t was the fashion, except
among a set of clever but not always very reputable people, to think the
stage, as it was, below the notice of scholars and statesmen; and
Shakespeare took no trouble to save his works from neglect. Yet it is a
curious defect in Bacon that he should not have been more alive to the
powers and future of his own language. He early and all along was
profoundly impressed with the contrast, which the scholarship of the age
so abundantly presented, of words to things. He dwells in the
_Advancement_ on that "first distemper of learning, when men study words
and not matter." He illustrates it at large from the reaction of the new
learning and of the popular teaching of the Reformation against the
utilitarian and unclassical terminology of the schoolmen; a reaction
which soon grew to excess, and made men "hunt more after choiceness of
the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the
sweet falling of the clauses," than after worth of subject, soundness of
argument, "life of invention or depth of judgment." "I have represented
this," he says, "in an example of late times, but it hath been and will
be _secundum majus et minus_ in all times;" and he likens this "vanity"
to "Pygmalion's frenzy"--"for to fall in love with words which are but
the images of matter, is all one as to fall in love with a picture." He
was dissatisfied with the first attempt at translation into Latin of the
_Advancement_ by Dr. Playfer of Cambridge, because he "desired not so
much neat and polite, as clear, masculine, and apt expression." Yet,
with this hatred of circumlocution and prettiness, 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