tle. So far was he from attempting to
write that his new superiors prohibited him from publishing anything under
pain of forfeiture of the book and penance of bread and water. But we can
see the craving of his mind, the passionate instinct of creation which
marks the man of genius, in the joy with which he seized a strange
opportunity that suddenly opened before him. "Some few chapters on
different subjects, written at the entreaty of friends," seem to have got
abroad, and were brought by one of the Pope's chaplains under the notice of
Clement the Fourth. The Pope at once invited Bacon to write. But
difficulties stood in his way. Materials, transcription, and other expenses
for such a work as he projected would cost at least, L60, and the Pope sent
not a penny. Bacon begged help from his family, but they were ruined like
himself. No one would lend to a mendicant friar, and when his friends
raised the money he needed it was by pawning their goods in the hope of
repayment from Clement. Nor was this all; the work itself, abstruse and
scientific as was its subject, had to be treated in a clear and popular
form to gain the Papal ear. But difficulties which would have crushed
another man only roused Roger Bacon to an almost superhuman energy. By the
close of 1267 the work was done. The "greater work," itself in modern form
a closely-printed folio, with its successive summaries and appendices in
the "lesser" and the "third" works (which make a good octavo more), were
produced and forwarded to the Pope within fifteen months.

[Sidenote: The Opus Majus]

No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book itself. The "Opus Majus"
is alike wonderful in plan and detail. Bacon's main purpose, in the words
of Dr. Whewell, is "to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of
philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not made a
greater progress, to draw back attention to sources of knowledge which had
been unwisely neglected, to discover other sources which were yet wholly
unknown, and to animate men to the undertaking by a prospect of the vast
advantages which it offered." The developement of his scheme is on the
largest scale; he gathers together the whole knowledge of his time on every
branch of science which it possessed, and as he passes them in review he
suggests improvements in nearly all. His labours, both here and in his
after works, in the field of grammar and philology, his perseverance in
insisting on the n