text:  From his earliest years young Montesquieu evinced remarkable readiness and vivacity of mind; a circumstance which determined his father to breed him up to the "magistracy " as it was termed in France--a profession midway as it were between the career of arms peculiar to the noble and the labours of the bar confined to persons of plebeian origin and from which many of the greatest men and nearly all the distinguished statesmen of France took their rise