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latter provision was no doubt intended to override the former, and must be regarded as the sole exception to the absolute ruling of the law that the child shall be educated in its parents' religion.

ART. II.-Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera quædam hactenus inedita. Vol. I. containing, I. Opus Tertium; II. Opus Minus; III. Compendium Philosophiæ. Edited by J. S. Brewer, M.A., Professor of English Literature, King's College. London: Longman, Green, Brown, and Roberts, 1859.

HE fame of Roger Bacon has been eclipsed by that of

eminently the Bacon of English literature and philosophy; the popular reputation of the great Franciscan is of a very equivocal character. To many he is almost entirely unknown. Those to whom his name is less unfamiliar have heard of him chiefly in connection with certain marvellous mediæval legends, of which he is the traditionary hero. Many regard him as little better than a necromancer or a charlatan. The" Wonderfull Historie of Fryer Bacon" is perhaps an exaggeration of the notions frequently entertained regarding him; but it may at least be taken as fairly representing their general character; and few of those who have been amused by the extravagant tales about the talking head of brass constructed by him, or about his transmuting elixir, and his wingless flights through the air, have ever formed an adequate idea of the wonders of learning, of science, and of profound inventive genius, which distinguish his Opus Majus and his Secreta Artis et Naturæ from every other literary production of the mediæval period.

We hasten, therefore, with very peculiar gratification, to express our acknowledgments to the Master of the Rolls, the distinguished projector of the series of "Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages," for the early place which he has assigned in the collection to the unpublished works of Roger Bacon. It is highly creditable as well to the energy and activity of

Sir John Romilly, as to the ability and zeal of the editors who have laboured under his direction, that the volumes issued within the short space of three years from the first mooting of the project, already number nearly a score. Of these,

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however, the great majority are purely historical. There are only three, indeed-the polemical volume, edited by Mr. Shirley, " Fasiculi Zizaniorum Johannis Wicliff cum Tritico," that of Bishop Pecock, edited by Mr. Babington, and Mr. Wright's Collection of Political Poems, from the reign of Edward III. downwards;-which are not chronicles in the strictest sense of the word; and even the two less purely historical volumes which we have excepted, however interesting, as illustrating the religious and political condition of the time, throw but little light on its literature or philosophy. Now most of the writings of Roger Bacon have this peculiar interest, that they not only exhibit the powers of his own mind, and the extent of his own personal attainments, but they are in some sense a picture of the learning and literature of the entire age to which he belonged. Each of the many specific treatises which he left behind may be regarded as a complete resume of all that was then known of the subject which it treats; and the Opus Majus has long been known to the small class of scholars who have interested themselves in these studies, as a systematic encyclopædia of mediæval letters, philosophy, and natural science. The same may be said, and in some respects even more truly, of the principal work contained in the volume before us, the so-called Opus Tertium, published for the first time in the present collection.

The majority of the modern writers who discuss the character of the philosophy of Roger Bacon, regard him as the great antagonist of the scholastic philosophy of his age, and describe his system as the solitary struggle of the higher forms of the human intellect against the trammels to which it was subjected by the empty formalism under which the unsubstantial pretensions of the schools were disguised. There are others, on the contrary, who prefer to judge the character of the age by the philosophy of this, its most eminent representative; and who thus hold up his learning and his success as an evidence of much higher enlightenment than has been commonly ascribed to the period, and as a refutation of the charge of ignorance and obscurantism which is popularly made against it. The

VOL. XLVIII.-No. XCVI.

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history of Roger Bacon, therefore, has an interest quite distinct from that which attaches to his own person. It is difficult, if not impossible, to consider him apart from the time in which he flourished; and his works are no less important for their relations to the literary condition and character of his contemporaries, than as illustrating the extent and the nature of his own also.

It must be confessed, nevertheless, that Roger Bacon's career has but few of the characteristics of a polemic. His writings hardly ever allude, even incidentally, to the doctrinal controversies which were agitated during his age. Even those philosophical heresies, the discussion of which might be expected to have possessed for him some peculiar attraction, pass without notice in his pages. We learn nothing from him of the Pantheistic sects of his day; whether of the Idealistic Pantheists, of whom Amaury de Bêne may be taken as the type, or of the grosser materialists, who, like David de Dinant, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, had made their philosophical speculations the vehicle or the mask of the most unbridled moral corruption. For Roger Bacon these controversies seem a dead letter; and it is almost equally so for the purely scholastic discussions of his age. Of the great controversy of the schools in his day-that upon Nominalism and Realism-his writings, with one exception, present scarcely a single trace. Indeed, it may be said that from the spirit of his philosophy, that and all similar discussions are utterly alien, and that the principles upon which these discussions turn have not even a standing place in his system. If he was a schoolman at all, it certainly was in a sense widely different; and his writings, far from disclosing any evidence of the cultivation of scholasticism, scarcely even show a trace of close personal intercourse with the celebrities of the contemporary philosophical or theological schools. His age, it need hardly be said, is pre-eminently the golden age of scholasticism. It was no longer confined to any single Church or nation. The greatest names of every one of the European_nations belong to the century in which Roger Bacon lived. In Italy, the age of St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure almost exactly coincides with that of Bacon. In Germany, Albert the Great was born almost in the very same year. In his own country, Alexander of Hales and Bradwardine preceded him by but a few years. The great Irish schoolman, John.

Duns Scotus, reached his highest eminence about the close of Bacon's career. William of Ockham, Scotus's most distinguished scholar, may be said to belong to the same period. And although France has no very notable native scholar exactly contemporary, (for William of Auvergne is of a lower rank,) yet the University of Paris, as the great centre of literary activity, may claim its share of the fame of each and all of those whom we have named.

Now, although Bacon often alludes to the works of Alexander of Hales, and speaks of other contemporary schoolmen, we do not find that he maintained with any of them those familiar relations which might be presumed to subsist between kindred minds, at a time when the circle of letters was so limited, and when the means of intercommunion were so entirely confined to the private and personal interchange of projects and opinions.

Some explanation of this remarkable fact may be found. in the circumstances of the time, which was peculiarly unfavourable in England to the cultivation of any form of learning. The best part of Bacon's life corresponds with the angry and protracted contest between Henry and his barons, by which the whole social system in England was disorganized. The disputes on ecclesiastical affairs, which marked the commencement of the reign of Henry, exercised a most prejudicial influence on the progress of learning, by disturbing the peace of the various ecclesiastical bodies, and introducing angry division and party-spirit into the schools and universities. The civil and political contests which succeeded, the proceedings of the "Mad Parliament, and of the" Committee of Fifteen "-carried division into almost every family and every household; and the entire struggle was marked by one characteristic, especially unfavourable to the intercourse which had commonly subsisted between all the great schools of learning in the various countries-the distrust and jealousy of foreigners and foreign associations, which the foreign partialities of King Henry had created among the Barons of England and their numerous partisans, both in the commons and in the clergy.

Roger Bacon was born at Ilchester, in Somersetshire, in the year 1214, of an ancient and wealthy family. Mr. Brewer refers in one of his editorial notes to a statement

串 p. lxxxv.

made by Tanner, on the authority of a MS. by Brother Twine, (now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.) to the effect that Bacon's original name was David Dee de Radik; and that it was not till his admission into the Franciscan Order that he assumed the name of Brother Roger Bacon. This strange allegation scarcely needs to be refuted. If we except the single MS. to which Mr. Brewer refers, it is entirely unsupported, while all the ancient authorities concur in assigning Bacon as the true family name. There is good reason indeed for doubting whether at this time the practice of changing the name at entrance into religious life existed in the Franciscan Order; and at all events the change, where it did prevail, only affected the christian, and not the family, or surname, of the individual.

Bacon's family took the king's side in the civil contests of the period, and appear to have suffered severely by their fidelity to the cause of royalty. In his explanation to Pope Clement IV. of the difficulties which he had had to encounter in the preparation of the works in which he had engaged, by the Pope's desire, he states that for the purpose of procuring the necessary funds, he had despatched a messenger to his rich brother, in his own country; but that this brother, together with his mother and the other members of the family, had been banished for their adhesion to the royal cause; that they had more than once been compelled to pay a ransom in order to redeem themselves from captivity; and that he had failed to obtain any answer to his application. It is worthy of note, nevertheless, that Roger Bacon himself, whatever may have been the politics of his family, was not at least a blind and indiscriminating adherent of Henry III. In a sermon which he preached at Oxford, before Henry and his court, he criticised in no measured terms† the obnoxious partialities of the king, denouncing vigorously the employment of French and Gascon nobles and prelates in the great civil and ecclesiastical offices, the king's prodigality towards the foreigners employed in these and other posts, and especially the impolicy of entrusting to them the charge of the great fortresses and strongholds of the kingdom. It is not impossi

Opus Tertium, p. 16.

See Milman's Latin Christianity, vi. p. 472.

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