one intellectual essay, but particularly in his letters to his son, shows himself to us as a moralist as amiable as he is consummate, and one of the masters of life. It is the Rochefoucauld of England of whom we speak. Montesquieu, after the publication of L'Esprit des Lois, wrote to the Abbé de Guasco, who was then in England: "Tell my Lord Chesterfield that nothing is so flattering to me as his approbation; but that, though he is reading my work for the third time, he will only be in a better position to point out to me what wants correcting and rectifying in it; nothing could be more instructive to me than his observations and his critique." It was Chesterfield who, speaking to Montesquieu one day of the readiness of the French for revolutions, and their impatience at slow reforms, spoke this sentence, which is a résumé of our whole history: "You French know how to make barricades, but you never raise barriers."
Lord Chesterfield certainly appreciated Voltaire; he remarked, à propos of the Siècle de Louis XIV.: "Lord Bolingbroke had taught me how to read history; Voltaire teaches me how it should be written." But, at the same time, with that practical sense which rarely abandons men of wit on the other side of the Straits, he felt the imprudences of Voltaire, and disapproved of them. When he was old,
