ice that our
gain not being worthy our travel, and the same commodity with less cost
ready to be had at home from other countries (though but for a while), it
causeth us to give over our endeavours and as it were by-and-by to forget
the matter whereabout we went before, to obtain them at their hands. And
this is the only cause wherefore our commodities are oft so little
esteemed of. Some of them can say, without any teacher, that they will buy
the case of a fox of an Englishman for a groat, and make him afterwards
give twelve pence for the tail. Would to God we might once wax wiser, and
each one endeavour that the commonwealth of England may flourish again in
her old rate, and that our commodities may be fully wrought at home (as
cloth if you will for an example) and not carried out to be shorn and
dressed abroad, while our clothworkers here do starve and beg their bread,
and for lack of daily practice utterly neglect to be skilful in this
science! But to my purpose.

We have in England great plenty of quicksilver, antimony, sulphur, black
lead, and orpiment red and yellow. We have also the finest alum (wherein
the diligence of one of the greatest favourers of the commonwealth of
England of a subject[176] hath been of late egregiously abused, and even
almost with barbarous incivility) and of no less force against fire, if it
were used in our parietings, than that of Lipari, which only was in use
sometime amongst the Asians and Romans and whereof Sylla had such trial
that when he meant to have burned a tower of wood erected by Archelaus,
the lieutenant of Mithridates, he could by no means set it on fire in a
long time, because it was washed over with alum, as were also the gates of
the temple of Jerusalem with like effect, and perceived when Titus
commanded fire to be put unto the same. Besides this, we have also the
natural cinnabarum or vermillion, the sulphurous glebe called bitumen in
old time, for mortar, and yet burned in lamps where oil is scant and
geson; the chrysocolla, copperas, and mineral stone, whereof petriolum is
made, and that which is most strange, the mineral pearl, which as they are
for greatness and colour most excellent of all other, so are they digged
out of the main land and in sundry places far distant from the shore.
Certes the western part of the land hath in times past greatly abounded
with these and many other rare and excellent commodities, but now they are
washed away by the violence of the