You are defended from being a trifler.
At court, though no trifler or flatterer, he was a favourite counsellor in three successive reigns, but he never meddled much in civil or temporal affairs.
While, therefore, it is a profound mistake to regard Bacon as a great constructive philosopher, or even as a lonely pioneer of modern thought, it is quite unfair to speak of him as a trifler.
Before the English visit Voltaire had been an elegant trifler, an adept in the forms of literature popular in French society, a sort of superior Dorat or Boufflers of earlier growth.