literature and art was defective; he honoured the antique
world, but it was the Greek and Latin historians and the ideals of
Roman virtue and patriotism which most deeply moved him. At the same
time he was a man of his own generation, and while essentially serious,
he explored the frivolous side of life, and yielded his imagination
to the licence of the day.

With enough wit and enough wantonness to capture a multitude of
readers, the _Lettres Persanes_ (1721) contain a serious criticism
of French society in the years of the Regency. It matters little that
the idea of the book may have been suggested by the Siamese travellers
of Dufresny's _Amusements_; the treatment is essentially original.
Things Oriental were in fashion--Galland had translated the _Arabian
Nights_ (1704-1708)--and Montesquieu delighted in books of travel
which told of the manners, customs, religions, governments of distant
lands. His Persians, Usbek and Rica, one the more philosophical, the
other the more satirical, visit Europe, inform their friends by letter
of all the aspects of European and especially of French life, and
receive tidings from Persia of affairs of the East, including the
troubles and intrigues of the eunuchs and ladies of the harem. The
spirit of the reaction against the despotism of Louis XIV. is
expressed in Montesquieu's pages; the spirit also of religious
free-thought, and the reaction against ecclesiastical tyranny. A
sense of the dangers impending over society is present, and of the
need of temperate reform. Brilliant, daring, ironical, licentious
as the _Persian Letters_ are, the prevailing tone is that of judicious
moderation; and already something can be discerned of the large views
and wise liberality of the _Esprit des Lois_. The book is valuable
to us still as a document in the social history of the eighteenth
century.

In Paris, Montesquieu formed many distinguished acquaintances, among
others that of Mlle. de Clermont, sister of the Duke de Bourbon.
Perhaps it was in homage to her that he wrote his prose-poem, which
pretends to be a translation from the Greek, _Le Temple de Gnide_
(1725). Its feeling for antiquity is overlaid by the artificialities,
long since faded, of his own day--"naught remains," writes M. Sorel,
"but the faint and subtle perfume of a _sachet_ long hidden in a
_rococo_ cabinet." Although his publications were anonymous,
Montesquieu was elected a member of the Academy in 1728, and almost
immedi