The Regent granted a licence to Cornelius De Vois, a Dutchman, for nineteen years, to search for gold and silver in any part of Scotland, ‘break the ground, mak sinks and pots therein, and to put labourers thereto,’ as he might think expedient, with assurance of full protection from the government, paying in requital for every hundred ounces of gold or silver which could be purified by washing, eight ounces, and for every hundred of the same which required the more expensive process of a purification by fire, four ounces.--_P. C. R._ [Sidenote: 1567-8.] Stephen Atkinson, who speculated in the gold-mines of Scotland a generation later, gives us[53] some account of Cornelius De Vois, whom he calls a German lapidary, and who, he says, had come to Scotland with recommendations from Queen Elizabeth. According to this somewhat foolish writer, ‘Cornelius went to view the said mountains in Clydesdale and Nydesdale, upon which mountains he got a small taste of small gold. This was a whetstone to sharpen his knife upon; and this natural gold tasted so sweet as the honey-comb in his mouth. And then he consulted with his friends at Edinburgh, and by his persuasions provoked them to adventure with him, shewing them at first the natural gold, which he called the temptable gold, or alluring gold. It was in sterns, and some like unto birds’ eyes and eggs: he compared it unto a woman’s eye, which entiseth her lover into her bosom.’ Cornelius was not inferior to his class in speculative extravagance. He found in his golden dreams a solution for the question regarding the poor. He saw Scotland and England ‘both oppressed with poor people which beg from door to door for want of employment, and no man looketh to it.’ But all these people were to find good and profitable employment if his projects were adopted. We are not accustomed to consider our countrymen inferior in energy and enterprise to the Germans. Yet Cornelius stated, that if he had been able to shew in his own country such indications of mineral wealth as he had found in Scotland, ‘then the whole country would confederate, and not rest till young and old that were able be set to work thereat, and to discover this treasure-house from whence this gold descended; and the people, from ten years old till ten times ten years old, should work thereat: no charges whatsoever should be spared, till mountains and mosses were turned into valleys and dales, but this treasure-house should be discovered.’