BOISSARD, JEAN JACQUES (1528-1602), French antiquary and Latin poet, was born at Besancon. He studied at Louvain; but, disgusted by the severity of his master, he secretly left that seminary, and after traversing a great part of Germany reached Italy, where he remained several years and was often reduced to great straits. His residence in Italy developed in his mind a taste for antiquities, and he soon formed a collection of the most curious monuments from Rome and its vicinity. He then visited the islands of the Archipelago, with the intention of travelling through Greece, but a severe illness obliged him to return to Rome. Here he resumed his favourite pursuits with great ardour, and having completed his collection, returned to his native 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