ays Bacon in
recommending him to the Pope, "I caused him to be nurtured and instructed
for the love of God, especially since for aptitude and innocence I have
never found so towardly a youth. Five or six years ago I caused him to be
taught in languages, mathematics, and optics, and I have gratuitously
instructed him with my own lips since the time that I received your
mandate. There is no one at Paris who knows so much of the root of
philosophy, though he has not produced the branches, flowers, and fruit
because of his youth, and because he has had no experience in teaching. But
he has the means of surpassing all the Latins if he live to grow old and
goes on as he has begun."

The pride with which he refers to his system of instruction was justified
by the wide extension which he gave to scientific teaching in Oxford. It is
probably of himself that he speaks when he tells us that "the science of
optics has not hitherto been lectured on at Paris or elsewhere among the
Latins, save twice at Oxford." It was a science on which he had laboured
for ten years. But his teaching seems to have fallen on a barren soil. From
the moment when the Friars settled in the Universities scholasticism
absorbed the whole mental energy of the student world. The temper of the
age was against scientific or philosophical studies. The older enthusiasm
for knowledge was dying down; the study of law was the one source of
promotion, whether in Church or state; philosophy was discredited,
literature in its purer forms became almost extinct. After forty years of
incessant study, Bacon found himself in his own words "unheard, forgotten,
buried." He seems at one time to have been wealthy, but his wealth was
gone. "During the twenty years that I have specially laboured in the
attainment of wisdom, abandoning the path of common men, I have spent on
these pursuits more than two thousand pounds, not to mention the cost of
books, experiments, instruments, tables, the acquisition of languages, and
the like. Add to all this the sacrifices I have made to procure the
friendship of the wise and to obtain well-instructed assistants." Ruined
and baffled in his hopes, Bacon listened to the counsels of his friend
Grosseteste and renounced the world. He became a friar of the order of St.
Francis, an order where books and study were looked upon as hindrances to
the work which it had specially undertaken, that of preaching among the
masses of the poor. He had written lit