could not be entirely concealed, it was understood that among cultivated persons it could never be given any importance. Even on the stage it was no longer considered becoming that peasants or labourers, a Peruvian or Iroquois, should speak in their own natural manner; they were all alike rendered polite, sententious, and fluent as their distinguished audience. Each local and individual tone was rubbed away, every person of the drama was but a mouthpiece for the eighteenth-century eloquence of the author. As with the drama, so with other literature. Taine correctly observes that if we read an English romance of the period, we have before our eyes a section of the English people; but a French one, though widely varying in garb, contains invariably a picture of a French salon, and that only. In presence of so universal a mood as this, how could any one come to the study of the State by means of difficult and distant researches on historical ground? Montesquieu did it, but he remained solitary among his contemporaries, won much celebrity, but exercised very little influence. The other reformers used quickly to turn over the pages of histories in order to find piquant quotations for some ready-made theory; as, for instance, the ambition of priests, the falsehood of diplomatists, the insatiability of princely greed. As to the complicated task of judging any individual State and its constitution according to its climatic and geographic conditions and its historical antecedents, with the exception of Montesquieu, no man dreamt of that. The public, with whom the decision lay, did not require anything of the kind, nay, would have repaid the severe toil with disapproval. It placed, as we have before said, far more stress on a pleasant form than an instructive purpose, cared but little for any subject in itself, but only as affording material for the most intelligent, yet at the same time most comprehensible and exciting conversation. In debate no trace of previous knowledge won by personal effort was pre-supposed; all that was needed was never to be commonplace, and in every case to bring forward new and amazing truths. Accordingly speech and style strove neither for fulness nor depth, but so much the more for clearness and conclusiveness. In exposition, the progress was regular from syllogism to syllogism, great care being taken never to skip over a middle term. In order to be impressive the speaker became rhetorical, in order to convince he endeavoured to reduce every subject to one universal and easily inculcated proposition. Good society was delighted to be thus agreeably put in possession of the most advanced views of the world; but literature thus allowed itself to deviate from real knowledge into the way of empty abstraction.