It is much to be regretted that Roger Bacon does not appear to have executed the second and more important part of his design, namely, “to assign the causes and methods” of these wonderful works of Art and Nature.  Possibly he was unable to do so to his own satisfaction; possibly he may upon further reflection have refrained from doing so, deeming them mysteries not to be communicated to the vulgar;—­“for he who divulges mysteries diminishes the majesty of things; wherefore Aristotle says that he should be the breaker of the heavenly seal, were he to divulge the secret things of wisdom."[41] However this may have been, we may safely doubt whether the inventions which he reports were in fact the result of sound scientific knowledge, whether they had indeed any real existence, or whether they were only the half-realized and imperfect creations of the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming of things to come.

The matters of interest in the volume before us are by no means exhausted, but we can proceed no farther in the examination of them, and must refer those readers who desire to know more of its contents to the volume itself.  We can assure them that they will find it full of vivid illustrations of the character of Bacon’s time,—­of the thoughts of men at an epoch of which less is commonly known than of periods more distant, but less connected by intellectual sympathy and moral relations with our own.  But the chief interest of Bacon’s works lies in their exhibition to us of himself, a man foremost in his own time in all knowledge, endowed by Nature with a genius of peculiar force and clearness of intuition, with a resolute energy that yielded to no obstacles, with a combination so remarkable of the speculative and the practical intellect as to place him in the ranks of the chief philosophers to whom the progress of the world in learning and in thought is due.  They show him exposed to the trials which the men who are in advance of their contemporaries are in every age called to meet, and bearing these trials with a noble confidence in the final prevalence of the truth,—­using all his powers for the advantage of the world, and regarding all science and learning of value only as they led to acquaintance with the wisdom of God and the establishment of Christian virtue.  He himself gives us a picture of a scholar of his times, which we may receive as a not unworthy portrait of himself.  “He does not care for discourses and disputes of words, but he pursues the works of wisdom, and in them he finds rest.  And what others dim-sighted strive to see, like bats in twilight, he beholds in its full splendor, because he is the master of experiments; and thus he knows natural things, and the truths of medicine and alchemy, and the things of heaven as well as those below.  Nay, he is ashamed, if any common man, or old wife, or soldier, or rustic in the country knows anything of which he is ignorant.  Wherefore he has searched out all the effects of the fusing of metals, and whatever