Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/13

2 ‘Notwithstanding this example,’ said Buffon,—who, as well as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the Jansenist Gazetteer,—‘notwithstanding this example, I think I may promise my course will be different. I shall not answer a single word.’

And to any one who has noticed the baneful effects of controversy, with all its train of personal rivalries and hatreds, on men of letters or men of science; to any one who has observed how it tends to impair, not only their dignity and repose, but their productive force, their genuine activity; how it always checks the free play of the spirit, and often ends by stopping it altogether; it can hardly seem doubtful, that the rule thus imposed on himself by Buffon was a wise one. His own career, indeed, admirably shows the wisdom of it. That career was as glorious as it was serene; but it owed to its serenity no small part of its glory. The regularity and completeness with which he gradually built up the great work which he had designed, the air of equable majesty which he shed over it, struck powerfully the imagination of his contemporaries, and surrounded Buffon’s fame with a peculiar respect and dignity. ‘He is,’ said Frederick the Great of him, ‘the man who has best deserved the great celebrity which he has acquired.’ And this regularity of production, this equableness of temper, he maintained by his resolute disdain of personal controversy.

Buffon’s example seems to me worthy of all