In Turgot, on the other hand, we discern something of the isolation, the sternness, the disdainful melancholy of Tacitus.
He even rises out of the eager, bustling, shrill-tongued crowd of the Voltairean age with some of that austere moral indignation and haughty astonishment with which Dante had watched the stubborn ways of men centuries before.

On one side Turgot shared the conservatism of Burke, though, perhaps, he would hardly have given it that name.

He habitually corrected the headlong insistence of the revolutionary philosophers, his friends, by reminding them that neither pity, nor benevolence, nor hope can ever dispense with justice; and he could never endure to hear of great changes being wrought at the cost of this sovereign quality.

Like Burke, he held fast to the doctrine that everything must be done for the multitude, but nothing by them.

Like Burke, he realised how close are the links that bind the successive generations of men, and make up the long chain of human history.