eu's great work, the _Esprit des Lois_, which followed his
_Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness and Fall of the Romans_
(1734), and appeared in 1748, forms an epoch in French prose style. He
and Voltaire are the two parents of modern French prose literature. The
_Esprit des Lois_ was far more greedily read in England than in France.
Society there had little taste for so solid a work; they vastly
preferred the lively sparkle of the _Persian Letters_; the book was
perhaps too clearly influenced by an admiration for the Constitution of
England, and by a love for liberty, face to face with the weak arbitrary
despotism which was dragging France to a catastrophe.

If Montesquieu is the advocate of political freedom, Voltaire is the
champion of tolerance and freedom of conscience; and that, in his day
and with his surroundings, meant that he was the deadly foe of the
established faith, as he saw it in its acts in France. When we regard
this apostle of toleration, and watch his pettinesses and vanity, note
him at kings' courts, see him glorifying Louis XIV, that great
antagonist of all tolerance, whether religious or political or social,
we are inclined to think that the most difficult of all toleration is
that of having to endure its champion and to try to do him justice.

Voltaire was no deep thinker: he had amazing cleverness, was very
susceptible of the influence of thought, and unrivalled in expression.
We shall expect to find him taking color from what was round him, nor
shall we be astonished if that color is dazzling and brilliant. Five
successive influences marked his earlier life. First, his education
under the Jesuits, which gave him an insight into their system;
secondly, his introduction to the irreligious and immoral society of the
fashionable _abbes_ of the day, which showed him another side of the
official religion of the time; thirdly, the beneficent friendship of the
Abbe de Caumartin, who set him thinking about great and ambitious
subjects, and led him to write the _Henriade_, and probably also to
begin projecting his _Siecle de Louis XIV_; fourthly, the enforced
leisure of the Bastille, whither he went a second time in 1726 for
having resented an insult put on him by a coarse nobleman, one of the
Rohans; lastly--thanks to the order for his exile--his sojourn in
England after release from the Bastille, and his friendship for the
chief writers and thinkers of this country. Hitherto he had been a
pur