MURET, or Muretus, Marc Antoine (1526-1585), French humanist, was born of respectable parentage at Muret near Limoges on 12th April 1526. Nothing is recorded of his early education, but at the age of eighteen he was already sufficiently accomplished to attract the notice of the elder Scaliger, and to be invited to prelect upon Cicero and Terence in the archiépiscopal college at Auch. He afterwards taught Latin at Villeneuve, and then at Bordeaux, where the youthful Montaigne was one of his pupils and played some of the principal parts in his Latin tragedies. Some time before 1552 he received a regency in the college of Cardinal Lemoine at Paris, and his brilliant lectures were largely attended, Henry II. and his queen being occasionally, it is recorded, among his hearers. His success seems to have excited more than the usual amount of envy; and in consequence of a disgraceful charge—which, however, was never established— he was thrown into prison. Here he had begun to carry out a resolution to starve himself to death, when the exertions of powerful friends procured his release. Hardly had he resumed lecturing at Toulouse when his career was again cut short by a new charge similar to that which had proved so disastrous at Paris; he saved his life by timely flight, but the records of the town bear that he was burned in effigy as a Huguenot and as shamefully immoral (1554). After a wandering and insecure life of some years in Italy, he received and accepted the invitation of the Cardinal d’Este to settle in Rome in 1559. Henceforward his life was one of unclouded prosperity. He was even able to revisit France in 1561 as a member of the cardinal’s suite at the colloquy of Poissy. The interest shown in his lectures on the Ethics of Aristotle, and on the Pandects, ...