the pope employed him about nine years looking out marble at the quarries of Pietra Santa for the façade of the family church of San Lorenzo at Florence; and during the pontificate of Adrian VI., and part of that of Clement VII.—another Medici—he was engaged on the Laurentian library and the Medici chapel in San Lorenzo, on the family mausoleum, where are the celebrated allegorical figures of Night and Morning, which may be now seen in casts at the Crystal palace at Sydenham. There is no evidence of Michelangelo's having been in Rome between 1513 and 1525. Part of his time from this period was devoted to improving the fortifications of Florence, used against the pope, Clement VII., in 1529. In 1533, however, in the tenth year of Clement's pontificate, Michelangelo resumed his painting, and just thirteen years after the death of Raphael, commenced his famous fresco of the "Last Judgment" on the altar-wall of the Sistine chapel. This great composition is 47 feet high by 43 wide, and it occupied the painter about eight years; it was completed in 1541 in the pontificate of Paul III., who in 1535 had made Michelangelo painter, sculptor, and architect of the Vatican palace. He produced no good work in painting after this time; the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina, also in the Vatican and finished in 1549, are very inferior works. He was now chiefly employed as an architect, having in 1547 succeeded San Gallo as architect of St. Peter's. The great mausoleum of Julius resulted in the simple but noble monument in San Pietro in Vinculis, of which the principal figures are the famous sitting statue of Moses and those of active and contemplative life executed by Michelangelo himself; the Virgin and Child, the Prophet and Sibyl, were executed by Raffaello da Montelupo; and the monument was thus finally completed in 1550, after an unavoidable delay, on the part of Michelangelo, of more than forty years from the date of the original commission. Michelangelo altered the plan of St. Peter's, but did not live to complete the dome, of which he made the model in 1558 (for the succession of architects of this church, see Bramante). In 1556 our great artist was much distressed by the death of his faithful servant Francesco d'Amadore, called Urbino, who had lived with him twenty-six years. The Duke Cosmo of Florence was at this time very anxious to get Michelangelo back to the Tuscan capital; but he preferred devoting the remainder of his life to the church, which he did according to his views in carrying on the rebuilding of the great cathedral, without receiving any emolument for his labour; he appears also to have had political reasons for declining to return to Florence. In 1560 the duke visited Rome, and gave Michelangelo an interview. In 1563 he was made vice-president of the Academy of Florence, then founded by Cosmo, and of which the duke himself was the president. In the night of the 17th of February, 1564, Michelangelo died at Rome, having nearly completed his eighty-ninth year, and having conducted the building of St. Peter's till his death, throughout the five pontificates of Paul III., Julius III., Marcellus II., Paul IV., and Pius IV. Gherardo Fidelissimi, one of the physicians who attended him, announcing his death to the Duke Cosmo at Florence on the 18th, speaks of him as a miracle of nature, and terms him the greatest man that had ever lived upon the earth. It was the great artist's wish to be buried at Florence, and his body was taken to Florence on the 14th of March, and buried in a vault in the church of Santa Croce. Michelangelo was never married, but is reputed to have loved Vittoria Colonna. He wrote many poems; selections translated into English have been published by J. E. Taylor—Michelangelo Considered as a Philosophic Poet, &c., 8vo, London, 1840. An English life of him was published by Duppa in 1816; and another by J. S. Harford appeared in London in 1856, 2 vols. 8vo, with a folio of plates. A French work was published by Quatremere de Quincy at Paris in 1835, a mere discursive essay on his life and works. The real authorities are Condivi's Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, folio, Flor. 1746; Vasari's memoir in the Vite dei Pittori, &c. (ed. Le Monnier, vol. xii., 1856); and the Documents published by Gaye, in his Corteggio Inedito D'Artisti, 3 vols. 8vo, Flor., 1840. Great as this remarkable man was in almost every intellectual accomplishment, and he was great in painting, yet he was not an excellent painter. Fuseli well describes his manner in the expressive remark, that his women were female men, and his children diminutive giants. The cartoon of Pisa must have been a superb production; but his greatest work is the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The "Last Judgment" is much inferior; he seems never to have painted in oil. All his figures proclaim the sculptor; and the ultimate aim of his art, whether in painting or sculpture, is an abstract impersonation of dignity under the various affections of humanity.—R. N. W.
MICHELET, Jules, one of the greatest of contemporary French writers, was born at Paris on the 21st of August, 1798. In the introduction to his little book, "Le Peuple," Michelet has told the story of his early life. He was the son of a small master printer of Paris, who was ruined by one of the Emperor Napoleon's arbitrary measures against the press, by which the number of printers in Paris was suddenly reduced. For the benefit of his creditors the elder Michelet, with no aid but that of his family, printed, folded, bound, and sold some trivial little works of which he owned the copyright; and the historian of France began his career by "composing" in the typographical, not the literary, sense of the word. At twelve he had picked up a little Latin from a friendly old-bookseller who had been a village schoolmaster, and his brave parents, in spite of their penury, decided that he should go to college. He entered the Lycée Charlemagne, where he distinguished himself, and his exercises attracted the notice of Villemain. He supported himself by private teaching until, in 1821, he obtained by competition a professorship in his college. His first publications were two chronological summaries of modern history, 1825-26. In 1827 he essayed a higher flight by the publication, not only of his "Précis de l'Histoire Moderne," but by that of his volume on the Scienza Nuova of Vico ("Principes de la Philosophie d'Histoire"), the then little-known father of the so-called philosophy of history, whose work was thus first introduced to the French public, and indeed to that of England. These two works procured him a professorship at the école normale. After the revolution of the Three Days, the now distinguished professor was placed at the head of the historical section of the French archives—a welcome position which gave him the command of new and unexplored material for the history of France. The first work in which he displayed his peculiar historical genius, was his "Histoire Romaine," 1831, embracing only the history of the Roman republic. From 1833 dates the appearance of his great "History of France," of which still uncompleted work twelve volumes had appeared in 1860. In 1834, Guizot made the dawning historian of France his suppléant or substitute in the chair of history connected with the Faculty of Letters, and in 1838 he was appointed professor of history in the collège de France. Meanwhile, besides instalments of his "History of France," he had published several works, among them (1835) his excellent and interesting "Mémoires de Luther," in which by extracts from Luther's Table-Talk and Letters, the great reformer was made to tell himself the history of his life; the "Œuvres Choisies de Vico;" and the philosophical and poetical "Origines du Droit Français." In the education controversy of the later years of Louis Philippe's reign, Michelet and his friend Edgar Quinet (q.v.) vehemently opposed the pretensions of the clerical party, and carried the war into the enemy's camp by the publication of their joint work, "Les Jesuites," 1843, followed in 1844 by Michelet's "Du Prêtre, de la Femme, de la Famille"—translated into English as "Priests, Women, and Families." Guizot bowed to the ecclesiastical storm which these works invoked, and suspended the lectures of the two anticlerical professors. To 1846 belongs Michelet's eloquent and touching little book, "Le Peuple," far from exclusively political or sentimental, but depicting from personal observation the inner and outer life of French society, in all its grades, with wonderful comprehensiveness and sympathy. The revolution of February, 1848, restored Michelet to his functions. He waived, however, the political career which was then open to him, and laboured at his grandiose "History of the French Revolution," of which the first volume had appeared in 1847. In 1851 he was again suspended—this time by the ministry of the prince-president—from his professional functions, and on account of his democratic teachings. After the coup d'état he refused to take the oaths, and lost all his public employments. He was subsequently occupied with his "History of France" and of the French Revolution, and with the production of some other and minor works. It is not among the last that must be classed his two striking volumes, "L'Oiseau," 1856, and "L'Insecte," 1857, the results of a retreat from the pressure of a new political system into the realm of nature. In these singular works, by dealing with the instinctive and involuntary in animated nature as if they were the products of reason and feeling, a strange and novel interest, even if at the expense
