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 great architectural tasks on which he was engaged were the reconstruction of the Porta Pia, and the conversion of a portion of the baths of Diocletian into the church of Sta Maria degli Angeli; the great cloister with its hundred columns, now used as the Museo delle Terme, is the only part of this reconstruction which remains as he designed it. At length, in the midst of these vast schemes and responsibilities, the heroic old man’s last remains of strength gave way. He died on the threshold of his ninetieth year, on the 18th of February 1564.

MICHELET, JULES (1798–1874), French historian, was born at Paris on the 21st of August 1798, of a family which had Huguenot traditions. His father was a master printer, not very prosperous, and the son at an early age assisted him in the actual work of the press. A place was offered him in the imperial printing office, but his father was able to send him to the famous Collège or Lycée Charlemagne, where he distinguished himself. He passed the university examination in 1821, and was shortly after appointed to a professorship of history in the Collège Rollin. Soon after this, in 1824, he married. The period of the restoration and the July monarchy was one of the most favourable to rising men of letters of a somewhat scholastic cast that has ever been known in France, and Michelet had powerful patrons in Villemain, Victor Cousin and others. But, though he was an ardent politician (having from his childhood embraced republicanism and a peculiar variety of romantic free-thought), he was first of all a man of letters and an inquirer into the history of the past.

His earliest works were school-books, and they were not written at a. very early age, Between 1825 and 1827 he produced divers sketches, chronological tables, &c., of modern history. His Précis of the subject, published in the last-mentioned year, is a sound and careful book, far better than anything that had appeared before it, and written in a sober yet interesting style. In the same year he was appointed maître de conferences at the École normale. Four years later, in 1831, the Introduction à l’histoire universelle showed a very different style, exhibiting no doubt the idiosyncrasy and literary power of the writer to greater advantage, but also displaying the peculiar visionary qualities which made Michelet the most stimulating, but the most untrustworthy (not in facts, which he never consciously falsifies, but in suggestion) of all historians; The events of 1830 had unmuzzled him, and had put him in a better position for study by obtaining for him a place in the Record Office, and a deputy-professorship under Guizot in the literary faculty of the university. Very soon afterwards he began his chief and monumental work, the Histoire de France. But he accompanied this with numerous other books, chiefly of erudition, such as the Œuvres choisies de Vica, the Mémoires de Luther écrits par lui-même, the Origines du droit français, and somewhat later the Procès des templiers. 1838 was a year of great importance in Michelet’s life. He was in the fullness of his powers, his studies had fed his natural aversion to the principles of authority and ecclesiasticism, and at a moment when the revived activity of the Jesuits caused some real and more pretended alarm he was appointed to the chair of history at the Collège de France. Assisted by his friend Edgar Quinet, he began a violent polemic against the unpopular order and the principles which it represented, a polemic which made their lectures, and especially Michelet’s, one of the most popular resorts of the day. He published, in 1839, his Histoire romaine, but this was in his graver and earlier manner. The results of his lectures appeared in the volumes Le Prêtre, la femme, et la famille and le peuple. These books do not display the apocalyptic style which, partly borrowed from Lamennais, characterizes Michelet’s later works, but they contain in miniature almost the whole of his curious ethic-politico-theological creed—a mixture of sentimentalism, communism, and anti-sacerdotalism, supported by the most eccentric arguments, but urged with a great deal of eloquence. The principles of the outbreak of 1848 were in the air, and Michelet was not the least important of those who condensed and propagated them: indeed his original lectures were of so incendiary a kind that the course had to be interdicted. But when the actual revolution broke out Michelet, unlike many other men of letters, did not attempt to enter on active political life, and merely devoted himself more strenuously to his literary work. Besides continuing the great history, he undertook and carried out, during the years between the downfall of Louis Philippe and the final establishment of Napoleon III., an enthusiastic Histoire de la révolution française. Despite or because of its enthusiasm, this was by no means Michelet’s best book. The events were too near and too well known, and hardly admitted the picturesque sallies into the blue distance which make the charm and the danger of his larger work. In actual picturesqueness as well as in general veracity of picture, the book cannot approach Carlyle’s; while as a mere chronicle of the events it is inferior to half a dozen prosaic histories older and younger than itself. 