tive country; but not being permitted
to profess publicly the Protestant religion, which he had embraced some
time before, he withdrew to Metz, where he died on the 30th of October
1602. His most important works are: _Poemata_ (1574); _Emblemata_
(1584); _Icones Virorum Illustrium_ (1597); _Vitae et Icones Sultanorum
Turcicorum_, &c. (1597); _Theatrum Vitae Humanae_ (1596); _Romanae Urbis
Topographia_ (1597-1602), now very rare; _De Divinatione et Magicis
Praestigiis_ (1605); _Habitus Variarum Orbis Gentium_ (1581), ornamented
with seventy illuminated figures.

BOISSIER, MARIE LOUIS ANTOINE GASTON (1823-1908), French classical
scholar, and secretary of the French Academy, was born at Nimes on the
15th of August 1823. The Roman monuments of his native town very early
attracted Gaston Boissier to the study of ancient history. He made
epigraphy his particular theme, and at the age of twenty-three became a
professor of rhetoric at Angouleme, where he lived and worked for ten
years without further ambition. A travelling inspector of the
university, however, happened to hear him lecture, and Boissier was
called to Paris to be professor at the Lycee Charlemagne. He began his
literary career by a thesis on the poet Attius (1857) and a study on the
life and work of M. Terentius Varro (1861). In 1861 he was made
professor of Latin oratory at the College de France, and he became an
active contributor to the _Revue des deux mondes_. In 1865 he published
_Ciceron et ses amis_ (Eng. trans, by A.D. Jones, 1897), which has
enjoyed a success such as rarely falls to the lot of a work of
erudition. In studying the manners of ancient Rome, Boissier had learned
to re-create its society and to reproduce its characteristics with
exquisite vivacity. In 1874 he published _La Religion romaine d'Auguste
aux Antonins_ (2 vols.), in which he analysed the great religious
movement of antiquity that preceded the acceptance of Christianity. In
_L'Opposition sous les Cesars_ (1875) he drew a remarkable picture of
the political decadence of Rome under the early successors of Augustus.
By this time Boissier had drawn to himself the universal respect of
scholars and men of letters, and on the death of H.J.G. Patin, the
author of _Etudes sur les tragiques grecs_, in 1876, he was elected a
member of the French Academy, of which he was appointed perpetual
secretary in 1895.

His later works include _Promenades archeologiques: Rome et Pompei_
(1880; se