850 GASTON BOISSIER. 



But Boissier was attracted by the actualities as well as the possi- 

 bilities of antiquity. Appointed in 1861 to the chair of Latin elo- 

 quence at the College de France, he began appropriately with a course 

 on the times of Cicero. In a brilliant lecture of introduction, he 

 implies that the study of history means to him the study of personali- 

 ties; Cicero and his friends are to furnish the clue to the mo\ements 

 of the age. To these personalities he devoted special essays, later 

 to be combined into one of his most popular and delightful books. 

 A passing reference to Saint-Simon and a comparison of Cicero and 

 Mme. de Sevigne are prophetic, too, of further works to come; there 

 is hardly a paragraph of the brief lecture which did not later develop 

 into some fuller treatment. To Boissier's hearers, his theme, so 

 eloquently presented, must have thrilled with an almost contemporary 

 interest, for France had passed from an age of Republican revolution to 

 one of Imperialism. 



That a professor of Latin eloquence could interpret his subject 

 broadly is shown by Boissier's appointment in 1865 as viaitrc de 

 conferences at the Ecole Normale to succeed Sainte-Beuve in the 

 course on Latin poetry. Eleven years later he was elected to the 

 French Academy in the place of M. Patin. In the interval there had 

 appeared, besides his studies of Cicero and his friends, a noble group 

 of essays, published in the Revue des Deux Mondcs, which develop 

 the various interests conspicuous at the beginning of his career. His 

 archaeological tendencies now result in a discussion of the progress 

 of archaeology and in a sketch of ancient life in Pompeii; based on 

 sober fact, this brilliant portrait makes the pages of Bulwer and 

 Sienkiewicz seem tawdry and dull. The publication of. Le Blant's 

 "Inscriptions chretiennes de la Gaule" suggested an interpretation of 

 this new material; the appearance of those impoitant works, the 

 "Histoire poetique de Charlemagne," by Gaston Paris, and "Les 

 Epopees francaises," by Leon Gautier, inspired one of the most 

 penetrating and universal of all his writings, an essay on recent 

 theories of the epic. A series of papers treated of Roman societ\' 

 under the Empire, and there followed in 1874 a more profound study 

 of the Roman spirit in the two volumes on "La Religion romaine," 

 in which the treatment is by no means confined to religion, but in- 

 cludes among other things an appreciation of Virgil and of Seneca, 

 quite as important for the literary criticism of these authors. Finally 

 there had appeared a work which includes and supplements his earlier 

 studies on Roman society, and is significant likewise for the history 

 of philosophy and for literary history — " L'Opposition sous les 



