uted by his schoolfellows, he never lost
courage, and had the joy of rewarding his parents with the cross won
by his schoolboy theme. In happy country days his aunt Alexis told
him legendary tales, and read to him the old chroniclers of France.
Michelet's vocation was before long revealed, and its summons was
irresistible.

In 1827 he published his earliest works, the _Precis de l'Histoire
Moderne_, a modest survey of a wide field, in which genius illuminated
scholarship, and a translation of the _Scienza Nuova_ of Vico, the
master who impressed him with the thought that humanity is in a
constant process of creation under the influence of the Divine ideas.
The _Histoire Romaine_ and the _Introduction a l'Histoire
Universelle_ followed; the latter a little book, written with
incredible ardour under the inspiration of the days of July. His
friend Quinet had taught him to see in history an ever-broadening
combat for freedom--in Michelet's words, "an eternal July," and the
exposition of this idea was of the nature of a philosophical
entrancement.

A teacher at the Ecole Normale, appointed chief of the historical
section of the National Archives in 1831, Guizot's substitute at the
Sorbonne in 1833, professor of history and morals at the College de
France in 1838, Michelet lived in and for the life of his people and
of his land. The _Histoire de France_, begun in 1830, was completed
thirty-seven years later. After the disasters of the war of 1870-71,
with failing strength the author resumed his labours, endeavouring
to add, as it were, an appendix on the nineteenth century.

A passionate searcher among original sources, published and
unpublished, handling documents as if they were things of flesh and
blood, seeing the outward forms of existence with the imaginative
eye, pressing through these to the soul of each successive epoch,
possessed by an immense pity for the obscure generations of human
toilers, having, more than almost any other modern writer, Virgil's
gift of tears, ardent in admiration, ardent in indignation, with ideas
impregnated by emotions, and emotions quickened by ideas, Michelet
set himself to resuscitate the buried past. It seemed to him that
his eminent predecessors--Guizot, Mignet, Thiers, Thierry--had each
envisaged history from some special point of view. Each had too little
of the outward body or too little of the inward soul of history.
Michelet dared to hope that a resurrection of the integral li