TIMOLEON, G. B. I. 



383 



from an obscure district where lie was per- 

 sonally unknown. His influence in the Cham- 

 ber was but slight, and even his eloquence 

 produced little effect. At the time of the 

 coup d'etat (December 2, 1851) he withdrew 

 finally from public life. He was at this time 

 poor, although nominally the possessor of 

 large tracts of territory in Turkey, and the 

 recipient of a considerable income from his 

 works. He had lived extravagantly, and was 

 deeply in debt. A large subscription was 

 raised for him both at home and abroad by his 

 friends; but it was not sufficient to lift the 

 burdens which oppressed him, and he checked 

 it, and went resolutely to work to endeavor to 

 raise the amount by his literary labor. But he 

 was already past sixty years of age, and, though 

 lie wrote voluminously, his writings were 

 mostly of ephemeral character, and lacked the 

 freshness, the grace, and the brilliancy of his 

 earlier compositions. He prepared a collected 

 edition of his works, and appealed to the public 

 to purchase them to relieve him from embar- 

 rassment ; he put his estates into repeated lot- 

 teries, in which he urged all his friends to par- 

 ticipate, and his later years were spent largely 

 in querulous complaints against the public for 

 their ingratitude to their benefactor. About a 

 year before his death, the Emperor offered to 

 discharge his debts, amounting to about one 

 hundred and twenty thousand dollars, without 

 exacting any conditions from him, but the old 

 republicanism of the poet led him to refuse 

 this offer, which seemed really to have been 

 kindly intended. The death of his wife, in 

 1863, rendered him more unhappy than before, 

 and he indulged in strange vagaries, forgetful, 

 at times, of his own grand and noble career. 

 His works, besides those already named, were 

 his beautiful poem, "Jocelyn," 1835; "The 

 Fall of an Angel," 1838; "Poetical Miscella- 

 nies," 1839 ; " Three Months of Power," 1848 ; 

 "History of the Revolution of 1848," two vol- 

 umes, 1849 ; " Les Confidences," 1869 ; " Tous- 

 saint TOuverture," a dramatic poem, 1850; 

 "The New Confidences," 1851 ; "Genevieve, 

 the Memoirs of a Savant," "1851 ; " The Tailor 

 of St. Point," 1851 ; "Graziella," 1852; "His- 

 tory of the Restoration," sixvolumes, 8vo, 1851- 

 '63; "New Voyage in the Orient," 1853; 

 " Visions," 1852 ; " History of Turkey," six vol- 

 umes, 8vo, 1854; "History of Russia," two 

 volumes, 1855; "The Counsellor of the Peo- 

 ple," 1849-'50; "The Civilizer," 1851; "Fa- 

 miliar Course of Literature," 1856-'63. His 

 complete works, collected by himself, published 

 1860-'69, number about thirty uniform vol- 

 umes. 



LIBRI-CARUCCI BELLA SOMMAIA, Gu- 

 GLIELMO BRUTUS ICILIUS TIMOLEOX, Count de, 

 an Italian mathematician, professor, author, and 

 bibliophile, born in Florence, January 2, 1803 ; 

 died at Fiesole, near Florence, September 28, 

 1869. He was the son of the Count Libri-Bag- 

 nano, who several years later, after some not 

 very creditable adventures, escaped from the 



prison at Lyons, and became from 1825 to 1830 

 the secret agent of the King of the Netherlands 

 in Belgium. The son was well educated at 

 Florence and Pisa, and early developed a re- 

 markable talent for mathematical studies. In 

 1820, at the age of seventeen, he published an 

 extraordinary memoir on the " Theory of Num- 

 bers; " in 1823 another on some points in Ana- 

 lytic Geometry ; in 1826 one on the General Res- 

 olutions of Undetermined Equations of the First 

 Degree; and in 1826 a volume on "Physical 

 Questions. " He had been appointed a professor 

 in the University of Pisa in 1822. In 1830 his 

 political views, which he enunciated with great 

 freedom, and his participation in the unsuccess- 

 ful insurrection of that year, made him obnox- 

 ious to the Austrian Government, and, through 

 its influence, he was compelled to seek safety 

 from arrest by flight to France, where, through 

 the friendship of Arago, he was introduced 

 into the circle of science. In 1833 he was 

 naturalized as a citizen of France, and was 

 elected the successor of Legend re in the French 

 Academy. He secured the friendship of Guizot 

 and many other eminent men, though his first 

 friend, Arago, turned against him. Honors 

 were bestowed upon him in abundance; he 

 was made a professor at the Sorbonne, a pro- 

 fessor at the College of France, and, after he 

 had given in his adhesion to the doctrinaire 

 party, he was appointed to the chair of Analy- 

 sis in the Faculty of Sciences in Paris, and 

 charged with the functions of Inspector Gen- 

 eral of Public Instruction, of newspapers, and 

 of the public libraries of France. He received 

 the decoration of the Legion of Honor, and be- 

 came editor of the Journal des Savants. Pos- 

 sessing remarkable capacity for intellectual la- 

 bor, and great industry, Libri accomplished in 

 the fifteen years that followed a vast amount of 

 work. His " History of the Mathematical Sci- 

 ences in Italy from the Renaissance up to the 

 end of the Seventeenth Century," four volumes, 

 1838-'41, is a work of great erudition and abil- 

 ity, and will always be the standard history of 

 those sciences for that period ; but it excited 

 the displeasure of Arago and some of the 

 French mathematicians because it demon- 

 strated that what they had claimed as original 

 with them had been known two centuries 

 before in Italy. He also published during this 

 period four very remarkable treatises on the 

 higher mathematics. Turning his attention 

 also to matters connected with his official posi- 

 tion, he published " Letters on the Clergy and 

 the Liberty of Instruction," and "Recollections 

 of the Youth of Napoleon." He was also at 

 this time editor, not only of the Journal des 

 Savants, but of the Revue des Deux Mondes, 

 and a constant contributor to the Journal des 

 Debats, and wrote largely on bibliographic 

 subjects. His patrimony and his official posi- 

 tions had made him wealthy, but this and his 

 somewhat sarcastic and haughty temper had 

 also gained him many bitter enemies; and, 

 when he proposed through M. Guizot to give 



