person that introduced the subject; and, as he told Mr. Thrale, when a
gentleman one day spoke to him at the club of Catiline's conspiracy, he
withdrew his attention, and thought about Tom Thumb. In his Taxation no
Tyranny, having occasion to notice a reference made by the American
Congress to a passage in Montesquieu, he calls him in contempt the
fanciful Montesquieu. Yet this is the man, of whom Burke, when his just
horror of every thing fanciful in politics was at its height, has passed
the noblest eulogium that one modern has ever made on another, and which
the reader will pardon me if in my veneration for a great name I place
here as an antidote to the detraction of Johnson.

Place before your eyes such a man as Montesquieu. Think of a genius not
born in every country, or every time; a man gifted by nature with a
penetrating aquiline eye; with a judgment prepared with the most
extensive erudition; with an herculean robustness of mind, and nerves
not to be broken with labour; a man who could spend twenty years in one
pursuit. Think of a man, like the universal patriarch of Milton (who had
drawn up before him in his prophetic vision, the whole series of the
generations which were to issue from his loins), a man capable of
placing in review, after having brought together, from the east, the
west, the north, and the south, from the coarseness of the rudest
barbarism, to the most refined and subtle civilization, all the schemes
of government which had ever prevailed amongst mankind, weighing,
measuring, collating, and comparing them all, joining fact with theory,
and calling into council, upon all this infinite assemblage of things,
all the speculations which have fatigued the understandings of profound
reasoners in all times! Let us then consider that all these were but so
many preparatory steps to qualify a man, and such a man, tinctured with
no national prejudice, with no domestic affection to admire, and to hold
out to the admiration of mankind the constitution of England.--_Appeal