the place that Bacon occupies in English literature, he
occupies it, as it were, _malgre lui_. Unlike almost all the greatest men
of his own and even of the preceding generation, he seems to have thought
little of the capacities, and less of the chances of the English language.
He held (and, unluckily for him, expressed his opinion in writing) that
"these modern languages will at one time or the other play the bankrupt
with books," and even when he wrote in the despised vernacular he took care
to translate his work, or have it translated, into Latin in order to
forestall the oblivion he dreaded. Nor is this his only phrase of contempt
towards his mother-tongue--the tongue which in his own lifetime served as a
vehicle to a literature compared with which the whole literary achievement
of Latin antiquity is but a neat school exercise, and which in every point
but accomplished precision of form may challenge comparison with Greek
itself. This insensibility of Bacon's is characteristic enough, and might,
if this were the place for any such subtlety, be connected with the other
defects of his strangely blended character--his pusillanimity, his lack of
passion (let any one read the Essay on Love, and remember that some
persons, not always inmates of lunatic asylums, have held that Bacon wrote
the plays of Shakespere), his love of empty pomp and display, and so
forth.

But the English language which he thus despised had a noble and worthy
revenge on Bacon. Of his Latin works hardly anything but the _Novum
Organum_ is now read even for scholastic purposes, and it is not certain
that, but for the saving influences of academical study and prescription,
even that might not slip out of the knowledge of all but specialists. But
with the wider and wider spread and study of English the _Essays_ and _The
Advancement of Learning_ are read ever more and more, and the only reason
that _The History of Henry VII._, _The New Atlantis_, and the _Sylva
Sylvarum_ do not receive equal attention, lies in the comparative
obsoleteness of their matter, combined with the fact that the matter is the
chief thing on which attention is bestowed in them. Even in the two works
noted, the _Essays_ and _The Advancement_, which can go both together in a
small volume, Bacon shows himself at his very greatest in all respects, and
(ignorant or careless as he was of the fact) as one of the greatest writers
of English prose before the accession of Charles I.

The