family, of jurisprudence, of religion. The book
concludes with an elaborate examination of the feudal system in France.
Throughout it the reader is equally surprised at the varied and exact
knowledge of the author, and at his extraordinary fertility in general
views. This fertility is indeed sometimes a snare to him, and leads to
rash generalisation. But what has to be remembered is, that he was one
of the pioneers of this method of historical exploration, and that
hundreds of principles which, after correction by his successors, have
passed into general acceptance, were discovered, or at least enunciated,
by him for the first time. Nothing is more remarkable in Montesquieu,
and nothing more distinguishes him from the common run of his somewhat
self-satisfied and short-sighted successors, than the steady hold he
keeps on the continuity of history, and his superiority to the shallow
view of his day (constantly put forward by Voltaire), according to which
the middle ages were a dark period of barbarism, the study of which
could be of no use to any one but a mere curiosity hunter. Montesquieu
too, almost alone of his contemporaries, had a matured and moderate plan
of political and social reform. While some of them indulged in an idle
and theoretical Republicanism, and others in the old unpractical
_frondeur_ spirit, eager to pull down but careless about building up,
Montesquieu had conceived the idea of a limited monarchy, not identical
with that of England, but in many ways similar to it; an ideal which in
the first quarter of the eighteenth century might have been put in
practice with far better chance of success than in the first quarter of
the nineteenth. The merely literary merits of this great book are equal
to its philosophical merits. The vast mass of facts with which the
author deals is selected with remarkable judgment, and arranged with
remarkable lucidity. The style is sober, devoid of ornament, but
admirably proportioned and worked out. There are few greater books, not
merely in French but in literature, than the _Esprit des Lois_.

[Sidenote: Voltaire.]

With Voltaire the case is very different. Very many of his innumerable
works have directly philosophical titles, but no one of them is a work
of much interest or merit. His 'Philosophic Letters,' 1733, published
after his return from England, and the source of much trouble to him,
are the lively but not very trustworthy medium of a contrast between
English