Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/92

Rh he read and meditated upon it. But the books that he read most and knew best were the works of Latin authors; he wrote Latin fluently, he thought in Latin, as his writings in both Latin and English abundantly show. The Latin of Bacon is partly his individual bent and partly the tenor of his age. Latin has come into English mainly in two great streams, through the French of the Norman conquest and directly from the revival of learning, and just as one must read Chaucer to understand the French influence, so Bacon best represents the learned borrowing of Latin of the Renaissance. Bacon was the most learned man of Elizabethan times, and the Elizabethan time was learned. To learn to read then was to learn to read Latin. Boys in school learned their grammar from Latin grammars, as Shakspere shows that he did in the King's New School of Stratford-upon-Avon, and a very good way to learn grammar it is. By the time the boy had completed his university course, if he had made good use of his time, Latin had become to him a second vernacular. If the young man was the son of a landed proprietor and stayed at home, his household accounts were kept in Latin. If he entered one of the learned professions, the law, or the church, or medicine, he had to draw up legal documents in Latin, or to read theology in Latin, or to study medical science written in Latin. If he was ambitious to become an author, he thought he must write his books in Latin. Roger Ascham, dedicating his Toxophilus to Henry VIII, in 1545, remarked that it would have been easier, Rh