was cold and reserved towards those of whom he knew little; but
gentle, simple, equable, and familiar in the intercourse of friendship.
It is there that, throwing off the grave exterior which he wore in
public, he gave himself up to a peaceful and amiable gayety."

The resemblance between Bailly and Lacaille goes no farther. Bailly
informs us that the great astronomer proclaimed truth on all occasions,
without disquieting himself as to whom it might wound. He would not
consent to put vice at its ease, saying:

"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