“Now I find,” he says, “as far as I have been informed, there is nothing in that nation that is either barbarous or savage,--unless men call that barbarism which is not common to them.... They are even savage as we call those fruits wild which nature of herself and of her ordinary progress hath produced,--whereas, indeed, they are those which ourselves have ordered by our artificial devices and diverted from their common order we should rather term savage. In those are the true and most profitable virtues, and natural properties most lively and vigorous, which in these we have bastardized, applying them to the pleasure of our corrupted taste.... And if notwithstanding, in diverse fruits of those countries that were never tilled, we shall find that in respect of ours they are most excellent and as delicate to the taste, there is no reason art should gain the point of honor over our puissant mother Nature. We have so much by our invention surcharged the beauties and riches of her works, that we have altogether choked her; yet wherever her purity shineth, she maketh our vain and frivolous enterprises wonderfully ashamed. “Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius, Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris, Et volucres nulla dulcius arte canunt. “All our endeavor or wit cannot so much as reach to represent the nest of the least birdlet, ... no, nor the web of a silly spider.... “Those nations seem therefore so barbarous unto me because they have received very little fashion from human wit, and are yet near their original naturality. The laws of nature do yet command them which are but little bastardized by ours, and that with such purity as I am sometimes grieved the knowledge of it came not sooner to light, what time there were men that, better than we, could have judged of it. I am sorry Lycurgus and Plato had it not; for me seemeth that what in these nations we see by experience doth not only exceed all the pictures wherewith licentious poesy hath proudly embellished the Golden Age, but also the conception and desire of philosophy.... It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no name of magistrate nor of politic priority, no use of service, of riches or of poverty, no occupation but idle, no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no measuring of lands, no use of wine, corn or metal.... The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction and pardon were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant would Plato find his imaginary commonwealth from this perfection? “Hos natura modos primum dedit.”