"It is a book," he says, "that will live, and be a citizen of the world, as English books are not." And he fitted it for continental reading by carefully weeding it of all passages that might give offence to the censors at Rome or Paris.

"I have been," he writes to the King, "mine own _Index Expurgatorius_, that it may be read in all places.

For since my end of putting it in Latin was to have it read everywhere, it had been an absurd contradiction to free it in the language and to pen it up in the matter." Even the _Essays_ and the _History of Henry VII._ he had put into Latin "by some good pens that do not forsake me." Among these translators are said to have been George Herbert and Hobbes, and on more doubtful authority, Ben Jonson and Selden.

The _Essays_ were also translated into Latin and Italian with Bacon's sanction.
Bacon's contemptuous and hopeless estimate of "these modern languages," forty years after Spenser had proclaimed and justified his faith in his own language, is only one of the proofs of the short-sightedness of the wisest and the limitations of the largest-minded.

Perhaps we ought not to wonder at his silence about Shakespeare.