10.]--are produced either by nature, by
fortune, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by the one or the
other of the former, the least and the most imperfect by the last.

These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received
but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and
consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The
laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with
any mixture of ours: but 'tis in such purity, that I am sometimes
troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they
were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more
able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato
had no knowledge of them; for to my apprehension, what we now see in
those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures with which the
poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a
happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire
of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by
experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination,
nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained
with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato that it
is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of
letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political
superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no
successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of
leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture,
no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying,
treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard
of.

--[This is the famous passage which Shakespeare, through Florio's
version, 1603, or ed. 1613, p. 102, has employed in the "Tempest,"
ii. 1.]

How much would he find his imaginary Republic short of his perfection?

"Viri a diis recentes."

["Men fresh from the gods."--Seneca, Ep., 90.]

"Hos natura modos primum dedit."

["These were the manners first taught by nature."
--Virgil, Georgics, ii. 20.]

As to the rest, they live in a country very pleasant and temperate, so
that, as my witnesses inform me, 'tis rare to hear of a sick person, and
they moreover as