England, in the eighteenth it was France, and now perhaps it is Germany, which sets the tone, or fashion, or thought. For the first generation, perhaps, of the eighteenth century, England had the lead, which Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Harvey, Cromwell, and William had given her in the century preceding. The contemporaries of Newton, Locke, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Defoe, and Addison were a force in combination which the worshippers of Louis the Fourteenth did not immediately perceive, but which was above anything then extant in Europe. The revelation of this great intellectual strength in England was made by Montesquieu and Voltaire. Voltaire, if not exactly a thinker, was the greatest interpreter of ideas whom the world has ever seen, and became the greatest literary power in the whole history of letters. When, in 1728, he took back to France his English experience and studies, he carried with him the sacred fire of freedom whereby the supremacy of thought began to pass to France. Within ten years that fire lit up some of the greatest beacons of the modern world. Voltaire wrote his 'Essay on Manners' in 1740; Montesquieu's 'Spirit of the Laws' appeared in 1748, and its influence was greater than that of any single work of Voltaire. The forty years, 1740-1780, were perhaps the most pregnant epoch in the history of human thought. It contained the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, D'Alembert, Vauvenargues, Buffon, Lavoisier, Rousseau, the Encyclopedists, Condorcet, and Turgot, in France; and, in England, those of Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Gibbon, Robertson, Hume, Adam Smith, Priestley, Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gray. During the last twenty years of the century France was absorbed in her