History of the English People, Volume II | Page 6

useful books connected with the science of
morals." It is only words like these of his own that bring home to us the
keen thirst for knowledge, the patience, the energy of Roger Bacon. He
returned as a teacher to Oxford, and a touching record of his devotion
to those whom he taught remains in the story of John of London, a boy
of fifteen, whose ability raised him above the general level of his pupils.
"When he came to me as a poor boy," says 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 little. 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, £60, 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