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Rh rules that he laid down for good writing are practically the rules for good conversation. 'To write well,' he says somewhere, 'you must skip the connecting links, enough not to be a bore, not so much as to be unintelligible .' Hence his book is not so much a dissertation as a causerie. It rambles pleasantly and unmethodically from point to point, welcomes digressions, and often goes off at a tangent. You feel yourself in the presence of a learned, witty, and urbane talker, who does not wish to monopolize the talk, but desires to elicit that free, responsive play of thought which is essential to good conversation. 'I don't want to exhaust the subject,' he says, 'for who can say everything without being a deadly bore .' And again, 'My object is not to make you read; but to make you think .'

But Montesquieu is also a man of the closet, a man who spent long, solitary hours in his library at La Brède, filling note-books with copious extracts, and condensing his thoughts in maxims and reflections. And he is too often unable to resist the temptation of utilizing the contents of his notebooks without considering sufficiently whether they are relevant to or assist the progress of his argument. Indeed, he is essentially a 'fragmentary' thinker, sententious rather than continuous, and constitutionally reluctant, perhaps unable, to follow out persistently long trains of thought. But these peculiarities, though they detract from the scientific merit of his book, make it more readable. So