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.