r.'--Condorcet, _Vie de Voltaire_
(_OEuv._ iv. 33, 34).]

We have said that Turgot disdained to fight under a mask. There was one
exception, and only one. In 1754 there appeared two letters, nominally
from an ecclesiastic to a magistrate, and entitled _Le Conciliateur_.
Here it is enough to say that they were intended to enforce the
propriety and duty of religious toleration. In a letter to a friend we
find Turgot saying, 'Although the _Conciliator_ is of my principles, and
those of our friend, I am astonished at your conjectures; _it is neither
his style nor mine_.'[18] Yet Turgot had written it. This is his one
public literary equivocation. Let us, at all events, allow that it was
resorted to, not to break the law with safety, nor to cloak a malicious
attack on a person, but to give additional weight by means of a harmless
prosopopoeia, to an argument for the noblest of principles.[19]

[Footnote 18: _OEuv._ ii. 685. Morellet says that it was written by
Lomenie de Brienne, 19.]

[Footnote 19: See the note of Dupont de Nemours, _ad loc._]

* * * * *

Before Turgot entered the great world, he had already achieved an amount
of success in philosophic speculation, which placed him in the front
rank of social thinkers. To that passion for study and the acquisition
of knowledge which is not uncommon in youth, as it is one of the most
attractive of youth's qualities, there was added in him what is
unhappily not common in men and women of any age--an active impulse to
use his own intelligence upon the information which he gained from books
and professors. He was no conceited or froward caviller at authority,
nor born rebel against established teachers and governors. His
understanding seriously craved a full and independent satisfaction, and
could draw this only from laborious meditation, which should either
disclose the inadequacy of the grounds for an opinion, or else establish
it, with what would be to him a new and higher because an independently
acquired, conclusiveness.

His letter to Buffon, to which we have already referred, is an
illustration of this wise, and never captious nor ungracious, caution in
receiving ideas. Neither Buffon's reputation, nor the glow of his style,
nor the dazzling ingenuity and grandeur of his conceptions--all of them
so well calculated, at one-and-twenty, to throw even a vigilant
intelligence off its guard--could divert Turgot from the prime
scientific duty of co