The Utopia of Sir Thomas More was published in 1516 and Englished by Ralph Robynson in 1551. The work is a political romance. The spirit of the renascence was still fresh when the author wrote, and it made him imagine a new world to which the old order might conform, and, by conforming, escape the evils of its present condition. There is not any attempt at a philosophical analysis of the nature of the state, but only an account of a government and people devoted to the cause of social welfare. Their life is one of peace and freedom, of justice and equality.
Nothing is distributed after a niggish sort, neither there is any poor man or beggar.
And though no man have any thing, yet every man is rich. Its interest lies in the description of Solomon's house, which may be taken as Bacon's ideal of the public endowment of science. 35 Harrington's Oceana is a work of a different kind. It has none of the imaginative quality of Utopia or even of New Atlantis. Much of it reads like a state paper or the schedules of a budget.