the case. Montesquieu has
dished up his serious doctrines into a spicy story, full of epigrams and
light topical allusions, and romantic adventures, and fancy visions of
the East. Montesquieu was a magistrate; yet he ventured to indulge here
and there in reflections of dubious propriety, and to throw over the
whole of his book an airy veil of voluptuous intrigue. All this is
highly typical of the literature of the age which was now beginning. The
serious, formal tone of the classical writers was abandoned, and was
replaced by a gay, unemphatic, pithy manner, in which some grains of
light-hearted licentiousness usually gave a flavour to the wit. The
change was partly due to the shifting of the centre of society from the
elaborate and spectacular world of Versailles to the more intimate
atmosphere of the drawing-rooms of Paris. With the death of the old
king the ceremonial life of the Court fell into the background; and the
spirits of the time flew off into frivolity with a sense of freedom and
relief. But there was another influence at work. Paradoxical as it may
sound, it was the very seriousness of the new writers which was the real
cause of their lack of decorum. Their great object was to be read--and
by the largest possible number of readers; the old select circle of
literary connoisseurs no longer satisfied them; they were eager to
preach their doctrines to a wider public--to the brilliant, inquisitive,
and increasingly powerful public of the capital. And with this public no
book had a chance of success unless it was of the kind that could be run
through rapidly, pleasantly, on a sofa, between dinner and the opera,
and would furnish the material for spicy anecdotes and good talk. Like
the jesters of the Middle Ages, the philosophers of the eighteenth
century found in the use of pranks and buffoonery the best way of
telling the truth.

Until about the middle of the century, Montesquieu was the dominating
figure in French thought. His second book--_Considerations sur la
Grandeur et la Decadence des Romains_--is an exceedingly able work, in
which a series of interesting and occasionally profound historical
reflections are expressed in a style of great brilliance and
incisiveness. Here Montesquieu definitely freed history from the
medieval fetters which it had worn even in the days of Bossuet, and
considered the development of events from a purely secular point of
view, as the result of natural causes. But his greatest