age was against scientific or philosophical studies. The older enthusiasm
for knowledge was dying down; the study of law was the one source of
promotion, whether in Church or state; philosophy was discredited,
literature in its purer forms became almost extinct. After forty years of
incessant study, Bacon found himself in his own words "unheard, forgotten,
buried." He seems at one time to have been wealthy, but his wealth was
gone. "During the twenty years that I have specially laboured in the
attainment of wisdom, abandoning the path of common men, I have spent on
these pursuits more than two thousand pounds, not to mention the cost of
books, experiments, instruments, tables, the acquisition of languages, and
the like. Add to all this the sacrifices I have made to procure the
friendship of the wise and to obtain well-instructed assistants." Ruined
and baffled in his hopes, Bacon listened to the counsels of his friend
Grosseteste and renounced the world. He became a friar of the order of St.
Francis, an order where books and study were looked upon as hindrances to
the work which it had specially undertaken, that of preaching among the
masses of the poor. He had written little. So far was he from attempting to
write that his new superiors prohibited him from publishing anything under
pain of forfeiture of the book and penance of bread and water. But we can
see the craving of his mind, the passionate instinct of creation which
marks the man of genius, in the joy with which he seized a strange
opportunity that suddenly opened before him. "Some few chapters on
different subjects, written at the entreaty of friends," seem to have got
abroad, and were brought by one of the Pope's chaplains under the notice of
Clement the Fourth. The Pope at once invited Bacon to write. But
difficulties stood in his way. Materials, transcription, and other expenses
for such a work as he projected would cost at least, £60, and the Pope sent
not a penny. Bacon begged help from his family, but they were ruined like
himself. No one would lend to a mendicant friar, and when his friends
raised the money he needed it was by pawning their goods in the hope of