BUFFON— FULLER QUOTA TIONS. 1 1 1 



tive listeners, yet so encouraging to those who are 

 taking pains to understand their author that their 

 interest is revived at once. 



Thus, he has insisted, and means insisting much 

 further, on the many points of resemblance between 

 man and the lower animals, and it has now become 

 necessary to neutralize the effect of what he has written 

 upon the minds of those who are not yet fitted to see 

 instinct and reason as differentiations of a single faculty. 

 He accordingly does this, and, as is his wont, he does it 

 handsomely; so handsomely that even his most ad- 

 miring followers begin to be uncomfortable. Whereon 

 he begins his next paragraph with " Animals have ex- 

 cellent senses, but not generally, oM of them, as good as 

 man's.* We have heard of damning with faint praise. 

 Is not this to praise with faint damnation ? Yet we can 

 lay hold of nothing. It was not Buffon's intention 

 that we should. An ironical writer, concerning whom 

 we cannot at once say whether he is in earnest or 

 not, is an actor who is continually interrupting his per- 

 formance in order to remind the spectator that he is 

 acting. Complaint, then, against an ironical writer on 

 the score that he puzzles us, is a complaint against 

 irony itself ; for a writer is not ironical unless he puzzles. 

 He should not puzzle unless he believes that this is the 

 best manner of making his reader understand him in 

 the end, or without having a bonne louche for those who 

 will be at the pains to puzzle over him ; and he should 

 make it plain that for long parts of his work together 

 he is to be taken according to the literal interpreta- 

 • Tom. iy. p. 31, 1753. 



