THE ENGLISH VOYAGES 



Montaigne on 

 Cannibals. 



The perfect 

 Common- 

 wealth. 



Shakespeare 

 and the 

 Golden Age, 



and by her own ordinary progress ; whereas in truth we 

 ought rather to call those wild, whose natures we have 

 changed by our artifice, and diverted from the common 

 order. ... 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 the poets' imagination, nor could 

 they ever believe that human society could have been 

 maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork.' 

 Then follows the famous passage which Shakespeare 

 borrowed for Gonzalo's description of his perfect com- 

 monwealth, in the Tempest, *I should tell Plato,' says 

 Montaigne, ^ 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 superi- 

 ority; no use of service, riches or poverty; no con- 

 tracts, 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 coin or wine; the very words that signify 

 lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, 

 pardon, never heard of. How much would he find his 

 imaginary Republic short of this perfection } ' 



The humours of this ideal as a practical theory of 

 colonisation tickled Shakespeare's fancy; the combination 

 of the virtues of the Golden Age with that extension of 

 trade and of sovereignty which was aimed at by the 



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