l shape
of their work will be, and of the aim they set before themselves.
Many are ignorant even of this, and write as the coral-insects build;
period joins to period, and the Lord only knows what the author means.

Life now-a-days goes at a gallop; and the way in which this affects
literature is to make it extremely superficial and slovenly.

ON THE STUDY OF LATIN.

The abolition of Latin as the universal language of learned men,
together with the rise of that provincialism which attaches to
national literatures, has been a real misfortune for the cause of
knowledge in Europe. For it was chiefly through the medium of the
Latin language that a learned public existed in Europe at all--a
public to which every book as it came out directly appealed. The
number of minds in the whole of Europe that are capable of thinking
and judging is small, as it is; but when the audience is broken up and
severed by differences of language, the good these minds can do is
very much weakened. This is a great disadvantage; but a second and
worse one will follow, namely, that the ancient languages will cease
to be taught at all. The neglect of them is rapidly gaining ground
both in France and Germany.

If it should really come to this, then farewell, humanity! farewell,
noble taste and high thinking! The age of barbarism will return, in
spite of railways, telegraphs and balloons. We shall thus in the end
lose one more advantage possessed by all our ancestors. For Latin is
not only a key to the knowledge of Roman antiquity; its also directly
opens up to us the Middle Age in every country in Europe, and modern
times as well, down to about the year 1750. Erigena, for example, in
the ninth century, John of Salisbury in the twelfth, Raimond Lully in
the thirteenth, with a hundred others, speak straight to us in the
very language that they naturally adopted in thinking of learned
matters.

They thus come quite close to us even at this distance of time: we are
in direct contact with them, and really come to know them. How would
it have been if every one of them spoke in the language that was
peculiar to his time and country? We should not understand even the
half of what they said. A real intellectual contact with them would be
impossible. We should see them like shadows on the farthest horizon,
or, may be, through the translator's telescope.

It was with an eye to the advantage of writing in Latin that Bacon, as
he himself expressly