had been to Tacitus. It was a neighbouring country in which he found, or thought that he found, principles of liberty which had vanished from his own country, and for the restoration of which he hoped. And he sketched those principles like a great artist, with a bold and free sweep of the brush. He sought to render the spirit and characteristic features: for minute accuracies of topographical detail he cared as little as Turner cared in painting a landscape.
That a book thus conceived should be read with delight and admiration by Englishmen was not surprising[1]. Its practical influence was first exercised in
- ↑ Nugent's English translation of the Spirit of Laws appears to have been published in 1750. See Montesquieu's letter to the translator of Oct. 18, 1750. A second edition, of which there is a copy in the British Museum, appeared in 1752, and several other editions followed.
'My delight,' says Gibbon in his autobiography, 'was in the frequent perusal of Montesquieu, whose energy of style and boldness of hypothesis were powerful to awaken and stimulate the genius of the age.'
There is a curious and characteristic rhapsody on Montesquieu in Bentham's Commonplace Book (Works by Bowring, x. p. 143). 'When the truths in a man's book, though many and important, are fewer than the errors; when his ideas, though the means of producing clear ones in other men, are found to be themselves not clear, that book must die: Montesquieu must therefore die: he must die, as his great countrymen, Descartes, had died before him: he must wither as the blade withers, when the corn is ripe: he must die, but let tears of gratitude and admiration bedew his grave. O Montesquieu! the British constitution, whose death thou prophesiedst, will live longer than thy work, yet not longer than thy fame. Not even the incense of [the illustrious Catherine] can preserve thee.
'Locke—dry, cold, languid, wearisome, will live for ever. Montesquieu—rapid, brilliant, glorious, enchanting—will not outlive his century.
'I know—I feel—I pity—and blush at the enjoyment of a liberty
