nsensibly died
away, like those rivers which disappear in the sands.

In a very small volume M. de Montesquieu explained and unfolded his
picture. Avoiding detail, and seizing only essentials, he has included
in a very small space a vast number of objects distinctly perceived, and
rapidly presented, without fatiguing the reader. While he points out
much, he leaves us still more to reflect upon; and he might have
entitled his book, 'A Roman History for the Use of Statesmen and
Philosophers.'

Whatever reputation M. de Montesquieu had thus far acquired, he had but
cleared the way for a far grander undertaking--for that which ought to
immortalize his name, and commend it to the admiration of future ages.
He had meditated for twenty years upon its execution; or, to speak more
exactly, his whole life had been a perpetual meditation upon it. He had
made himself in some sort a stranger in his own country, the better to
understand it. He had studied profoundly the different peoples of
Europe. The famous island, which so glories in her laws, and which makes
so bad a use of them, proved to him what Crete had been to Lycurgus--a
school where he learned much without approving everything. Thus he
attained by degrees to the noblest title a wise man can deserve, that of
legislator of nations.

If he was animated by the importance of his subject, he was at the same
time terrified by its extent. He abandoned it, and returned to it again
and again. More than once, as he himself owns, he felt his paternal
hands fail him. At last, encouraged by his friends, he resolved to
publish the 'Spirit of Laws.'

In this important work M. de Montesquieu, without insisting, like his
predecessors, upon metaphysical discussions, without confining himself,
like them, to consider certain people in certain particular relations or
circumstances, takes a view of the actual inhabitants of the world in
all their conceivable relations to each other. Most other writers in
this way are either simple moralists, or simple lawyers, or even
sometimes simple theologists. As for him, a citizen of all nations, he
cares less what duty requires of us than what means may constrain us to
do it; about the metaphysical perfection of laws, than about what man is
capable of; about laws which have been made, than about those which
ought to have been made; about the laws of a particular people, than
about those of all peoples. Thus, when comparing himself to those who
have r