It 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.