The Anatomy of Melancholy

In some respects it is ranked above other countries: for skilled seamen, our laborious voyages of discovery, the art of navigation, and genuine merchants. They take the prize over every other nation, even the Portuguese and the Dutch themselves: “Fearlessly,” says Botero, “ploughing the ocean in winter and summer; and two of their captains, with as much courage as good fortune, have sailed around the world.”

Besides, we have many particular blessings that our neighbours lack: the Gospel rightly preached; church discipline established; long peace and tranquillity, free from oppressive levies, foreign threats, invasions, and civil unrest; a well-cultivated country, fortified by human skill and nature; and now, happiest of all, that fortunate union of England and Scotland which our forefathers worked to achieve and longed to see. But what raises us above everyone else is a wise, learned, religious king—another Numa, a second Augustus, a true Josiah—most worthy councillors, a learned clergy, an obedient people, and so on.

Yet among the many roses grow some thistles: noxious weeds and abuses that seriously disturb the peace of this political body and dim its honour and glory. They deserve to be rooted out and reformed without delay.

The first is idleness. Because of it, we have swarms of rogues and beggars, thieves, drunkards, and discontented people—whom Lycurgus, in Plutarch, calls “diseases of the commonwealth,” the boils of the commonwealth—and many poor people in all our towns: “undistinguished cities,” as Polydore calls them, meanly built, inglorious, poor, small, few and far between, dilapidated, and sparsely inhabited.

We cannot deny that our land is fertile and full of good things. Why, then, does it not abound in cities like Italy, France, Germany, and the Low Countries? Because their policies have been different, and we are not so thrifty, careful, or industrious. Idleness is our nation’s “evil spirit.” As Botero rightly argues, a country’s fertility is not enough unless skill and industry accompany it. According to Aristotle, wealth is either natural or made by human skill: natural wealth consists of good land, rich mines, and so on; wealth made by human skill consists of manufactured goods, coins, and the like.

Many kingdoms are fertile but sparsely inhabited, such as the duchy of Piedmont in Italy, which Leandro Alberti praises so highly for its grain, wine, fruit, and so on; yet they are nowhere near as populous as less fertile countries. “England,” he says, “London alone excepted, has not a single populous city, yet it is a fertile country.”

I find 46 cities and walled towns in Alsace, a small province of Germany, 50 castles, and countless villages. No land lies idle: even rocky places and hilltops are cultivated, as Münster tells us. In Kraichgau, a small territory on the Neckar, 24 Italian miles across, I read of 20 walled towns and innumerable villages, most containing 150 houses apiece, besides castles and noblemen’s palaces.