TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS LORD

HIERONYMUS BUSLIDIUS, PROVOST

OF AIRE, COUNSELOR TO THE CATHOLIC KING

CHARLES, PETER GILLES OF ANTWERP SENDS GREETINGS.

Decorative drop-cap initial 'S' depicting a winding serpent or dragon-like creature intertwined with the letter's form, set within a rectangular frame.

In these past days, most ornate Buslidius, that THOMAS MORE—to whom you are also a witness, for he is well known to you—that outstanding glory of this our age, sent to me the island of Utopia. It is as yet known to few mortals, but it is worthy above all to be known by all as something more than Platonic. It is expressed, depicted, and placed before the eyes by a most eloquent man in such a way that, as often as I read it, I seem to see somewhat more than when I heard Raphael Hythlodaeus himself (for I was present for the conversation just as MORE was) voicing his own words. Even if that man, endowed with no common eloquence, set forth the matter such that it clearly appeared he was not recounting things he had learned from the stories of others, but things he had drawn in with his own eyes and in which he had spent no small amount of time. He is, in my opinion, a man superior even to Ulysses himself in his experience of regions, men, and affairs, and such a man as I judge has not been born in these eight hundred years, compared to whom Vespucius might be thought to have seen nothing. Now, besides the fact that we recount what we have seen more effectively than what we have heard, there was in the man a certain peculiar dexterity for explaining things. But yet, how often these same things are depicted by the brush of MORE...