and bacon, from each county; borrowed their silver plate from many abbeys, as well as great sums of money both abroad and at home; and pawned his crown for fifty thousand florins."[1]
He pawns his queen's jewels next year; and final!y summons all the gentlemen of England who had forty pounds a year, to come and receive the honour of knighthood, or pay to be excused!
277. II. The failures of Edward, or of twenty Edwards, would have done Florence no harm, had she remained true to herself, and to her neighbouring states. Her merchants only fall by their own increasing avarice; and above all by the mercantile form of pillage, usury. The idea that money could beget money, though more absurd than alchemy, had yet an apparently practical and irresistibly tempting confirmation in the wealth of villains, and the success of fools. Alchemy, in its day, led to pure chemistry; and calmly yielded to the science it had fostered. But all wholesome indignation against usurers was prevented, in the Christian mind, by wicked and cruel religious hatred of the race of Christ. In the end, Shakspeare himself, in his fierce
- ↑ Henry's "History of England," book iv., chap. i.
