From The Examiner. Some Works of Roger Bacon hitherto Unedited.-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, and Reader at the Rolls. (Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, published by the Authority of her Majesty's Treasury, under the Direction of the Master of the Rolls). Longman and Co. THE "Old Hodge Bacon" of Hudibras, and the hero of "the honorable History of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay," is the person who acquired his skill by promising himself to the devil when he died, whether he died in the church or out of it, and who at last cheated the devil cleverly by dying in a hole in the church wall. Four centuries before the day of small philosophy, when such stories were credited, an anxious simple-minded man in the gray habit of the lowliest of the religious orders, one who had spent a handsome patrimony for the love of knowledge, and who waited on the outcast leper for the love of God, walked barefoot in the streets of Oxford. His home was in no stately monastery, but in the poor house in the suburbs, in the parish of St. Ebbe's, which had been given to the Franciscans by a citizen. In the wretched chamber that was the appointed dwelling of a Minorite, while still the doctrine of St. Francis was in force among his followers, Roger Bacon made lament sometimes for want of ink, and sometimes was by the superior of his order confined as a prisoner on bread and water, because he had plunged rebelliously into the luxury of books, or made his knowledge known too freely to others. Beyond these punishments for breach of discipline it does not appear that Friar Roger Bacon suffered, as many accounts of him would have us believe, chains and persecution from the church. Neither did he occupy any such middle place between the church and the world as might be represented by the hole in the church wall, wherein tradition tells us that he died. Within the church he lived and died, and all the labor of his life, in science and philosophy, as in the daily ministering to the sorrows of the poor, was worship. der the direction of the Master of the Rolls. In the valuable introduction to that volume, in its opening treatise of Eccleston de Adventu Minorum in Angliam, and especially in the remarkable letters of Adam de Marisco, a contemporary of Bacon, and like him an Oxford Minorite, there is much to be found that is essential to any lively understanding of the place occupied in his own time by one who was the earliest of our great English philosophers. He was a thinker who has been excelled by very few in grasp of intellect, by none in honesty of character. Roger Bacon was born when King John of England had done homage to Pandolf, and he was in his cradle in Somersetshire when the barons obtained from the king his signature to Magna Charta. He was the child of a rich family that in the succeeding reign sided with Henry the Third against the combination of the barons. The triumph of the barons, as we learn from the Opus Tertium now published, had sent Bacon's mother, his brothers, and his whole family into exile. Repeatedly subject as they were to capture, all their wealth was eaten up in ransoms. Roger, from childhood studious, avoided the strife of the day. He was sent to the University of Oxford, and according to the custom of the better class of scholars, passed on to the University of Paris, then in chief repute. The death of his father may have placed his fortune in his hands. He prosecuted in France without stint costly studies and experiments, did not shrink from the great expense of books, transcribers, and instructors, and he mastered thoroughly not Latin merely, but also Hebrew and Greek, which not more than five men in England then understood grammatically, though there were more who could loosely read or speak those tongues. When he returned to Oxford, having obtained a doctorate in Paris, to be confirmed to him by his own university, he withdrew entirely from the shock of civil strife by joining the house of the Oxford Minorites, having spent all his time in the world and two thousand pounds of money on the search for knowledge. But of all that he acquired and digested in his healthy brain, he had committed to writing nothing or almost nothing, and his order prided itself in the checks put by it upon the vanity of learning. A ditch and a fence, poor cottages of mud There could be no better introduction to and wood, with some few cells for the friars the study of the works of Roger Bacon, now to pray in and labor in for the eschewing first printed after laborious investigation, of idleness, had been St. Francis' ideal of a and collected by Professor Brewer, than the religious house. In London the Minorites volume of Monumenta Franciscana, issued chose for their home “Stinking Lane,” near already under the same editorship in the the Newgate shambles; at Shrewsbury the same issue of Chronicles and Memorials, un-liberality of the townsmen having raised for the Franciscan's dormitory walls of stone, the minister of the order caused them to be taken away and rebuilt with mud alone. Saint Francis declared doing to be more than talking or writing. To a friar who asked whether he might not keep a psalter, he said, When you have got a psalter then you'll want a breviary, and when you have got a breviary you will sit in your chair as great as a lord, and you will say to your brother, "Friar, fetch me my breviary." A man, said the honest saint, has no more knowledge than he works, and he is a wise man only in the degrees in which he loves God and his neighbor. Roger Bacon was already ten years old when the Franciscan friars first came into England, and he was a Franciscan when the order was still true to the principles on which it had been founded. It does not appear, therefore, that his studies were impeded by peculiar discouragement or persecution. The strict discipline of his order weighed upon him. It has yet to be shown that he was regarded as a heretic, or that, as an old translator of one of his books in the days of the restored Long Parliament expressed it, "'twas the pope's smoke which made the eyes of that age so sore as they could not discern any open-hearted and clear-headed soul from an heretical phantasm." the time of Alcuin, as the handmaid of theology. In Alcuin's extant manuals,-following the old division of studies into "Trivium" (Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic) and "Quadrivium" (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy ;)-we find that even Arithmetic is theological. The definition of a perfect number, as six, illustrated the perfectness of Creation in six days. On the contrary, wrote Alcuin, if we divide the number 8 we find the sum of its parts less than the whole. On this account, when the human race was renewed after the flood, it originated from the number 8, for we read that 8 persons were in Noah's ark, thus indicating that the second race is less perfect than the first, which had been created in the number 6. So theological was science. Roger Bacon saw benefit to the church in the communication of his knowledge, and the pope required that, disregarding any rule of his order to the contrary, he would write for him what was in his mind. What was in his mind! Within his mind was, according to the just phrase of Dr. Whewell, at the same time the Encyclopædia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century. By the rule of his order strictly enforced, he was a sealed fountain, till the desire of the pope set the stream flowing. In a thick coming eager torrent Out of the pope's smoke came, in fact, it poured forth, dashing wildly against the Roger Bacon's light. A report made to him great rocks set in its path. The first rock before his elevation to the papacy had ex- was poverty. As a Franciscan he was withcited in Clement IV. curiosity to learn what out worldly goods. The pope sent him no was in the mind of the Doctor Mirabilis, and money, and the welcome command celebrated from what poor Bacon called his chair on with so many eloquent words of extreme, the top of the world he sent to the lowly heartfelt gratitude, came to the poor friar friar for the knowledge that he had to give. when he was in France. The Franciscans, The pent up store was all held for the it may here be remembered, travelled often good of the church. In spite of their self- for their order, and went far as missionaries, denials the Franciscans at Oxford and else- strict to keep Lent even in bleak Crim Tarwhere included many learned men, who by tary on salt, millet, and melted snow. To the daily habit of their minds were impelled commit to parchment all that he had been to give to scholarship a wholesome practical pining to say would cost in materials, trandirection. They were already beginning to scribers, necessary references, and experisupply the men who raised the character of ments, a sum of sixty pounds. Bacon hurteaching at the University of Oxford, till it ried a call for money to his exiled mother rivalled that of Paris. Friar Bacon was and brothers, but they had spent all in payamong the earliest of these teachers, so was ing their own ransoms. None, of course, Friar Bungay, who lives with him in pop- would lend money on the personal security ular tradition. In those days the strength of a man vowed to possess nothing in this of the pure clergy was gone out of the world. It was furnished at last by poor church; rank and power came by use of the friends, some of whom pawned goods to raise law, and the clergy were embroiled in ques- the necessary means, upon the understandtions of canonists and jurists, pouring out ing that their loans would be made known uncertain words directed by a logic parted to his holiness, who would, no doubt, enable from the nature out of which it sprang. Ba- the poor friar to repay the gold necessary to con believed that the use of all his knowl-be borrowed for his service. The next obedge, if he could but make free use of it, would be to show how strength and peace were to be given to the church. Knowledge was then regarded strictly, as it had been in stacle to be overcome was the continued hinderance of his order, for the pope's command was but a release to Bacon's conscience. It was confidential, and was not made known to those who had immediate rule over his known by others, and the strong Redan of time. Nevertheless, the torrent was set ignorance has fallen. loose, and the most astonishing fact demon- But because much ignorance arises and is strated by the volume now before us is, that perpetuated through uncertain use of words, in less than a year and a half, in about fif- the right study of grammar, and the art of teen months, the Opus Majus had been writ- exact expression must be taken as the portal ten for Pope Clement, the Opus Minus had to sound knowledge. In his day, says Bacon, been sent after it to recapitulate its argu-" ego currit" passed as grammar, and "conment and strengthen some of its parts, the traries may be like" as logic, among youths Opus Tertium had followed upon that, as who were "sine ulla arte artium magistri." Summary and Introduction to the whole, Great stress is laid upon the study of lanenriched with further novelty, and prefaced guages and the getting rid of untrue transwith those touching details to which we have lations, especially those of the Bible and just referred. The details appear in explan- of Aristotle. He would have learned men ation of the strict account of requisite dis-study to read the Bible accurately in the bursements which had been sent to the pope original tongues. Of Aristotle, he declared with the last treatise, because to raise the that it would be a blessing if he never yet means of making them the friar had pawned had been translated, so great was the conto poor men the credit of the Holy See. fusion of good knowledge caused by the inThe Opas Majus, edited by Doctor Samuel competence of those who turned him into Jebb in 1733, is a large closely printed folio. Latin. Next to grammar and languages, The Opus Tertium, serving for argument Bacon placed mathematics, which in his day and introduction to the whole, as now first included all physical science, adding a parprinted in the volume before us, occupies ticular consideration of optics and ending more than three hundred pages. The mere fragment which alone has been discovered of the Opus Minus fills in the same volume eighty pages more. Yet Bacon performed the duties of his order, read and experimented, framed intricate tables, and had to superintend the work of his transcribers. His eagerness must have been sleepless; but there is no record of any acknowledgment that it received. with the study of nature by experiment, which, he says, is at the root of all other science and a basis of religion. In this order he traced the course of knowledge in his Opus Majus and the works connected with it. In the same order he afterwards prepared upon a grander scale his summary of knowledge, not in a brief conspectus, but in a series of ample treatises, whereof a grammar and some other parts are extant in MSS., soon, we hope, to appear in print under the sound editorship of Professor Brewer. Roger Bacon, then fifty-three years old, saw to the heart of the knowledge of his time, and it had life for him. He rejected nearly all its vanities and follies, and per- Some of the discoveries attributed to ceived the harmony among its truths. The Roger Bacon are ascribed to him, perhaps, body of doctrine that he urged in the Opus through ignorance of the substance of knowlMajus, reiterated in the Opus Minus, and edge in the middle ages. He is far from atsummed up for his holiness in the Opus Ter- tributing to himself any discovery of optic tium, sets out with the principle that there lenses, but records the belief that Julius are four grounds of human ignorance: trust Cæsar set up great glasses on the coast of in inadequate authority, the force of custom, Gaul to observe the people and cities on the the opinion of the inexperienced crowd, and shores of Britain when he designed his invathe hiding of one's own ignorance with the sion. He knew how to imitate thunder and parading of a superficial wisdom. No part lightning with gunpowder, but had doubtless of that ground has yet been cut away from that knowledge from his oriental studies, beneath the feet of students, although six and did not suggest any use for the explocenturies ago the Oxford friar clearly pointed sive force. In the mechanical chapter of out its character. We still make sheep that remarkable letter "On the Secrets of walks of second, third, and fourth and fiftieth Art and Nature, and the Nullity of Magic," hand references to authority; still we are which Mr. Brewer very properly has included the slaves of habit; still we are found fol- in an appendix, we read, "It is possible to lowing too frequently the untaught crowd; make a chariot move with an inestimable still we flinch from the righteous and whole-swiftness, and this motion to be without the some phrase, I do not know! and acquiesce help of any living creature." Yet we cannot actively in the opinion of others that we say that Roger Bacon was discoverer of locoknow what they appear to know. Substitute honest research, original and independent thought, strict truth in the comparison of only what we really know with what is really motive engines. The careful reader of his works does not, in fact, dwell upon isolated curiosities, but notes rather the philosophic tone of the whole argument, the clearness with which truth is apprehended, the nicety of mathematical calculation, the evidence of actual and careful astronomical research, and the wise tone in which those errors are discredited with which Roger Bacon's name has, by perversity, been for so many centuries associated. He explicitly condemns the doctrine of astrology dominant in his day, which attributed events to the working of the constellations, and foretold them occordingly, allowing "nothing to freewill, nothing to accident or fortune, nothing to prudence." He was so far from accepting magical doctrines that he censures even the priests who attributed magical power to the holy water sprinkled on hot irons for the ordeal, or to prayers over running streams at the immersion of witches. But he cautiously allows some force, as men do still, to the opinion that faith in charms, by acting cheerfully upon the mind, may cause them to effect some cures. That Roger Bacon was the true originator of the reform of the Julian calandar there is good reason to believe. Mr. Brewer's volume is the first of two or three which will in fact contain the more important and the larger part of Roger Bacon's works, for the unpublished MSS. outweigh in extent and even in value all that has hitherto appeared in print. The list of what has formerly been printed is exhausted soon. In 1542 Claudius Caelestinus edited at Paris, and in 1617 Doctor Dee printed at Hamburg the Letter, De Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturæ, which was translated by an Englishman in 1659. At Nuremberg there was printed in 1614 the Speculum Alchemiæ. At Oxford there was printed in 1590 the treatise, which was translated in 1683 by Doctor Richard Browne, as "The Cure of Old Age." Its doctrine is that man being by nature Potens non mori, if everybody, from the breast upward, followed a complete regimen of health, he might reach the utmost limit "that the nature he had from his parents would permit, beyond which there is no further progress." That doctrine we receive from the physicians of the present day. To this brief list we have only to add Doctor Jebb's edition of the Opus Majus; even that is, however, wanting the book upon Natural Science, which it is left to Professor Brewer to supply. "It is easier," said Leland, "to collect the leaves of the Sibyl than the titles of the works written by Roger Bacon." Nevertheless to the acute and practised eye of Professor Brewer, which identified the disjointed, ill-copied fragment of the Opus Minus, given here, and found a MS. of the Opus Tertium in Lambeth Library, under the modern title of De Laude Sacræ Scripturæ, we look for the collection of no inconsiderable number of the works themselves. BUMPTIOUS AND GUMPTION.-Sir E. L. B. Lytton, in My Novel, gives an amusing disquisition on the words gumption and bumptious :— "She was always-not exactly proud likebut what I call gumptious.' "I never heard that word before,' said the parson. Bumptious, indeed, though I believe it is not in the dictionary, has crept into familiar parlance, especially amongst young folks at school and college.' "Bumptious is bumptious, and gumptious is gumptious,' said the landlord. Now, the town Beadle is bumptious, and Mrs. Avenel is gump tious.' Dale. She is a very respectable woman,' said Mr. "In course, sir; all gumptious folks are they value themselves on their respectability, and look down on their neighbors.' "Parson. "Gumptious-gumption. I think I remember the substantive at school; not that my master taught it to me. Gumption, it means cleverness.' sir?"" "Landlord. "There's gumption and gumptious! Gumption is knowing; but when I say that sum un is gumptious, I mean- though that's more vulgar like-sum un who does not think small beer of hisself. You take me, W. C. When the question about gumption was first started, it at once struck me that it was connected with gawm, and gawmless; at the same time the word bumptious suggested itself as being a corruption of presumptuous, to which it in the main corresponds. J. EASTWOOD. of observation. It is still in use in the south of Gumption, heedfulness, carefulness, acuteness Scotland; from A-S. gyman, geman; from which, to gome, still in use in south of Scotland (but to observe, take heed, zemen (Ancren Rime, pasnot found in Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary), sim). Bumptious, in common use in Lincolnshire, Dict. of Provincialisms it is, "apt to take uninpresumptuous, pertinacious. In Holloway's tended affronts; petulantly, and arrogantly."J. MN. Notes and Queries. From The Corn? Magarine. 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