England is the freest country in the world; I do not except any republic." He returned to France so smitten with the parliamentary or moderate form of government, as he called it, that he seemed sometimes to forget the prudent maxim of the _Lettres persanes_.

"It is true," said the Parsee Usbeck, "that, in consequence of a whimsicality (_bizarrerie_) which springs rather from the nature than from the mind of man, it is sometimes necessary to change certain laws; but the case is rare, and, when it occurs, it should not be touched save with a trembling hand." On returning to his castle of La Brede after so many and such long travels, Montesquieu resolved to restore his tone by intercourse with the past.

"I confess my liking for the ancients," he used to say; "this antiquity enchants me, and I am always ready to say with Pliny, 'You are going to Athens; revere the gods.'" It was not, however, on the Greeks that he concentrated the working of his mind; in 1734, he published his _Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la decadence des Romaine_.

Montesquieu did not, as Bossuet did, seek to hit upon God's plan touching the destinies of mankind; he discovers in the virtues and vices of the Romans themselves the secret of their triumphs and of their reverses.

The contemplation of antiquity inspires him with language often worthy of Tacitus, curt, nervous, powerful in its grave simplicity.
"It seemed," he says, "that the Romans only conquered in order to give; but they remained so positively the masters that, when they made war on any prince, they crushed him, so to speak, with the weight of the whole universe." Montesquieu thus performed the prelude to the great work of his life; he had been working for twenty years at the _Esprit des lois,_ when he published it in 1748.