None of your travellers have reached Utopia, and brought from thence a fuller account of its institutions?

Montesinos.—­There was one, methinks, who must have had it in view when he walked over the world to discover the source of moral motion.  He was afflicted with a tympany of mind produced by metaphysics, which was at that time a common complaint, though attended in him with unusual symptoms, but his heart was healthy and strong, and might in former ages have enabled him to acquire a distinguished place among the saints of the Thebais or the philosophers of Greece.

But although we have now no travellers employed in seeking undiscoverable countries, and although Eldorado, the city of the Cesares, and the Sabbatical River, are expunged even from the maps of credulity and imagination, Welshmen have gone in search of Madoc’s descendants, and scarcely a year passes without adding to the melancholy list of those who have perished in exploring the interior of Africa.

Sir Thomas More.—­Whenever there shall exist a civilised and Christian negro state Providence will open that country to civilisation and Christianity, meantime to risk strength and enterprise and science against climate is contending against the course of nature.  Have these travellers yet obtained for you the secret of the Psylli?

Montesinos.—­We have learnt from savages the mode of preparing their deadliest poisons.  The more useful knowledge by which they render the human body proof against the most venomous serpents has not been sought with equal diligence; there are, however, scattered notices which may perhaps afford some clue to the discovery.  The writings of travellers are not more rich in materials for the poet and the historian than they are in useful notices, deposited there like seeds which lie deep in the earth till some chance brings them within reach of air, and then they germinate.  These are fields in which something may always be found by the gleaner, and therefore those general collections in which the works are curtailed would be to be reprobated, even if epitomisers did not seem to possess a certain instinct of generic doltishness which leads them curiously to omit whatever ought especially to be preserved.

Sir Thomas More.—­If ever there come a time, Montesinos, when beneficence shall be as intelligent, and wisdom as active, as the spirit of trade, you will then draw from foreign countries other things beside those which now pay duties at the custom-house, or are cultivated in nurseries for the conservatories of the wealthy.  Not that I regard with dissatisfaction these latter importations of luxury, however far they may be brought, or at whatever cost; for of all mere pleasures those of a garden are the most salutary, and approach nearest to a moral enjoyment.  But you will then (should that time come) seek and find in the laws, usages and experience of other nations palliatives for some of those evils and diseases which have hitherto been inseparable from society and human nature, and remedies, perhaps, for others.