y more than
the facts of the religious order are to be judged by civil laws. Here
the great treatise might have closed, but Montesquieu adds what may
be styled an historical appendix in his study of the origin and
development of feudal laws. At a time when antiquity was little
regarded, he was an ardent lover of antiquity; at a time when mediaeval
history was ignored, he was a student of the forgotten centuries.

Such in outline is the great work which in large measure modified
the course of eighteenth-century thought. Many of its views have been
superseded; its collections of facts are not critically dealt with;
its ideas often succeed each other without logical sequence; but
Montesquieu may be said to have created a method, if not a science;
he brought the study of jurisprudence and politics, in the widest
sense, into literature, laicising and popularising the whole
subject; he directed history to the investigation of causes; he led
men to feel the greatness of the social institution; and, while
retiring from view behind his work, he could not but exhibit, for
his own day and for ours, the spectacle of a great mind operating
over a vast field in the interests of truth, the spectacle of a great
nature that loved the light, hating despotism, but fearing revolution,
sane, temperate, wisely benevolent. In years tyrannised over by
abstract ideas, his work remained to plead for the concrete and the
historical; among men devoted to the absolute in theory and the
extreme in practice, it remained to justify the relative, to demand
a consideration of circumstances and conditions, to teach men how
large a field of reform lay within the bounds of moderation and good
sense.

The _Esprit des Lois_ was denounced by Jansenists and Jesuits; it
was placed in the Index, but in less than two years twenty-two editions
had appeared, and it was translated into many languages. The author
justified it brilliantly in his _Defense_ of 1750. His later writings
are of small importance. With failing eyesight in his declining years,
he could enjoy the society of friends and the illumination of his
great fame. He died tranquilly (1755) at the age of sixty-six, in
the spirit of a Christian Stoic.

II

The life of society was studied by Montesquieu; the inward life of
the heart was studied by a young moralist, whose premature loss was
lamented with tender passion by Voltaire.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de VAUVENARGUES, though neither a thinker