It shows us a world where our evil is made a good, and our good an evil; there all that we consider a blessing is had in abundance--prolonged and perpetual sunlight, riches, power, fame--and yet these things are despised, and the people, turning away from them, imagine that they can find happiness in poverty, darkness, death, and unrequited love.

The writer thus mocks at all our dearest passions and strongest desires; and his general aim is to show that the mere search for happiness per se is a vulgar thing, and must always result in utter nothingness.

The writer also teaches the great lesson that the happiness of man consists not in external surroundings, but in the internal feelings, and that heaven itself is not a place, but a state.
It is the old lesson which Milton extorted from Satan: "'What matter where, if I be still the same--' "Or again: "'The mind is its own place, and of itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven--'" "That's good too," cried Oxenden.

"That reminds me of the German commentators who find in the Agamemnon of AEschylus or the OEdipus of Sophocles or the Hamlet of Shakespeare motives and purposes of which the authors could never have dreamed, and give us a metaphysical, beer-and-tobacco, High-Dutch Clytemnestra or Antigone or Lady Macbeth.

No, my boy, More was a simple sailor, and had no idea of satirizing anything." "How, then, do you account for the perpetual undercurrent of meaning and innuendo that may be found in every line ?" "I deny that there is anything of the sort," said Oxenden.