Note 9 — INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS. (continued 6)

When the ambassadors came arrayed in gold and peacocks’ feathers ‘to the eyes of all the Utopians except very few, which had been in other countries for some reasonable cause, all that gorgeousness of apparel seemed shameful and reproachful. In so much that they most reverently saluted the vilest and most abject of them for lords—passing over the ambassadors themselves without any honour, judging them by their wearing of golden chains to be bondmen. You should have seen children also, that had cast away their pearls and precious stones, when they saw the like sticking upon the ambassadors’ caps, dig and push their mothers under the sides, saying thus to them—“Look, mother, how great a lubber doth yet wear pearls and precious stones, as though he were a little child still.” But the mother; yea and that also in good earnest: “Peace, son,” saith she, “I think he be some of the ambassadors’ fools”’ (p. 102).