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Rh publication of the manuscripts which had for many years been preserved in the family archives of the Montesquieu family. They include the journals of travel which Sainte-Beuve said he would sooner have than the Spirit of Laws, and the three quarto volumes of Pensées in which Montesquieu stored materials for his published works.

The Persian Letters supply a clue to the plan of the Spirit of Laws, and contain the germs of many of the ideas which were subsequently developed in that book. They are the work of a young man. They profess to be written, and were probably composed or sketched, at different dates between 1711 and 1720, that is to say,