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 it is the matter, the real thing that he wanted to say, which
was uppermost. He cared how it was said, not for the sake of form or
ornament, but because the force and clearness of what was said depended
so much on how it was said. Of course, what he wanted to say varied
indefinitely with the various occasion