelf:  Fernam Lopez and Pedro de Ayala; John de Laet and Barlaeus, with the historians of Joam Fernandes Vieira; Foxe’s Martyrs and the Three Conversions of Father Parsons; Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner; Dominican and Franciscan; Jesuit and Philosophe (equally misnamed); Churchmen and Sectarians; Round-heads and Cavaliers

“Here are God’s conduits, grave divines; and here
Is Nature’s secretary, the philosopher: 
And wily statesmen, which teach how to tie
The sinews of a city’s mystic body;
Here gathering chroniclers; and by them stand
Giddy fantastic poets of each land.”—­Donne.

Here I possess these gathered treasures of time, the harvest of so many generations, laid up in my garners:  and when I go to the window there is the lake, and the circle of the mountains, and the illimitable sky.

Sir Thomas More.—­“Felicemque voco pariter studiique locique!”