granted to those peoples who rebelled against their kings; in the excellent policy of permitting the conquered to preserve their religion and customs; and the equally excellent determination never to have two enemies upon their hands at once, but to bear everything from the one till they had destroyed the other.  He finds the causes of their declension in the aggrandizement of the State itself:  in those distant wars, which, obliging the citizens to be too long absent, made them insensibly lose their republican spirit; in the too easily granted privilege of being citizens of Rome, which made the Roman people at last become a sort of many-headed monster; in the corruption introduced by the luxury of Asia; in the proscriptions of Sylla, which debased the genius of the nation, and prepared it for slavery; in the necessity of having a master while their liberty was become burdensome to them; in the necessity of changing their maxims when they changed their government; in that series of monsters who reigned, almost without interruption, from Tiberius to Nerva, and from Commodus to Constantine; lastly, in the translation and division of the empire, which perished first in the West by the power of barbarians, and after having languished in the East, under weak or cruel emperors, insensibly died away, like those rivers which disappear in the sands.

In a very small volume M. de Montesquieu explained and unfolded his picture.  Avoiding detail, and seizing only essentials, he has included in a very small space a vast number of objects distinctly perceived, and rapidly presented, without fatiguing the reader.  While he points out much, he leaves us still more to reflect upon; and he might have entitled his book, ’A Roman History for the Use of Statesmen and Philosophers.’

Whatever reputation M. de Montesquieu had thus far acquired, he had but cleared the way for a far grander undertaking—­for that which ought to immortalize his name, and commend it to the admiration of future ages.  He had meditated for twenty years upon its execution; or, to speak more exactly, his whole life had been a perpetual meditation upon it.  He had made himself in some sort a stranger in his own country, the better to understand it.  He had studied profoundly the different peoples of Europe.  The famous island, which so glories in her laws, and which makes so bad a use of them, proved to him what Crete had been to Lycurgus—­a school where he learned much without approving everything.  Thus he attained by degrees to the noblest title a wise man can deserve, that of legislator of nations.

If he was animated by the importance of his subject, he was at the same time terrified by its extent.  He abandoned it, and returned to it again and again.  More than once, as he himself owns, he felt his paternal hands fail him.  At last, encouraged by his friends, he resolved to publish the ‘Spirit of Laws.’