don "is not due to the inhabitants being noblemen and gentlemen; on the contrary, they are persons of low degree and artificers who have congregated there from all parts of the Island, from Flanders, and from every other place. . . . Still the citizens of London are esteemed quite as highly there as the Venetian gentlemen are in Venice." Artisans became merchants; merchants bought country estates; new landed gentlemen took on the style of old families.
To speak summarily, a passion for bourgeois comfort spread everywhere. The whole domestic life of the mercantile classes was altered: stories were added to their houses; the number of rooms was increased; the use of the entrance hall as a sleeping place was abandoned; servants were more sharply separated from the family; beds took the place of pallets; plate and furniture accumulated; contentment with primitive simplicity in living gave way to the quest for material goods.
Now the comfort so prized by the rising middle class was bought with money and, after the looting of feudal wars was stopped, money was most easily acquired by commerce, especially beyond the seas. It was not uncommon for promoters of trading expeditions to gather in profits running from one hundred to four hundred per cent; indeed some of the early voyages to India netted twelve hundred per cent. In a single year, 1622, a consignment of goods bought in India for £386,000 sold in England for £1,915,000. The gains of peaceful trade were augmented from the spoils gathered by sea dogs, such as Drake and Hawkins, who raided the Spanish towns in America, overhauled galleons laden with gold and silver from Mexico and Peru, and seized Spanish merchant vessels from the East Indies bearing a king's ransom in spices and precious stuffs. From the New World gold and silver poured into Europe in an ever increasing stream, rising, according to Humboldt's estimates, from £52,000 annually at the opening of the sixteenth century to £280,000 annually at its close; and
