“If good men thus showed their indignation, bad men being known, and vice unmasked, could no longer do harm, and virtue would be more respected.”  This Spartan morality could not accord with Bailly’s character; he admired but did not adopt it.

Tacitus took as a motto:  “To say nothing false, to omit nothing true.”  Our colleague contented himself in society with the first half of the precept.  Never did mockery, bitterness, or severity issue from his lips.  His manners were a medium between those of Lacaille and the manners of another academician who had succeeded in not making a single enemy, by adopting the two axioms:  “Every thing is possible, and everybody is in the right.”

Crebillon obtained permission from the French Academy to make his reception discourse in verse.  At the moment when that poet, then almost sixty years of age, said, speaking of himself,

     “No gall has ever poisoned my pen,”

the hall reechoed with approbation.

I was going to apply this line by the author of Rhadamistus to our colleague, when accident offered to my sight a passage in which Lalande reproaches Bailly for having swerved from his usual character, in 1773, in a discussion that they had together on a point in the theory of Jupiter’s Satellites.  I set about the search for this discussion; I found the article by Bailly in a journal of that epoch, and I affirm that this dispute does not contain a word but what is in harmony with all our colleague’s published writings.  I return therefore to my former idea, and say of Bailly, with perfect confidence,

     “No gall had ever poisoned his pen.”

Diffidence is usually the trait that the biographers of studious men endeavour most to put in high relief.  I dare assert, that in the common acceptation, this is pure flattery.  To merit the epithet of diffident, must we think ourselves beneath the competitors of whom we are at least the equals?  Must we, in examining ourselves, fail in the tact, in the intelligence, in the judgment, that nature has awarded us, and of which we make so good a use in appreciating the works of others?  Oh! then, few learned men can be said to be diffident.  Look at Newton:  his diffidence is almost as celebrated as his genius.  Well, I will extract from two of his letters, scarcely known, two paragraphs which, put side by side, will excite some surprise; the first confirms the general opinion; the second seems with equal force to contradict it.  Here are the two passages: 

“We are diffident in the presence of Nature.”

“We may nobly feel our own strength in the face of man’s works.”

In my opinion, the opposition in these two passages is only apparent; it will he explained by means of a distinction which I have already slightly indicated.

Bailly’s diffidence required the same distinction.  When people praised him to his face on the diversity of his knowledge, our colleague did not immediately repel the compliment; but soon after, he would stop his panegyrist, and whisper in his ear with an air of mystery:  “I will confide a secret to you, pray do not take advantage of it:  I am only a very little less ignorant than another man.”