Victorian culture dominated the world by the end of the nineteenth century, and James Spedding participated in the intellectual development of that culture as did few others. His contribution is, however, hardly recognized today. The mammoth edition of the works of Francis Bacon (1858-1874), including Bacon's biography--one of the central scholarly projects of his time, to which Spedding devoted thirty years of his life--is generally ignored. Spedding's recovery of Bacon for his own time, however, brought praise from Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, Edward FitzGerald, Leslie Stephen, and other Victorian intellectuals and helped in the actualization of the Baconian method in the work of Victorian scientists, including Charles Darwin. But the Bacon edition was only one of Spedding's achievements. He developed a powerful control of the English sentence, with a manipulation of syntax that came from a combination of knowledge of Latin and Greek and an inherited eighteenth-century prose...