autocracy of the government, and enunciated the revolutionary doctrine that a monarch existed for no other purpose than the good of his people.  The Duc de Bourgogne was converted to the mild, beneficent, and open-minded views of his tutor; and it is possible that if he had lived a series of judicious reforms might have prevented the cataclysm at the close of the century.  But in one important respect the mind of Fenelon was not in accord with the lines on which French thought was to develop for the next eighty years.  Though he was among the first to advocate religious toleration, he was an ardent, even a mystical, Roman Catholic.  Now one of the chief characteristics of the coming age was its scepticism—­its elevation of the secular as opposed to the religious elements in society, and its utter lack of sympathy with all forms of mystical devotion.  Signs of this spirit also had appeared before the end of Louis’s reign.  As early as 1687—­within a year of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—­FONTENELLE, the nephew of Corneille, in his Histoire des Oracles, attacked the miraculous basis of Christianity under the pretence of exposing the religious credulity of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  In its mingling of the sprightly and the erudite, and in the subdued irony of its apparent submission to orthodoxy, this little book forestalled a method of controversy which came into great vogue at a later date.  But a more important work, published at the very end of the seventeenth century, was the Dictionary of BAYLE, in which, amid an enormous mass of learning poured out over a multitude of heterogeneous subjects, the most absolute religious scepticism is expressed with unmistakable emphasis and unceasing reiteration.  The book is an extremely unwieldy one—­very large and very discursive, and quite devoid of style; but its influence was immense; and during the long combat of the eighteenth century it was used as a kind of armoury, supplying many of their sharpest weapons to the writers of the time.

It was not, however, until a few years after the death of the great king that a volume appeared which contained a complete expression of the new spirit, in all its aspects.  In the Lettres Persanes of MONTESQUIEU (published 1721) may be discerned the germs of the whole thought of the eighteenth century in France.  The scheme of this charming and remarkable book was not original:  some Eastern travellers were supposed to arrive in Paris, and to describe, in a correspondence with their countrymen in Persia, the principal features of life in the French capital.  But the uses to which Montesquieu put this borrowed plot were all his own.  He made it the base for a searching attack on the whole system of the government of Louis XIV.  The corruption of the Court, the privileges of the nobles, the maladministration of the finances, the stupidities and barbarisms of the old autocratic regime—­these are the topics to which he is perpetually drawing