" He sends Prince Charles the
_Advancement_ in its new Latin dress. "It is a book," he says, "that
will live, and be a citizen of the world, as English books are not." And
he fitted it for continental reading by carefully weeding it of all
passages that might give offence to the censors at Rome or Paris. "I
have been," he writes to the King, "mine own _Index Expurgatorius_, that
it may be read in all places. For since my end of putting it in Latin
was to have it read everywhere, it had been an absurd contradiction to
free it in the language and to pen it up in the matter." Even the
_Essays_ and the _History of Henry VII._ he had put into Latin "by some
good pens that do not forsake me." Among these translators are said to
have been George Herbert and Hobbes, and on more doubtful authority, Ben
Jonson and Selden. The _Essays_ were also translated into Latin and
Italian with Bacon's sanction.
Bacon's contemptuous and hopeless estimate of "these modern languages,"
forty years after Spenser had proclaimed and justified his faith in his
own language, is only one of the proofs of the short-sightedness of the
wisest and the limitations of the largest-minded.
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