It is not improbable that we owe to him and to his optical studies--in some humble degree--the eye-glasses that make reading possible to old eyes: and his books, first of any books from English sources, described how sulphur and charcoal and saltpetre properly combined will make thunder and lightning (_sic facies tonitrum et coruscationem_). We call the mixture gunpowder. In his _Opus Majus_ (he wrote only in Latin, and vastly more than has appeared in printed form) scholars find some of the seeds of the riper knowledges which came into the _Novum Organum_ of another and later Bacon--with whom we must not confound this sharp, eager, determined, inquiring Franciscan friar. He is worthy to be kept in mind as the Englishman who above all others living in that turbid thirteenth century, saw through the husks of things to their very core. He died at the close of the century--probably in the year 1294; and I have gone back to that far-away time--somewhat out of our forward track--and have given you a glimpse of this Franciscan innovator and wrestler with authorities, in order that I might mate him with two other radical thinkers whose period of activity belonged to the latter half of the succeeding century: I mean Langlande and Wyclif. And before we go on to speak of these two, we will set up a few way-marks, so that we may not lose our historic bearings in the drift of the intervening years. Bacon died, as we have said, in 1294. William Wallace fought his great battle of Cambuskenneth in 1297. Those who have read that old favorite of school-boys, Miss Porter’s “Scottish Chiefs,” will not need to have their memories refreshed about William Wallace. Indeed, that hero will be apt to loom too giant-like in their thought, and with a halo about him which I suspect sober history would hardly justify. Wallace was executed at Smithfield (Miss Porter says he died of grief before the axe fell) in 1305; and that stout, flax-haired King Edward I., who had humbled Scotland at Falkirk--who was personally a match for the doughtiest of his knights--who was pious (as the times went), and had set up beautiful memorial crosses to his good Queen Eleanor--who had revived King Arthur’s Round Table at Kenilworth, died only two years after he had cruelly planted the head of Wallace on London Bridge. Then came the weak Edward II., and the victories of Bruce of Bannockburn, and that weary Piers Gaveston story, and the shocking death of the King in Berkeley Castle. The visitor to Berkeley (it is in Gloucestershire, and only two miles away from station on the Midland Railway) can still see the room where the murder was done: and this Castle of Berkeley--strangely enough--has been kept in repair, and inhabited continuously from the twelfth century until now; its moat, its keep, and its warders walks are all intact.