CHARLES-FRANÇOIS DOMINIQUE DE, an eminent Franco-German, was born at Belchen, a French town of Lorraine, inhabited by Germans, on the 4th of November 1764 or 1765. In 1782 he was appointed lieutenant of artillery at Metz, where he employed his leisure in studying science, history, ancient and modern literature, and classics. In 1791 he published a work, De la Liberté, which, from its advocating principles antagonistic to those of the majority of the French people at that time, brought the author and the book into an unenviable notoriety. Villers was pursued by the Jacobins into Germany, where Dr Brandis did much to enlighten him regarding the existing state of German literature, which had the effect of reversing the original judgment of Villers respecting the comparative rank of the literatures of France and Germany, and determined him to spend his life in the high endeavour to hold up the torch for the mutual illumination of the two countries. He translated Heeren's Essay on the Influence of the Crusades into French, he wrote for the Spectateur du Nord, and published his famous Essai sur l'Esprit et l'Influence de la Réformation de Luther, which was crowned by the French Institute, and was subsequently translated twice into English, thrice into German, into Dutch, and into Swedish. Villers was subjected to much persecution by the French in 1806, on the taking of Lübeck; but in 1811 he was appointed professor of philosophy by Jérôme Bonaparte in the University of Göttingen. In 1813, after the restoration of the house of Brunswick, he was dismissed from his post, but gained a retiring pension. Consumption was making rapid inroads on the strength of this enlightened and excellent man, and he fell a victim to that incurable malady on the 26th of February 1815. Besides the Philosophie de Kant, a Lettre à George Cuvier, a Rapport sur l'État de la Littérature Ancienne, he was engaged at his death on a life of Martin Luther, of which he had formerly published a Précis Historique.