In a word, the "Greater Work," to borrow the phrase of Dr.Whewell, is "at once the Encyclopedia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century." The whole of the after-works of Roger Bacon--and treatise after treatise has of late been disentombed from our libraries--are but developements in detail of the magnificent conception he laid before Clement.

Such a work was its own great reward.
From the world around Roger Bacon could look for and found small recognition.

No word of acknowledgement seems to have reached its author from the Pope.

If we may credit a more recent story, his writings only gained him a prison from his order.

"Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old man died as he had lived, and it has been reserved for later ages to roll away the obscurity that had gathered round his memory, and to place first in the great roll of modern science the name of Roger Bacon.
[Sidenote: Scholasticism] The failure of Bacon shows the overpowering strength of the drift towards the practical studies, and above all towards theology in its scholastic guise.