Place, for instance, 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 in 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! And
shall we Englishmen revoke to such a suit? Shall we, when so much more
than he has produced remains still to be understood and admired, instead
of keeping ourselves in the schools of real science, choose for our
teachers men incapable of being taught, whose only claim to know is,
that they have never doubted; from whom we can learn nothing but their
own indocility; who would teach us to scorn what in the silence of our
hearts we ought to adore?