de from him without loss. He commanded when he spoke, and had his
judges angry and pleased at his devotion ... the fear of every man that
heard him was that he should make an end." He notices one feature for
which we are less prepared, though we know that the edge of Bacon's
sarcastic tongue was felt and resented in James's Court. "His speech,"
says Ben Jonson, "was nobly censorious when he could _spare and pass by
a jest_." The unpopularity which certainly seems to have gathered round
his name may have had something to do with this reputation.

Yet as an English writer Bacon did not expect to be remembered, and he
hardly cared to be. He wrote much in Latin, and his first care was to
have his books put into a Latin dress. "For these modern languages," he
wrote to Toby Matthews towards the close of his life, "will at one time
or another play the bank-rowte with books, and since I have lost much
time with this age, I would be glad if God would give me leave to
recover it with posterity." He wanted to be read by the learned out of
England, who were supposed to appreciate his philosophical ideas better
than his own countrymen, and the only way to this was to have his books
translated into the "general language." He sends Prince Charles the
_Advancement_ in its new Latin dress. "It is a book," he says, "that
will live, and be a citizen of the world, as English books are not." And
he fitted it for continental reading by carefully weeding it of all
passages that might give offence to the censors at Rome or Paris. "I
have been," he writes to the King, "mine own _Index Expurgatorius_, that
it may be read in all places. For since my end of putting it in Latin
was to have it read everywhere, it had been an absurd contradiction to
free it in the language and to pen it up in the matter." Even the
_Essays_ and the _History of Henry VII._ he had put into Latin "by some
good pens that do not forsake me." Among these translators are said to
have been George Herbert and Hobbes, and on more doubtful authority, Ben
Jonson and Selden. The _Essays_ were also translated into Latin and
Italian with Bacon's sanction.

Bacon's contemptuous and hopeless estimate of "these modern languages,"
forty years after Spenser had proclaimed and justified his faith in his
own language, is only one of the proofs of the short-sightedness of the
wisest and the limitations of the largest-minded. Perhaps we ought not
to wonder at his silence about Shakespeare. I