The Wisdom and Wit of Blessed Thomas More. Collected and
edited by the Rev. T. C. Bridgett. (Burns and Oates )—There is much wit and wisdom in the writings of Sir Thomas More, and Father Bridgett has not failed to find and bring together some of it. But there are certain things in the volume that can hardly be described by either one word or the other. Sir Thomas More was not less given to violent language than other controversialists of his day. We have no right to blame him more than them. But there is no good reason for choosing his coarsest invectives as specimens of " sweetness and light." But perhaps they please the editor because they were applied to heretics, just on the same principle on which Vitellius declared that nothing smelt so sweet as a dead enemy. By-the-way, should not a Reverend Father know his Bible better than to say that Elijah "summoned the prophets and priests of Baal, after his fast of forty days" ? He fled from the vengeance of Jezebel, was miraculously fed in the wilderness, and " went in the strength of that meat forty days to Horeb, the Mount of God."
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