text:  In 1726 he sold his office of president of the parliament of Bourdeaux partly in order to escape from the toils of legal pursuit and judicial business which in that mercantile and rising community was attended with great labour; partly in order to be enabled to travel and study the institutions and character of different nations--a pursuit of which he was passionately fond and which without doubt had a powerful effect in giving him that vast command of detached facts in political science and that liberal view of institutions habits and manners differing in some degree from his own by which his philosophical writings are so eminently distinguished