It is hardly necessary to add that in this he shines all the more brightly when compared with his great detractor. Roger Bacon, secure in the consciousness of his commanding abilities, attacks with a rare self-confidence, not Michael Scot alone, but all the scholars of his time. Not four of them, he says, know Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic.[192] Those who pretend to translate from these tongues are ignorant even of Latin, not to speak of the sciences treated of in the books which they pretend to render intelligible. Busy in penning these diatribes, Bacon does not seem to have reflected that the best way of reproving the imperfections of which he complained would have been to shame these scholars to some purpose by producing better versions on his own account. But the truth of the matter lies here, that Bacon was no linguist. This appears plainly from the tale he tells against himself in the _Compendium Studii_; how a hard word in Aristotle had baffled him till one day there came some outlandish students to hear him lecture, who laughed at his perplexity, telling him it was good Spanish for the plant called Henbane.[193] ‘Hinc illae lachrymae’ then, and a plague on Michael Scot and all his tribe, who know Spanish so well they will not put a plain Latin word for the puzzled professor to understand. No wonder that to Scot rather than to Bacon, for all his genius, that age owed the chief part of the first translation of Aristotle and a good beginning of the second. CHAPTER VII SCOT AGAIN AT COURT The return of Michael Scot from Spain to the Imperial Court was doubtless a striking moment, not only in the life of the philosopher himself, but in the history of letters. He then appeared fresh from a great enterprise, and bringing with him the proofs of its success in the form of the Latin Averroës. We cannot doubt that his reception was worthy of the occasion and of one who had served his master so faithfully. Frederick was now returned to his dominions in the south. He had established his imperial rights in Germany at the cost of a campaign in which the pretensions of Otho were successfully overcome, and, on his return homeward in 1220, he had received the crown once more in Rome at the hands of the supreme ecclesiastical authority. His progress was indeed a continual scene of triumph. Arrived at Palermo, the court gave itself up to feasting and gaiety of every kind.