STATE OP ENGLAND IN 1685 .'

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have believed that a time would come when the princes and en-nobles of neighbouring lands would be as eager to obtainhorses from England as ever the English had been to obtainhorses from Barbary. *

The increase of vegetable and animal produce, thoughgreat, seems small when compared with the increase of ourmineral wealth. In 1G85 the tin of Cornwall, which had, morethan two thousand years before, attracted the Tyrian sailsbeyond the pillars of Hercules, was still one of the most va-luable subterranean productions of the island. The quantityannually extracted from the earth was found to be, some yearslater, sixteen hundred tons, probably about a third of what itnow is.** But the veins of copper which lie in the same regionwere, in the time of Charles the Second, altogether neglected,nor did any landowner take them into the account in estima-ting the value of his property. Cornwall and Wales at pre-sent yield annually near fifteen thousand tons of copper, worthnear a million and a half sterling; thatistosay, worthabouttwice as much as the annual produce of all English mines of alldescriptions in the seventeenth century.*** The first bed ofrock salt had been discovered not long after the Restoration inCheshire, but does not appear to have been worked in thatage. The salt which was obtained by a rude process frombrine pits was held in no high estimation. The pans in whichthe manufacture was carried on exhaled a sulphurous stench;

* King and Davenant as before; The Duke of Newcastle on Horse-manship; Gentleman’s Recreation, 1680. The “dappled Flanders mares”were marks of greatness in the time of Pope, and even later.

The vulgar proverb, that the grey mare is the better horse, origi-nated, I suspect, in the preference generally given to the grey mares ofFlanders over the finest coach horses of England.

** See a curious note by Tonkin, in Lord De Dunstanville’s edition ofCarew's Survey of Cornwall.

*** Borlase’s Natural History of Cornwall, 1158. The quantity ofcopper now produced, I have taken from parliamentary returns. Dave-nant, in 1100, estimated the annual produce of all the mines of Englandat between seven and eight hundred thousand pounds.