s, and
trade. The country was as thickly studded with large towns as other
countries were with villages. In the middle of the sixteenth century it
was computed to contain above three hundred and fifty cities, and more
than six thousand three hundred towns of a smaller size.[372] These
towns were not the resort of monks and mendicants, as in other parts of
the Continent, but they swarmed with a busy, laborious population. No
man ate the bread of idleness in the Netherlands. At the period with
which we are occupied Ghent counted 70,000 inhabitants, Brussels 75,000,
and Antwerp 100,000. This was at a period when London itself contained
but 150,000.[373]

The country, fertilized by its countless canals and sluices, exhibited
everywhere that minute and patient cultivation which distinguishes it at
the present day, but which in the middle of the sixteenth century had no
parallel but in the lands tilled by the Moorish inhabitants of the south
of Spain. The ingenious spirit of the people was shown in their
dexterity in the mechanical arts, and in the talent for invention which
seems to be characteristic of a people accustomed from infancy to the
unfettered exercise of their faculties. The processes for simplifying
labor were carried so far, that children, as we are assured, began, at
four or five years of age, to earn a livelihood.[374] Each of the
principal cities became noted for its excellence in some branch or other
of manufacture. Lille was known for its woollen cloths, Brussels for its
tapestry and carpets, Valenciennes for its camlets, while the towns of
Holland and Zealand furnished a simpler staple in the form of cheese,
butter, and salted fish.[375] These various commodities were exhibited
at the great fairs held twice a year, for the space of twenty days each,
at Antwerp, which were thronged by foreigners as well as natives.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Flemings imported great
quantities of wool from England, to be manufactured into cloth at home.
But Flemish emigrants had carried that manufacture to England; and in
the time of Philip the Second the cloths themselves were imported from
the latter country to the amount of above five millions of crowns
annually, and exchanged for the domestic products of the
Netherlands.[376] This single item of trade with one of their neighbors
may suggest some notion of the extent of the commerce of the Low
Countries at this period.

But in truth the commerce of