MONTESQUIEU’S “Spirit of the Laws,” which appeared in 1748, is one of the most remarkable books of the eighteenth century, and perhaps no other book written during the century has equaled it in influence. It inspired Beccaria in Italy and Bentham in England, and it has helped in so many ways to make history, that its importance to the student of history can hardly be overestimated. The style in which it is written is much more nearly Attic than Parisian. Montesquieu deals point by point with every subordinate phase of his subject. As if each were of primary importance, he makes his treatment of it a complete essay, while at the same time he keeps it within an allotted limit and subordinates it to the whole. The lack of ability to do this is the worst of the negative faults of the prose of the nineteenth century, and on this account Montesquieu would be worth serious study even if he were not a great thinker. Of the status of the book in literature, Professor Saintsbury writes: “It is an assemblage of the most fertile, original, and inspiriting views on legal and political subjects put in language of singular suggestiveness and vigor, illustrated by examples which are always apt and luminous, permeated by the spirit of temperate and tolerant desire for human improvement and happiness, and almost unique in its entire freedom at once from doctrinairism, from visionary enthusiasm, from egotism, and from an undue spirit of system.”

  Though Montesquieu is chiefly remembered by this great work, he was already famous when it appeared, as it was preceded by his “Persian Letters” (1721) and his “Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans.”

  He was born from a patrician family at the Château de la Brède, near Bordeaux, France, January 18th, 1689. He was educated carefully in literature and law; and when his hereditary position made him president of the Bordeaux parliament, he was well fitted for the place. Knowing himself better fitted for literature, however, he withdrew from public life, and devoted himself to a life of study, relieved chiefly by travel. When he died, February 10th, 1755, his generation had recognized him as one of its greatest men, and posterity has sustained its judgment.