almost inevitable reverse of fortune he chose harsh imprisonment and death
rather than to take the formal oath of allegiance to the king in opposition
to the Pope. His quiet jests on the scaffold suggest the never-failing
sense of humor which was one sign of the completeness and perfect poise of
his character; while the hair-shirt which he wore throughout his life and
the severe penances to which he subjected himself reveal strikingly how the
expression of the deepest convictions of the best natures may be determined
by inherited and outworn modes of thought.

More's most important work was his 'Utopia,' published in 1516. The name,
which is Greek, means No-Place, and the book is one of the most famous of
that series of attempts to outline an imaginary ideal condition of society
which begins with Plato's 'Republic' and has continued to our own time.
'Utopia,' broadly considered, deals primarily with the question which is
common to most of these books and in which both ancient Greece and Europe
of the Renaissance took a special interest, namely the question of the
relation of the State and the individual. It consists of two parts. In the
first there is a vivid picture of the terrible evils which England was
suffering through war, lawlessness, the wholesale and foolish application
of the death penalty, the misery of the peasants, the absorption of the
land by the rich, and the other distressing corruptions in Church and
State. In the second part, in contrast to all this, a certain imaginary
Raphael Hythlodaye describes the customs of Utopia, a remote island in the
New World, to which chance has carried him. To some of the ideals thus set
forth More can scarcely have expected the world ever to attain; and some of
them will hardly appeal to the majority of readers of any period; but in
the main he lays down an admirable program for human progress, no small
part of which has been actually realized in the four centuries which have
since elapsed.