They are not so useful: a man who can count his money knows enough arithmetic. A true geometrician can measure out a good fortune for himself; a perfect astrologer can calculate the rise and fall of others and turn their wandering movements to his own advantage. The best optics reflect the rays of great men’s favour and grace so that they shine on him. A good engineer needs only to devise a means of gaining advancement.

This was the usual opinion and practice in Poland, as Kromer observed not long ago in the first book of his History. Their universities were generally of low standing; no philosopher, mathematician, antiquary or the like of any distinction could be found among them, because no fixed reward or stipend was provided. Instead, everyone took up divinity, “having only this wish: a fat benefice.” A good parsonage was their aim.

Some of our near neighbours followed the same practice, as Lipsius complains: they push their children into the study of law and divinity before they are properly instructed or ready for such studies. “Of course, the hope of profit takes precedence over all the arts, and a heap of gold is more beautiful than anything those raving Greeks and Romans wrote. From this number men then come to steer the state; they sit in and preside over the councils of kings. O father, O fatherland!” So he complained, and others may do the same. For we find just this: serving a great man, obtaining an office in a bishop’s court, practising in a prosperous town or securing a benefice is the target we aim at, because it offers such advantages—the highway to advancement.

Yet, as far as I can see, these men often fail in their plans just as frequently as the rest and are just as often disappointed in their hopes. Suppose a man is a doctor of law, an excellent and accomplished civil lawyer: where can he practise and find room to work? His field is so narrow. Here, prohibitions so restrict the civil law, and so few cases remain because of those all-devouring laws of our own country—“than which nothing is more unlearned,” says Erasmus, an unlearned and barbarous study—that scarcely any courts are left to the profession. However well versed men may be in that national law, I can hardly grant them the name of scholars unless they have other accomplishments. The offices are so poorly paid, and usually cost so much to obtain, that I do not know how a talented man can prosper among them.

As for physicians, every village has so many mountebanks, empirics, quacks and self-styled Paracelsians—“lawsuit-makers and health-killers,” as Clenard calls them—wizards, alchemists, poor vicars, discarded apothecaries, physicians’ servants, barbers and housewives, all claiming great skill, that I seriously doubt how they can earn a living or who their patients will be.

Besides, there are so many of both kinds, and some are such harpies—so grasping, so noisy, so shameless—and, as the poet said, litigious fools:

With plenty of loud-mouthed arrogance, Little skill or none, And not one grain of literary wit: A purse-milking tribe, A chattering crowd, bundles of legal tricks, A malicious band of litigants, vultures in gowns, Laverna’s pupils, charlatans, and so on.

With no skill but prating arrogance, No learning—a purse-milking nation: Gowned vultures, thieves, a quarrelsome gang Of cheats who haunt this occupation.

There are so many that they scarcely know how to make a living alongside one another. As the comic poet joked about clocks, “the greater part of the people crawl about in parching hunger.” A great many are almost starving, ready to devour their fellows “and attack one another with malicious cunning.” Such a multitude of pettifoggers and empirics, such impostors, that an honest man does not know how to conduct himself in their company or maintain his good name in so vile a crowd: “he would be ashamed to profess the title of learning, acquired at such expense and through so many sleepless nights, since”—and so on.

Last of all, to come to our clergy: theirs is the noblest profession, worthy of double honour, yet of all people they are the most distressed and miserable. If you will not believe me, hear a brief account publicly preached not many years ago at Paul’s Cross by a minister who was then a respected preacher and is now a reverend bishop of this country:

“We who are brought up in learning, and destined for this by our parents, endure our childhood in the grammar school, which Augustine calls ‘a great tyranny and a grievous evil’, comparing it to the torments of martyrdom. When we come to the university, if we live on the college allowance, we are, as Phalaris reproached the Leontines, ‘lacking everything except hunger and fear’—needy of all things but hunger and fear. Or, if our parents bear even part of our costs, we spend five hundred pounds or a thousand marks on unnecessary upkeep, books and degrees before we reach any accomplishment.

If, at this cost in time, in our bodies and spirits, our property and inheritances, we cannot obtain those small rewards that belong to us by law and hereditary right—a poor parsonage, or a vicarage worth fifty pounds a year—but must pay the patron for a lease lasting our lifetime, a spent and worn-out lifetime, either by an annual payment or at more than the rate for a copyhold, and must do so at the risk and loss of our souls through simony and perjury, forfeiting all our church appointments, ‘actual and possible’, both present and future—

What father, before long, will be so improvident as to educate his son at great expense for this inevitable beggary? What Christian will be so irreligious as to bring up his son for a life that, in all probability and indeed inevitably, ‘compels him to shameful acts’—forces him into sin—and will entangle him in simony and perjury? As the poet says, ‘Even someone invited from a bridge would refuse such fare’: a beggar’s brat taken from the bridge where he sits begging would have reason to refuse it if he knew the hardship involved.”