according to the rule imposed upon him; and his strictures were severe enough to draw an angry remark from Albertus as to critics who were too idle to publish works of their own, and only read those of others to find fault with them. A mere list of the works read and quoted by Bacon, apparently at first hand, fills several pages of M. Charles's monumental essay. His reading was not humanistic in intention but utilitarian; he quotes from the poets, sometimes at secondhand from Sacrobosco, sometimes probably from a book of extracts; but he had read Cicero, Sallust, Pliny, Seneca, and the historians and geographers, classic and post-classic. It was an age of wide and eager reading; and, so far as we can see, Bacon was the deepest and widest-read man of his time.

When we endeavour to find out to what extent Bacon influenced his contemporaries and successors, we find very little direct evidence. Almost the only mention of him by a contemporary is that made by Pierre Dubois in his 'De Recuperatione Terre Sancte,' written about 1306, in which is recommended the study of Bacon' De Utilitatibus Mathematicarum.' But there is indirect evidence in abundance. The number and age of the manuscripts of his works testify to a constant care for his memory. If we except the tracts or parts of tracts dealing with magic and alchemy, we find a regular succession of copies made, showing a continued interest in him during the two centuries between his death and the Renaissance. The most important group of them, those collected by brother William Herebert for the Franciscan convent at Hereford, may even have been written for him in Paris during Bacon's life; and they certainly were designed to realise the last of Bacon's schemes, the Compendium Studii Theologiae.' The partly burnt Cottonian manuscript of the first four parts of the Opus Majus' was, not impossibly, written before his imprisonment. The Vatican copy of the same work was made within a few years of his death. The only copy we have of his scholastic lectures was made probably before his death. To the same period belong the earliest copy of his edition of the 'Secretum Secretorum,' and several manuscripts of his mathematical writings. The few 14th-century manuscripts are mainly of mathematical or philosophical

works; but in the early years of the 15th century the interest in Bacon revived, and many copies were made of those of his works that could be found.

Somewhere about 1410 a copy of the 'Opus Majus' seems to have fallen into the hands of Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, bishop of Cambrai. In August of that year the Cardinal wrote a description of the world, the 'Imago Mundi,' into which he conveyed, without acknowledgment, a passage from Bacon tending to prove that the sea voyage between Africa and the Indies could not be very long; and it is remarkable that this passage was quoted by Columbus in his letter of October 1498 to Ferdinand and Isabella from Haiti.*

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Later in the same year d'Ailly composed a tract, 'De Legibus et Sectis,' directed against abuses which might arise from Bacon's doctrine of astrology in the 4th part of the Opus Majus,' speaking of him as 'quidam doctor anglicus.' In 1411 the Cardinal wrote to the Pope on the correction of the calendar, substantially reproducing the reasons put forward by Bacon and quoting his dates for the solstice in 1267, but still without mention of his name. At last, in 1414, he mentions him by name, as 'Bacon, magnus doctor anglicus, in Epistola ad Clementem papa,' to blame him gently because nimis excessive mathematici potestatem extollit.' The reformation of the Calendar carried out by Gregory XIII can be looked on as the result of a long agitation inaugurated by Roger Bacon, carried on by Pierre d'Ailly and Nicolas of Cusa (1436) in the 15th century, and by a host of mathematicians following them till the final reform was made in 1582.

In another reform projected by Bacon, that of the text of the Vulgate, he approved himself again one of the greatest masters of biblical criticism. We need not here attempt to repeat the tribute paid him by Cardinal Gasquet, on whose shoulders is laid the task which Bacon advocated. The methods he suggested are the scientific methods employed to-day in the production of a critical text; and the principles he laid down

* Columbus was much influenced by d'Ailly's work as a whole, which, says Humboldt, 'exercised a greater influence on the discovery of America than did his correspondence with Toscanelli.'

were those which must always govern those concerned in Biblical revision. A fourth movement inaugurated by Bacon was the teaching of the four great languages -Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean, in the Universities of Europe, which was ordered by Clement V shortly after his death for reasons which seem borrowed from his works.

It does not lie within the scope of this article to estimate the position of Roger Bacon among the great men of his century or his country; the time has not yet come, when, with all the materials before us, we can revise the judgments by which the last two centuries have consecrated his fame. Excellent as are the Commemoration Essays just published, the work of M. Charles published more than half a century ago is still the most valuable account of his life and writings, though it much needs revision. More than one-half of Bacon's writings still await publication; and, until they are in the hands of scholars, the history of 13thcentury science and philosophy cannot be written. We in England have a special interest in this work. Roger Bacon was our first great English philosopher; he was typically English in his independent attitude and practical turn of mind; he influenced the teaching of Oxford, and, through Oxford and Scot and Ockham, the later philosophy and politics of medieval Europe; he established the tradition of free enquiry which has made English workers open out so many new paths in the world of thought and science. We have raised him a monument in the University where he once taught; it remains but to put that teaching on record for whoso will to read.

ROBERT STEELE.

By L.M. S. Amery

Art. 13.-THE HOME RULE CRISIS.

A UNIONIST Member of Parliament was reprimanded by the Speaker not long ago for saying that the country was drifting into Civil War because an old gentleman could not make up his mind. The remark may have been unparliamentary, but it was none the less illuminating. If we stand to-day on the brink of an appalling catastrophe it is due in no small measure to the fact that in a critical period the supreme power in the State has fallen into the hands of a man who combines unrivalled gifts of parliamentary leadership with a complete incapacity to face facts or to come to any decision upon them. Again and again in the last few months Mr Asquith has averted a breakdown in Parliament by the exercise of his amazing skill in debate. Of no one could it be more truly said than of him that he plays upon the House as upon an old fiddle. But not once since the beginning of this great constitutional crisis has he shown the slightest trace of any understanding of the forces at work outside, or made any visible effort to direct or control them. Devoid alike of imagination and of resolution, he has drifted on from debate to debate, from incident to incident, the slave of a Parliamentary situation which he has himself created, and of events in Ireland which have long since reduced that Parliamentary situation to a dangerous farce.

There is a Mr Asquith of current legend-austere, unflinching, logical and lucid. Whatever substratum of fact may once have existed for these epithets, they have little application to the real Mr Asquith of the present day. His famed lucidity, it is true, still survives, in a sense, and still receives from his opponents in debate the customary homage of a banal compliment. But it is a lucidity of phrase alone, and not of thought, a lucidity which explains but never enlightens. It would pass the wit of man to discover, in the whole series of Mr Asquith's speeches on this Home Rule issue, what is the real object of his measure, or what is his own idea of the future destiny of Ireland and of the United Kingdom. There are lucid phrases to please the Nationalists, lucid qualifications to assuage the doubts of faltering Liberals, lucid retorts to Unionist attacks.

But there is neither coherent vision nor illuminating glimpse, to tell us what it is all about, or why he is doing it. This vagueness and incoherence are not the artifice of one who deliberately conceals his purpose. They are, on the contrary, merely the outward expression of the lack of definite policy or purpose behind. It would be futile to attempt to strip off the outer integument of debating points in order to get at the real Mr Asquith underneath. There is no such person. The trouble with Mr Asquith is just that he never has been anything, either Nationalist, Federalist or Unionist, on this Home Rule question, and that he has never really wanted, and does not now want, to do anything with it. For twenty years he has held a season-ticket on the line of least resistance and has gone wherever the train of events has carried him, lucidly justifying his position at whatever point he has happened to find himself. Since 1910 he has been pinned down by Parliamentary exigencies to a particular measure. But he has never faced the consequences of his measure in action, and will not face them now. He cannot bring himself to abandon the policy of forcing Home Rule upon Ulster ; but neither can he bring himself to interfere with Ulster's preparations for resistance. And if Civil War should break out, as it well may, next month or the month after, he will still be found letting things take their course and justifying himself with dignity, conciseness and lucidity till some impatient man of action among his colleagues decides to lock him up.

There are several of Mr Asquith's colleagues who would long ago have made some real effort to settle the issue if they had been in his position. Mr Churchill, indeed, has more than once actually tried to bring about a real decision. The federal scheme first outlined at Dundee on September 12, 1912, and the "pogrom" of last March were each in their very different ways efforts to find a solution in the world of actualities and not of phrases. But Mr Churchill has little personal authority in his party, and no other colleague has attempted to interfere with the Prime Minister's control, or noncontrol, of the Home Rule situation. The only other person who could have exercised a really decisive influence in the shaping of policy to meet facts is Mr Redmond.