Nor was this closer political contact with Europe the only result of the new attitude of England. Throughout the age of the Georges we find her for the first time exercising an intellectual and moral influence on the European world. Hitherto Italian and French impulses had told on English letters or on English thought, but neither our literature nor our philosophy had exercised any corresponding influence on the Continent. It may be doubted whether a dozen Frenchmen or Italians had any notion that a literature existed in England at all, or that her institutions were worthy of study by any social or political inquirer. But with the Revolution of 1688 this ignorance came to an end. William and Marlborough carried more than English arms across the Channel; they carried English ideas. The combination of material and military greatness with a freedom of thought and action hardly known elsewhere, which was revealed in the England that sprang from the Revolution of 1688, imposed on the imagination of men. For the first time in our history we find foreigners learning English, visiting England, seeking to understand English life and English opinion. The main curiosity that drew them was a political curiosity, but they carried back more than political conceptions. Religious and philosophical notions crossed the Channel with politics. The world learned that there was an English literature. It heard of Shakspere. It wept over Richardson. It bowed, even in wretched translations, before the genius of Swift. France, above all, was drawn to this study of a country so near to her, and yet so utterly unknown. If we regard its issues, the brutal outrage which drove Voltaire to England in 1726 was one of the most important events of the eighteenth century. With an intelligence singularly open to new impressions, he revelled in the freedom of social life he found about him, in its innumerable types of character, its eccentricities, its individualities. His "Philosophical Letters" revealed to Europe not only a country where utterance and opinion were unfettered, but a new literature and a new science; while his intercourse with Bolingbroke gave the first impulse to that scepticism which was to wage its destructive war with the faith of the Continent. From the visit of Voltaire to the outbreak of the French Revolution, this intercourse with England remained the chief motive power of French opinion, and told through it on the opinion of the world. In his investigations on the nature of government Montesquieu studied English institutions as closely as he studied the institutions of Rome. Buffon was led by English science into his attempt at a survey and classification of the animal world. It was from the works of Locke that Rousseau drew the bulk of his ideas in politics and education. [Sidenote: The general temper of Europe.]