[1] Bain was a fluent linguist who could use over twenty languages.

[4] His contributions were biographies and varied from Andrew Aagensen to Aleksander Wielopolski.

He translated from Finnish, Danish and Russian and also tackled Turkish authors via Hungarian.

He was the most prolific translator into English from Hungarian in the nineteenth century.

He married late and died young after publishing a wide range of literature from or about Europe.