M I C M I C 235 tlie younger generation he held a position of absolute ascendency and authority ; nor was his example, as we have said, by any means altogether salutary for them. During the last years of his life he made but few more essays in sculpture, and those not successful, but was much employed in the fourth art in which he ex celled, that of architecture. A succession of popes de manded his services for the embellishment of Rome. For Paul III. he built the palace called after the name of the pope s family the Farnese. On the death of Antonio da San Gallo he succeeded to the onerous and coveted office of chief architect of St Peter s Church, for which he remodelled all the designs, living to see some of the main features, including the supports and lower portion of the great central dome, carried out in spite of all obstacles according to his plans. Other great architectural tasks on which he was engaged were the conversion of a portion of the Baths of Diocletian into the church of Sta Maria degli Angeli, and the embellishment and rearrangement of the great group of buildings on the Roman Capitol. 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. For the bibliography of Michelangelo, which is extensive, see the useful though very imperfect compilation of Passerini, Bibliografia di Michelangelo Buonarroti, &c. , Florence, 1875. The most import ant works, taken in chronological order, are the following: P. Giovio, supplement to the fragmentary Dialogus de viris littcris illustribus, written soon after 1527, first published by Tiraboschi, Xtoria della Lctteratura italiana, Modena, 1871; G. Vasari, in Vite degli piu cccellcnti architettori, pittori, e scultori, &c., Florence, 1550; A. Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1553; this account, for which the author, a pupil and friend of the master s, had long been collecting materials, was much fuller than that of Vasari, who made use of it in rewriting his own life of Michelangelo for his second edition, which appeared after the master s death (1568). The best edition of Vasari is that by Mila- nesi, Florence, 1878-83; of Condivi, that by Gori and Marietta, Pisa, 1746. The first additions of importance were published by Bottari, Eaccolta di lettere sulla pitlura, &c., Rome, 1754 (2d ed., by Ticozzi, Milan, 1822); the next by Gaye, Carteggio incdito, 1840. Portions of the correspondence preserved in the Buonarroti archives were published by Guasti in his notes to the Rime di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1863, and by Daelli in Carte Michelangelesche inedite, Milan, 1865. Complete biographies of Michelangelo had been meanwhile attempted by J. Harford, London, 1857, and with more power by Hermann Grimm, Lcbcn Michelangelo s, Hanover (5th ed., 1879). A great increment of biographical material was at length obtained by the publication, in the four hundredth year after Michelangelo s birth, of the whole body of his letters preserved in the Buonarroti archives, Lettcre di Michelangelo Buonarroti, ed. G. Milanesi, Florence, 1875. This material was first employed* in a connected narrative by A. Gotti, Vita di Michel angelo, Florence, 1875. Next followed C. Heath Wilson, Life and Works of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florence, 1876 , the technical remarks in which, especially as concerns the fresco-paintings, are valuable. Lastly, the combined lives of Michelangelo and Raphael by Professor A. Springer in Dohme s series of Kunst u. Kilnstlcr, Leipsic, 1878, contain the best biography of the master which has yet appeared. Of the poems of Michelangelo the best edition is that already referred to, G. Guasti, Rime di Michelangelo Buonar roti, 1863; in earlier additions the text had been recklessly tampered with, and the rugged individuality of the master s style smoothed <lown. An edition with German translations was published by Hasenclever, Leipsic, 1875; for the English student the translations by Mr J. A. Symonds, in Sonnets of Michelangelo and Cam- panclla, London, 1878, are invaluable. (S. C.) MICHELET, JULES (1798-1874), one of the most voluminous and remarkable writers of France, and one Avho only lacked a keener power of self-criticism to make him one of the greatest, was born at Paris, August 21, 1798. He belonged to a family which had Huguenot traditions, and which was latterly occupied in the art of printing. His father was a master printer, but seems not to have been 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 College or Lyce"e Charlemagne, where he distinguished himself. He passed the university examination in 1821, and was shortly after appointed to a professorship or rather mastership of history in the Colldge 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, 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 Precis 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 maitre de conferences at the Ecole Normale. Four years later, in 1831, the Introduction a VHistoire Universelle showed a very different style, exhibit ing no doubt the idiosyncrasy and literary power of the writer to greater advantage, but also displaying the peculiar visionary qualities which make Michelet the most stimulat ing 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 at the same time improved his prospects, and 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 Ilistoire de France, which occupied him for about forty years, and of which we shall speak presently. But he accompanied this with numerous other works, chiefly of erudition, such as the (Euvres Choisies de Vico, the Memoires de Luther ecrits par lui-meme, the Origines du Droit Fran$ais, and somewhat later the Proces des Templiers. 1838 was a year of great importance in Michelet s life. He was in the fulness 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 College de France. Assisted by his friend 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, a History of the Roman Republic, but this was in his graver and earlier manner. The results of his lectures appeared in the volumes Le Pretre, la Femme, et la Famille and Le Peuple. These books do not display the apocalyptic style which, borrowed to a certain though no very great extent from Lamennais, characterizes Michelet s later works, but they contain in miniature almost the whole of his curious ethico- 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 revolu- I tion 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