During the celebrity of his journal, the _Quotidienne_, he was made reader to the king, with a salary of 3,000 francs; to which appointment was attached the somewhat strange stipulation, that he should never be called upon to perform its duties. After 1819, when a plan was devised of buying up the influential journals, Michaud and his fellow-proprietors were offered 500,000 francs for theirs, which our author declined. “Monseigneur,” said he to the excellency who solicited him, “there is but one thing for which I could be tempted to sell the _Quotidienne_, and that would be a little health. If you could give me that, I might allow myself to be corrupted.” The minister, Villéle, returned repeatedly to the charge, but when, in consequence of the increasing weakness of his health, the sexagenarian Michaud parted with the greater part of his shares of the journal, it was only to pass them over to another self, his friend Laurentie. Whilst carrying on his great work, he had been surprised to meet with a vast quantity of matter which he had not dreamt of when he began it; and he conceived the idea of not only reconstructing his history, but of going to the Holy Land, in search of more information. Although it was too late for such an attempt, his fame procured him encouragement; and the king, Charles X., so far favoured it as to give him 25,000 francs to defray his expenses. He set out at the beginning of 1830. Whatever gratification he derived from his voyage, it must have been sadly damped by the news he received from France during that eventful year. To complete his griefs, he likewise at this period lost 200,000 francs, the greater part of his fortune, which he had imprudently placed in unsafe hands. He still, however, had a moderate competence, and might have passed the remainder of his days in ease, but for that mismanagement to which the families of literary men are so frequently subject. On his return from the Holy Land he sojourned for a time in Italy, where he was kindly welcomed by his natural sovereign, Charles Albert. In 1837 he was named member of the Académie des Inscriptions; but honours from monarchs and academies could not put off the fatal hour, and he died at the elegant village of Passy on the 30th of September, 1839. On this occasion was exhibited an instance of what our poet calls “the ruling passion, strong in death.” Few authors had received more adulation, and no one could be more covetous of it. Extraordinary instances are told of the copious draughts of this intoxicating beverage that were offered to him, and of the greediness with which he swallowed them. “Never,” says his biographer, “although he loved to be called the _La Fontaine of journalism_, did he think of the second fable of the good man.”[1] One of the most extravagant of his flatterers said to a friend, admitted for a last interview, “With all his weakness, not the least trace of decline of intellect;