Michelet was now twelve years old, and knew nothing but a word or two of Latin, which he had learned from an old bookseller who had been a schoolmaster, and was still an enthusiast in grammar. "He left me, when he died, all he had in the world--a manuscript; it was a very remarkable grammar, but incomplete, he not having been able to devote to it but thirty or forty years." Michelet, we may take this opportunity of remarking, has a perpetual under-current of humor. "Our place of work was in a cellar, where I had for companions my grandfather, when he came, and at all times a spider--an industrious spider, that worked beside me, and harder than I did--no doubt of it." Michelet's religious education had been entirely neglected. However, among the few books he read, happened to be the "Imitation of Christ." "In these pages, I perceived all of a sudden, beyond this dreary world, another life and hope. The feeling of religion thus acquired was very strong in me; it nourished itself from every thing, fortifying itself in its progress by a multitude of holy and tender things in art and poetry which are erroneously believed alien to it." In the then existing museum of French monuments, he received "his first lively impressions of history." He peopled the tombs in his imagination, felt the presence of their occupants, and "never entered without a kind of terror those low vaults in which slumbered Dagobert, Chilpéric, and Frédégonde." As for any thing like a regular education, all he had of it at this time was a short daily lesson from his friend, the grammarian, to whom he went in the morning before his work began. A friend of his father proposed to get the lad a situation in the Imperial Printing Office. It was a great temptation: things had become more and more gloomy with the family. "My mother grew worse, and France also (Moscow--1813!); we were in extreme penury." Yet his parents declined the offer; they had great faith in his future, and resolved to give him the education necessary to develop his talents. He was sent to the Collége de Charlemagne. Great indeed, must have been their faith, but it has not been unrewarded. If Michelet had entered the Imperial Printing Office, what would have become of him? He would soon have earned a livelihood, and would probably have now been a respectable master-printer, but nothing more. As many great men are spoiled for all great things, by tying them down to uncongenial professions, as there are little men spoiled for all useful things by hoisting them up to professions for which they are unqualified.