nslations, before the genius of Swift. France, above
all, was drawn to this study of a country so near to her, and yet so
utterly unknown. If we regard its issues, the brutal outrage which drove
Voltaire to England in 1726 was one of the most important events of the
eighteenth century. With an intelligence singularly open to new
impressions, he revelled in the freedom of social life he found about
him, in its innumerable types of character, its eccentricities, its
individualities. His "Philosophical Letters" revealed to Europe not only
a country where utterance and opinion were unfettered, but a new
literature and a new science; while his intercourse with Bolingbroke
gave the first impulse to that scepticism which was to wage its
destructive war with the faith of the Continent. From the visit of
Voltaire to the outbreak of the French Revolution, this intercourse with
England remained the chief motive power of French opinion, and told
through it on the opinion of the world. In his investigations on the
nature of government Montesquieu studied English institutions as closely
as he studied the institutions of Rome. Buffon was led by English
science into his attempt at a survey and classification of the animal
world. It was from the works of Locke that Rousseau drew the bulk of his
ideas in politics and education.

[Sidenote: The general temper of Europe.]

Such an influence could hardly have been aroused by English letters had
they not given expression to what was the general temper of Europe at
the time. The cessation of religious wars, the upgrowth of great states
with a new political and administrative organization, the rapid progress
of intelligence, showed their effect everywhere in the same
rationalizing temper, extending not only over theology but over each
department of thought, the same interest in political and social
speculation, the same drift towards physical inquiry, the same tendency
to a diffusion and popularization of knowledge. Everywhere the tone of
thought became secular, scientific, prosaic; everywhere men looked away
from the past with a certain contempt; everywhere the social fusion
which followed on the wreck of the Middle Ages was expressing itself in
a vulgarization of ideas, in an appeal from the world of learning to the
world of general intelligence, in a reliance on the "common sense" of
mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature
of the eighteenth century. Everywh