strong bent soon appeared in his
writings. He next read at the academy at Bourdeaux, a "Life of the
Duke of Berwick," and an "Essay on the Policy of the Romans in
Religion," which was the basis of the immortal work which he
afterwards composed on the rise and fall of that extraordinary people.
These desultory essays gave no indication of the first considerable
work which he published, which was the famous _Lettres Persanes_. They
appeared in 1721, when he was thirty-two years of age. Their success
was immediate and prodigious; a certain indication in matters of
thought, that they were not destined to durable fame. They fell in
with the ideas and passions of the time; they were not before it;
thence their early popularity and ultimate oblivion. The work was
published anonymously; for the keen but delicate satire on French
manners and vices which it contained, might have endangered the
author, and as it was he had no small difficulty, when it was known he
was the writer, in escaping from its effects. It consists in a series
of letters from an imaginary character, Usbeck, a Persian traveller,
detailing the vices, manners, and customs of the French metropolis.
The ingenuity, sarcasm, and truth, which that once celebrated
production contains, must not make us shut our eyes to its glaring
defects; the vices of the age, as they mainly contributed to its early
popularity, have been the chief cause of its subsequent decline. It
contains many passages improperly warm and voluptuous, and some which,
under the mask of attacks on the Jesuits, had the appearance, at
least, of being levelled at religion itself. No work, at that period,
could attract attention in France which was not disfigured by these
blemishes. Even the great mind of Montesquieu, in its first essay
before the public, did not escape the contagion of the age.

But, erelong, the genius of this profound thinker was devoted to more
congenial and worthy objects. In 1726, he sold his office of president
of the parliament of Bourdeaux, partly in order to escape from the
toils of legal pursuit and judicial business, which, in that
mercantile and rising community, was attended with great labour;
partly in order to be enabled to travel, and study the institutions
and character of different nations--a pursuit of which he was
passionately fond, and which, without doubt, had a powerful effect in
giving him that vast command of detached facts in political science,
and that libera