In 1507
there was published a little book called an _Introduction to
Cosmography_, which gave an account of the four voyages of Amerigo. In
the story of the fourth voyage it is narrated that twenty-four men were
left in a fort near Cape Bahia. More used this detail as a
starting-point, and one of the men whom Amerigo left tells the story of
this "Nowhere," a republic partly resembling England but most of all the
ideal world of Plato. Partly resembling England, because no man can
escape from the influences of his own time, whatever road he takes,
whether the road of imagination or any other. His imagination can only
build out of the materials afforded him by his own experience: he can
alter, he can rearrange, but he cannot in the strictest sense of the
word create, and every city of dreams is only the scheme of things as
they are remoulded nearer to the desire of a man's heart. In a way More
has less invention than some of his subtler followers, but his book is
interesting because it is the first example of a kind of writing which
has been attractive to many men since his time, and particularly to
writers of our own day.
There remains one circumstance in the revival of the classics which had
a marked and continuous influence on the literary age that followed.
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