Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/12



, the great French naturalist, imposed on himself the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks made upon him. ‘Je n’ai jamais répondu à aucune critique,’ he said to one of his friends who, on the occasion of a certain criticism, was eager to take up arms in his behalf; ‘je n’ai jamais répondu à aucune critique, et je garderai le même silence sur celle-ci.’ On another occasion, when accused of plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to answer, ‘Il vaut mieux,’ he said, ‘laisser ces mauvaises gens dans l’incertitude.’ Even when reply to an attack was made successfully, he disapproved of it, he regretted that those he esteemed should make it. Montesquieu, more sensitive to criticism than Buffon, had answered, and successfully answered, an attack made upon his great work, the Esprit des Lois, by the Gazetier Janséniste. This Jansenist Gazetteer was a periodical of those times,—a periodical such as other times, also, have occasionally seen,—very pretentious, very aggressive, and, when the point to be seized was at all a delicate one, very apt to miss it.