II. THE EAELY EDITIONS OF THE "UTOPIA"

As has been said, More wrote the greater part, if not
the whole, of the second part of the Utopia in Antwerp
during the leisure forced on him by the break in the
negotiations that had led to his being sent to Flanders

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xxxiv

INTRODUCTION

as an ambassador in 1515. Apparently he showed
what he had written to Giles, and was urged by him
to finish it. After his return to England he did so,
but so busy was he that nearly a year passed before
he sent the completed manuscript to his Antwerp
friend. With it was a letter in which More said that
he was undecided whether to publish his work or not,
but was willing to be guided by the counsels of his
friends, and especially by that of Giles.

The manuscript was therefore submitted by Giles
to several of More's friends living in Antwerp and the
vicinity ; and their advice was in favor of giving the
book to the world. But, though it was written in Latin
and was therefore inaccessible to those who might
have been led by it to attempt " reform by revolution
rather than evolution/' it contained such an unflatter-
ing picture of England's condition and such drastic
criticism of the policies of Henry VIII. and his father
that its publication in England would have been at-
tended by grave danger to both author and publisher.
It was therefore, late in 1516, issued at Louvain, a uni-
versity town of Belgium ; and no edition of it, either
in the original or in translation, was published in Eng-
land until long after the death of More and four years
after that of Henry.

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xxxv

Giles and Erasmus furnished the first edition with
marginal notes that not only gave the topics of the
paragraphs, but pointed out the likeness between
Amaurote and London, stated that the communism in
Utopia is similar to that in Plato's ideal state, and oc-
casionally call attention to how much better things are
managed in Utopia than in Europe. Several times
their admiration of the author's cleverness leads them
to insert such remarks as "Wonderful wittily
spoken ! " and " 0 witty head ! " Giles also inserted
the Utopian alphabet, which is made of circles, semi-
circles, squares, triangles, and right angles slightly
differentiated for the different letters, and four lines
of verse in the Utopian language, of which nothing
could have been made had he not obligingly furnished
a Latin translation. These he asserted were given
him by Hythloday after More's departure from Ant-
werp and before his own. More's letter to Giles was
also printed with the work, and one by Giles to Jerome
Busleyden that may to a certain extent be considered
an answer to it ; and there were also published with
the Utopia two other letters and four other poems en-
comiastic of the work and its author. The book was,
moreover, embellished by a woodcut that gave a bird's-
eye view of the island and its principal city.

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xxxvi INTRODUCTION

The popularity of the work was immediate. Late
in 1517 or early in 1518, it was reprinted at Paris with
a second letter from More to Giles and one by the
learned French scholar William Bude* to Thomas
Lupset, the young Englishman who had brought the
book to his attention ; and in 1518 it was twice issued
at Basle, in Switzerland, with a letter concerning it
from Erasmus to the printer, Froben. In 1519 it was
published at Venice ; and after that date its republica-
tion was frequent. It was not, however, till 1663 that
the Latin text was published in England. As early
as 1524 a German translation appeared; and before
the first English translation (1551) translations into
Italian (1548) and French (1550) had been published.
A Dutch translation was issued in 1553 and a Spanish
in 1790.