question, Vico in Italy, Montesquieu and
Turgot in France, are usually and rightly credited with the working out
of this great conception. But though pretty fully worked, or at least
sketched out, it was not applied in any book of bulk and merit. The
writings of Montesquieu and Turgot themselves are not history--they are
essays of lesser or greater length in historical philosophy. Nor from
the merely literary point of view has France any historical production
of the first rank to put forward at this time. The works of greater
extent, such as Rollin's, are of no special literary value; the works of
literary value, such as Voltaire's studies, are of but small extent, and
rather resemble the historical essay of the preceding century, which
still continued to be practised, and which had one special practitioner
of merit in Rulhiere. But nothing even distantly approaching the English
masterpiece of the period, the _Decline and Fall_, was produced; hardly
anything approaching Hume's History. Nor again do the memoirs[289] of
this time equal those of the seventeenth century in literary power,
though they are useful as sources of historical and social information.
No man of letters of the first class has left such work, and no one, not
by profession a man of letters, has by such work come even near the
position of the Cardinal de Retz or the Duke de Saint Simon, the latter
of whom, it is fair to remember, actually lived into the second half of
the century. On the other hand, the letter-writers of the time are
numerous and excellent. Although no one of them equals Madame de Sevigne
in bulk and in completeness of merit, the letters of Mademoiselle de
l'Espinasse, of Madame du Deffand, of Diderot to Mademoiselle Volland,
and some others, are of very great excellence, and almost unsurpassed in
their characterization of the intellectual and social peculiarities of
the time. The absence of regular histories of the first merit would be
more surprising than it is if it were not fully accounted for by the
dominant peculiarity of the day, which is never to be forgotten in
studying its history--the absorption, that is to say, of the greater
part of the intellect of the time in the _philosophe_ polemic. Almost
all the histories that were written, except as works of pure erudition,
were in reality pamphlets intended to point, more or less allegorically,
some moral as to real or supposed abuses in the social, ecclesiastical,
or political state