_18th-Century History._--It is not, however, in any of the departments of _belles-lettres_ that the real eminence of the 18th century as a time of literary production in France consists. In all serious branches of study its accomplishments were, from a literary point of view, remarkable, uniting as it did an extraordinary power of popular and literary expression with an ardent spirit of inquiry, a great speculative ability, and even a far more considerable amount of laborious erudition than is generally supposed. The historical studies and results of 18th-century speculation in France are of especial and peculiar importance. There is no doubt that what is called the science of history dates from this time, and though the beginning of it is usually assigned to the Italian Vico, its complete indication may perhaps with equal or greater justice be claimed by the Frenchman Turgot. Before Turgot, however, there were great names in French historical writing, and perhaps the greatest of all is that of Charles Secondat de Montesquieu (1689-1755). The three principal works of this great writer are all historical and at the same time political in character. In the _Lettres persanes_ he handled, with wit inferior to the wit of no other writer even in that witty age, the corruptions and dangers of contemporary morals and politics. The literary charm of this book--the plan of which was suggested by a work, the _Amusements serieux et comiques_, of Dufresny (1648-1724), a comic writer not destitute of merit--is very great, and its plan was so popular as to lead to a thousand imitations, of which all, except those of Voltaire and Goldsmith, only bring out the immense superiority of the original. Few things could be more different from this lively and popular book than Montesquieu's next work, the _Grandeur et decadence des Romains_, in which the same acuteness and knowledge of human nature are united with considerable erudition, and with a weighty though perhaps somewhat grandiloquent and rhetorical style. His third and greatest work, the _Esprit des lois_, is again different both in style and character, and such defects as it has are as nothing when compared with the merits of its fertility in ideas, its splendid breadth of view, and the felicity with which the author, in a manner unknown before, recognizes the laws underlying complicated assemblages of fact. The style of this great work is equal to its substance; less light than that of the _Lettres_, less rhetorical than that of the _Grandeur des Romains_, it is still a marvellous union of dignity and wit. Around Montesquieu, partly before and partly after him, is a group of philosophical or at least systematic historians, of whom the chief are Jean Baptiste Dubos (1670-1742), and G. Bonnot de Mably (1709-1785). Dubos, whose chief work is not historical but aesthetic (_Reflexions sur la poesie et la peinture_), wrote a so-called _Histoire critique de l'etablissement de la monarchie