The Anatomy of Melancholy

Mecca in Arabia Petraea stands among rocks in a most barren country that lacks water, as Varthema describes it; yet it is a beautiful and pleasant city because of trade between East and West. Hormuz in Persia is a celebrated trading town: nothing but its conveniently placed harbour makes it flourish.

Corinth, a noble city—Cicero calls it “the light of Greece,” the eye of Greece—drew all that traffic of the Ionian and Aegean seas to itself through its excellent ports, Cenchreae and Lechaeum. Yet the surrounding country was “uneven and beetling,” as Strabo describes it, rugged and harsh. We may say the same of Athens, Actium, Thebes, Sparta, and most Greek towns.

Nuremberg in Germany stands on very barren soil, yet it is a noble imperial city. Through the industry of its craftspeople and their skilled trades alone, its people draw the wealth of most countries to themselves. They are so expert in manufacture that, as Sallust said long ago of others like them, “the seat of their soul is in their fingertips”: their soul, or “active intellect,” was lodged in the ends of their fingers. We may say the same of Basel, Speyer, Cambrai, Frankfurt, and others.

What some writers report of Mexico and its neighbouring cities is almost incredible: at the time of their first discovery, no place in the world was more populous. Matteo Ricci the Jesuit and others describe the industry of the Chinese in their densely populated country: not a beggar or an idle person to be seen, and how, by these means, they prosper and flourish.

We have the same resources: able bodies, adaptable minds, and materials of every kind—wool, flax, iron, tin, lead, timber, and so on—plenty of excellent things to work on. Only industry is lacking. We send our best commodities overseas, where people put them to good use for their needs, set to work on them, and improve each in its own way, then send them back to us at high prices. Or they make toys and trinkets from the scraps and sell these back to us for as much as they paid for the whole.

In most of our cities, with a few exceptions, we live entirely by drinking inns and alehouses, like Spanish idlers. Malt-making is their most profitable “plough”; their chief trade is selling ale.

Meteren and others reproach us for being nowhere near as industrious as the Dutch. “The more intricate or laborious manual trades,” he says, “are practised entirely by foreigners. They live in a sea full of fish, yet are so idle that they will not catch enough for their own needs, but buy it from their neighbours.” Bah, “the free sea”! They fish under our noses, then sell us the catch at their own prices.

“It shames us that these reproaches could be made And could not be refuted.” I am ashamed to hear foreigners bring this charge against us, and I do not know how to answer it.