of the cloudy amplifications, and pompous flourishings, and “the flowing and watery vein,” which the scholars of his time affected, it is strange that he should not have seen that the new ideas and widening thoughts of which he was the herald would want a much more elastic and more freely-working instrument than Latin could ever become.  It is wonderful indeed what can be done with Latin.  It was long after his day to be the language of the exact sciences.  In his History of the Winds, which is full of his irrepressible fancy and picturesqueness, Bacon describes in clear and intelligible Latin the details of the rigging of a modern man-of-war, and the mode of sailing her.  But such tasks impose a yoke, sometimes a rough one, on a language which has “taken its ply” in very different conditions, and of which the genius is that of indirect and circuitous expression, “full of majesty and circumstance.”  But it never, even in those days of scholarship, could lend itself to the frankness, the straightforwardness, the fulness and shades of suggestion and association, with which, in handling ideas of subtlety and difficulty, a writer would wish to speak to his reader, and which he could find only in his mother tongue.  It might have been thought that with Bacon’s contempt of form and ceremony in these matters, his consciousness of the powers of English in his hands might have led him to anticipate that a flexible and rich and strong language might create a literature, and that a literature, if worth studying, would be studied in its own language.  But so great a change was beyond even his daring thoughts.  To him, as to his age, the only safe language was the Latin.  For familiar use English was well enough.  But it could not be trusted; “it would play the bankrupt with books.”  And yet Galileo was writing in Italian as well as in Latin; only within twenty-five years later, Descartes was writing De la Methode, and Pascal was writing in the same French in which he wrote the Provincial Letters, his Nouvelles Experiences touchant le Vide, and the controversial pamphlets which followed it; showing how in that interval of five-and-twenty years an instrument had been fashioned out of a modern language such as for lucid expression and clear reasoning, Bacon had not yet dreamed of.  From Bacon to Pascal is the change from the old scientific way of writing to the modern; from a modern language, as learned and used in the 16th century, to one learned in the 17th.

But the language of the age of Elizabeth was a rich and noble one, and it reached a high point in the hands of Bacon.  In his hands it lent itself to many uses, and assumed many forms, and he valued it, not because he thought highly of its qualities as a language, but because it enabled him with least trouble “to speak as he would,” in throwing off the abundant thoughts that rose within his mind, and in going through the variety of business which could not be done in Latin.  But in all his writing