The truth about him is that he was a brilliantly clever populariser of the cause of science, a kind of seventeenth century Huxley, concerned rather to lay down large general principles for the guidance of the work of others, than to be a serious worker himself.

The superstition of later times, acting on and refracting his amazing intellectual gifts, has raised him to a godlike eminence which is by right none of his; it has even credited him with the authorship of Shakespeare, and in its wilder moments with the composition of all that is of supreme worth in Elizabethan literature.
It is not necessary to take these delusions seriously.

The ignorance of mediaevalism was in the habit of crediting Vergil with the construction of the Roman aqueducts and temples whose ruins are scattered over Europe.

The modern Baconians reach much the same intellectual level.
A similar enthusiasm for knowledge and at any rate a pretence to science belong to the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Robert Burton.

His one book is surely the most amazing in English prose.