ABSTRACT
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. seems more interested in Montesquieu the litterateur and the man of the world than in Montesquieu the thinker, more interested in his love affairs and his Persian Letters than in the Spirit of the Laws. "Law and the Court," "Ideals and Doubts," and "Natural Law" are Holmes's best writing on legal philosophy, and on them his reputation as a legal philosopher, as distinguished from a judge, rests. To Holmes's comment that Montesquieu's remarks on the balance of powers in England were from the start fictional, Pollock wrote him a dissenting letter. Montesquieu was a man of science and at the same time a man of the world. Montesquieu's Rome was the Rome of fable uncritically accepted. It is worth remarking that, notwithstanding his deep sense of the inevitableness of the workings of the world, Montesquieu had a possibly exaggerated belief in the power of legislation, and an equally strong conviction of the reality of abstract justice.
