Liberty, he says, "is maintained by the continued differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in behalf of equitable government." The hand that can bend Ulysses' bow is certainly not here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in the obscurity into which he has fallen.

The _Esprit des Lois_ took twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of men like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped.

Facile popularisers of this sort may have mollified the drawing-room; but they did not add to political ideas.
III A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the students of constitutional law.

Blackstone's _Commentaries on the Laws of England_ (1765-9) has had ever since its first publication an authority such as Coke only before possessed.

"He it is," said Bentham, "who, first of all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the Scholar and the Gentleman." Certainly, as Professor Dicey has remarked, "the book contains much real learning about our system of government." We are less concerned here with Blackstone as an antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy.