It was Bacon’s thirst for knowledge that caused his death.  One winter day when the snow lay on the ground he drove out in his coach.  Suddenly as he drove along looking at the white-covered fields and roads around, the thought came to him that food might be kept good by means of snow as easily as by salt.  He resolved to try, so, stopping his coach, he went into a poor woman’s cottage and bought a hen.  The woman killed and made ready the hen, but Bacon was so eager about his experiment that he stuffed it himself with snow.  In doing this he was so chilled by the cold that he became suddenly ill, too ill to return home.  He was taken to a house near “where they put him into a good bed warmed with a pan"* and there after a few days he died.

J.  Aubrey.

This little story of how Bacon came by his death gives a good idea of how he tried to make use of his philosophy.  He was not content with thinking and speculating, that is, looking at ideas.  Speculate comes from the Latin speculari, to spy out.  He wanted to experiment too.  And although in those days no one had thought about it, we now know that Bacon was quite right and that meat can be kept by freezing it.  And it is pleasant to know that before Bacon died he was able to write that the experiment had succeeded “excellently well.”

In his will Bacon left his name and memory “to men’s charitable speeches, to foreign nations and to the next ages,” and he was right to do so, for in spite of all the dark shadows that hang about his name men still call him great.  We remember him as a great man among great men; we remember him as the fore-runner of modern science; we remember him for the splendid English in which he wrote.

And yet, although Bacon’s English is clear, strong, and fine, although Elizabethan English perhaps reached in him its highest point, he himself despised English.  He did not believe that it was a language that would live.  And as he wanted his books to be read by people all over the world and in all time to come, he wrote his greatest books in Latin.  He grieved that he had wasted time in writing English, and he had much that he wrote in English translated into Latin during his lifetime.

It seems strange to us now that in an age when Spenser and Shakespeare had show the world what the English tongue had power to do that any man should have been able to disbelieve in its greatness.  But so it was, and Bacon translated his books into Latin so that they might live when English books “were not.”

I will not weary you with a list of all the books Bacon wrote.  Although it is not considered his greatest work, that by which most people know him is his Book of Essays.  By an essay, Bacon meant a testing or proving.  In the short chapters of his essays he tries and proves many things such as Friendship, Study, Honor; and when you come to read these essays you will be surprised to find how many of the sentences are known to you already.  They have become “household words,” and without knowing it we repeat Bacon’s wisdom.  But we miss in them something of human kindliness.  Bacon’s wisdom is cool, calm, and calculating, and we long sometimes for a little warmth, a little passion, and not so much “use.”