The predilection for composing in the Roman language long continued among the most illustrious writers both at home and abroad. A judicious critic in the reign of James I., Edmund Bolton, in his "Nero Cæsar," recommends that the history of England should be composed in Latin by the classical pen of the learned Sir Henry Saville, the editor of "Chrysostom." It is indeed a curious circumstance that when an English play was performed at the University of Cambridge before Queen Elizabeth, the Vice-Chancellor was called on to remonstrate with the ministers of Elizabeth against such a derogation of the learning and the dignity of the University. This very Vice-Chancellor, who had to protest against all English comedies, had, however, himself been the writer of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," which was long considered to be the first attempt at English comedy.[6] This conduct of the University offered no encouragement to men of learning and genius to compose in their vernacular idiom. The genius of VERULAM, whose prescient views often anticipated the institutions and the discoveries of succeeding times, appears never to have contemplated the future miracles of his maternal tongue. Lord BACON did not foresee that the English language would one day be capable of embalming all that philosophy can discover or poetry can invent; that his country, at length, would possess a national literature, and exult in models of its own. So little did Lord Bacon esteem the language of his country, that his favourite works are composed in Latin; and what he had written in English he was anxious to have preserved, as he expresses himself, in "that universal language which may last as long as books last." It might have surprised Lord Bacon to have been told that the learned in Europe would one day study English authors to learn to think and write, and prefer his own "Essays," in their living pith, to the colder transfusions of the Latin versions of his friends. The taste of the philosophical Chancellor was probably inferior to his invention. Our illustrious CAMDEN partook largely of this reigning fatuity when he wrote the reign of Elizabeth--the history of his contemporaries, and the "Britannia"--the history of our country, in the Latin language; as did BUCHANAN that of Scotland, and DE THOU his great history, which includes that of the Reformation in France. All these works, addressed to the deepest sympathies of the people, were not imparted to them.