Now it so happens that, inasmuch as it was a forerunner of our own civilization, the Italian Eighteenth Century was poor, weak, and uninte resting, because in all this it was a mere insignificant copy of the English and French Eighteenth Century. The political and philosophic ten dencies of the days of Montesquieu, of Voltaire, of Hume, and of Smith, did indeed exist in Italy, both because they were naturally produced there as elsewhere by the p1eceding civilization, and also because they we1e f1_om other count1ies; but they we1e so comparatively feeble that Italian civilization would never have Spontaneously made the stride which it did, would never have got to its modern point, had it not been borne along by the whi1lwind of the French remtiqnmy invasion.