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 persecuted 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.