was luminous through its skilful arrangement; Thiers'
_Histoire_ was copious, facile, brilliant, more just in its general
conception than exact in statement, a plea for revolutionary
patriotism as against the royalist reaction of the day, and not
without influence in preparing the spirit of the country for the
approaching Revolution of July. His _Histoire du Consulat et de
l'Empire_ (1845-62) is the great achievement of Thiers' maturity;
journalist, orator, minister of state, until he became the chief of
stricken France in 1871 his highest claim to be remembered was this
vast record of his country's glory. He had an appetite for facts;
no detail--the price of bread, of soap, of candles--was a matter of
indifference to him; he could not show too many things, or show them
too clearly; his supreme quality was intelligence; his passion was
the pride of patriotism; his foible was the vanity of military success,
the zeal of a chauvinist. He was a liberal; but Napoleon summed up
France, and won her battles, therefore Napoleon, the great captain,
who "made war with his genius and politics with his passions," must
be for ever magnified. The _coup d'etat_ of the third Napoleon owed
a debt to the liberal historian who had reconstructed the Napoleonic
legend. The campaigns and battle-pieces of Thiers are unsurpassed
in their kind. His style in narrative is facile, abundant, animated,
and so transparent that nothing seems to intervene between the object
and the reader who has become a spectator; a style negligent at times,
and even incorrect, adding no charm of its own to a lucid presentation
of things.

JULES MICHELET, the greatest imaginative restorer of the past, the
greatest historical interpreter of the soul of ancient France, was
born in 1798 in Paris, an infant seemingly too frail and nervous to
remain alive. His early years gave him experience, brave and pathetic,
of the hardships of the poor. His father, an unsuccessful printer,
often found it difficult to procure bread or fire for his household;
but he resolved that his son should receive an education. The boy,
of a fine and sensitive organisation, knew cold and hunger; he watched
his mother toiling, and from day to day declining in health. Two
sources of consolation he found--the _Imitation_, which told him of
a Divine refuge from sorrow, and the Museum of French monuments, which
made him forget all present distress in visions of the vanished
centuries. Mocked and persec