messengers.  I could never find the works of Seneca, though I made diligent search for them during twenty years and more.  And so it is with many more most 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