nceth the upholders
thereof even in the Rhenish wines.

The time hath been also that woad, wherewith our countrymen dyed
their faces (as Caesar saith), that they might seem terrible to their
enemies in the field (and also women and their daughters-in-law did
stain their bodies and go naked, in that pickle, to the sacrifices of
their gods, coveting to resemble therein the Ethiopians, as Pliny
saith, [lib. 22, cap. 1]), and also madder have been (next unto our
tin and wools) the chief commodities and merchandise of this realm, I
find also that rape oil hath been made within this land. But now our
soil either will not, or at the leastwise may not, bear either woad
or madder. I say not that the ground is not able so to do, but that
we are negligent, afraid of the pilling of our grounds, and careless
of our own profits, as men rather willing to buy the same of others
than take any pain to plant them here at home. The like I may say of
flax, which by law ought to be sown in every country town in England,
more or less; but I see no success of that good and wholesome law;
sith it is rather contemptuously rejected than otherwise dutifully
kept in any place in England.

Some say that our great number of laws do breed a general negligence
and contempt of all good order, because we have so many that no
subject can live without the transgression of some of them, and that
the often alteration of our ordinances doth much harm in this
respect, which (after Aristotle) doth seem to carry some reason
withal, for (as Cornelius Gallus hath)--

_"Eventus varios res nova semper habet."_[1]

[1] "An innovation, has always mixed effects."

But very many let not to affirm that the greedy corruption of the
promoters on the one side, facility in dispensing with good laws and
first breach of the same in the lawmakers and superiors and private
respects of their establishment on the other, are the greatest causes
why the inferiors regard no good order, being always so ready to
offend without any faculty one way as they are otherwise to presume
upon the examples of their betters when any hold is to be taken. But
as in these things I have no skill, so I wish that fewer licences for
the private commodity but of a few were granted (not that thereby I
deny the maintenance of the prerogative royal, but rather would with
all my heart that it might be yet more honourably increased), and
that every one which by fee'd friendship (or otherwise) do