t also be
a prophet. The volumes which treat of the Reformation, the Renaissance,
the wars of religion, are as brilliant as earlier volumes, but they
are less balanced and less coherent. The equilibrium between
Michelet's intellect and his imagination, between his ideas and his
passions, was disturbed, if not destroyed.

Michelet, who had been deprived of his chair in the College de France,
lost also his post in the Archives upon his refusal, in 1852, to swear
allegiance to the Emperor. Near Nantes in his tempest-beaten home,
near Genoa in a fold of the Apennines, where he watched the lizards
sleep or slide, a great appeasement came upon his spirit. He had
interpreted the soul of the people; he would now interpret the soul
of humbler kinsfolk--the bird, the insect; he would interpret the
inarticulate soul of the mountain and the sea. He studied other
documents--the documents of nature--with a passion of love, read
their meanings, and mingled as before his own spirit with theirs.
_L'Oiseau_, _L'Insecte_, _La Mer_, _La Montagne_, are canticles in
prose by a learned lover of the external world, rather than essays
in science; often extravagant in style, often extreme in sentiment,
and uncontrolled in imagination, but always the betrayals of genius.

Michelet's faults as an historian are great, and such as readily
strike an English reader. His rash generalisations, his lyrical
outbreaks, his Pindaric excitement, his verbiage assuming the place
of ideas, his romantic excess, his violence in ecclesiastical affairs,
his hostility to our country, his mysticism touched with sensuality,
his insistence on physiological details, his quick and irregular
utterance--these trouble at times his imaginative insight, and mar
his profound science in documents. He died at Hyeres in 1874, hoping
that God would grant him reunion with his lost ones, and the joys
promised to those who have sought and loved.

EDGAR QUINET (1803-1875), the friend and brother-in-arms of Michelet
in his attack upon the Jesuits, born at Bourg, of a Catholic father
and a Protestant mother, approached the study of literature and
history with that tendency to large _vues d'ensemble_ which was
natural to his mind, and which had been strengthened by discipleship
to Herder. Happy in temper, sound of conscience, generous of heart,
he illuminated many subjects, and was a complete master of none. A
poet of lofty intentions, in his _Ahasverus_ (1833)--the wandering
Jew, ty