"If the man that turnips cries Cry not when his father dies, Then 'tis plain the man had rather Have a turnip than his father."

I cannot say that the logic of these verses was ever entirely to my satisfaction. I do not see my way through it as clearly as could be wished. But I see my way most clearly through D'Arc; and the result is —that he would greatly have preferred not merely a turnip to his father, but the saving a pound or so of bacon to saving the Oriflamme of France.

It is probable (as M. Michelet suggests) that the title of Virgin or Pucelle had in itself, and apart from the miraculous stories about her, a secret power over the rude soldiery and partisan chiefs of that period; for in such a person they saw a representative manifestation of the Virgin Mary, who, in a course of centuries, had grown steadily upon the popular heart.

As to Joanna's supernatural detection of the dauphin (Charles VII) among three hundred lords and knights, I am surprised at the credulity which could ever lend itself to that theatrical juggle. Who admires more than myself the sublime enthusiasm, the rapturous faith in herself, of this pure creature? But I am far from admiring stage artifices which not La Pucelle, but the court, must have arranged; nor can surrender myself to the conjurer's legerdemain, such as may be seen every day for a shilling. Southey's "Joan of Arc" was published in 1796. Twenty years after, talking with Southey, I was surprised to find him still owning a secret bias in favor of Joan, founded on her detection of the dauphin. The story, for the benefit of the reader new to the case, was this: La Pucelle was first made known to the dauphin, and presented to his court, at Chinon; and here came her first trial. By way of testing her supernatural pretensions, she was to find out the royal personage amongst the whole ark of clean and unclean creatures. Failing in this coup d'essai, she would not simply disappoint many a beating heart in the glittering crowd that on different motives yearned for her success, but she would ruin herself, and, as the oracle within had told her, would, by ruining herself, ruin France. Our own Sovereign Lady Victoria rehearses annually a trial not so severe in degree, but the same in kind. She "pricks" for sheriffs. Joanna pricked for a king. But observe the difference: our own Lady pricks for two men out of three; Joanna for one man out of three hundred. Happy Lady of the Islands and the Orient!—she can go astray in her choice only by one-half: to the extent of one-half she must have the satisfaction of being right. And yet, even with these tight limits to the misery of a boundless discretion, permit me, Liege Lady, with all loyalty, to submit that now and then you prick with your pin the wrong man. But the poor child from Domremy, shrinking under the gaze of a dazzling court—not because dazzling (for in visions she had seen those that were more so), but because some of them wore a scoffing smile on their features—how should she throw her line into so deep a river to angle for a king, where many a gay creature was sporting that masqueraded as kings in dress! Nay, even more than any true king would have done: for, in Southey's version of the story, the dauphin says, by way of trying the virgin's magnetic sympathy with royalty,

"On the throne, I the while mingling with the menial throng, Some courtier shall be seated."

This usurper is even crowned: "the jeweled crown shines on a menial's head." But, really, that is "un peu fort"; and the mob of spectators might raise a scruple whether our friend the jackdaw upon the throne, and the dauphin himself, were not grazing the shins of treason. For the dauphin could not lend more than belonged to him. According to the popular notion, he had no crown for himself; consequently none to lend, on any pretence whatever, until the consecrated Maid should take him to Rheims. This was the popular notion in France. But certainly it was the dauphin's interest to support the popular notion, as he meant to use the services of Joanna. For if he were king already, what was it that she could do for him beyond Orleans? That is to say, what more than a merely military service could she render him? And, above all, if he were king without a coronation, and without the oil from the sacred ampulla, what advantage was yet open to him by celerity above his competitor, the English boy? Now was to be a race for a coronation: he that should win that race carried the superstition of France along with him: he that should first be drawn from the ovens of Rheims was under that superstition baked into a king.

La Pucelle, before she could be allowed to practise as a warrior, was put through her manual and platoon exercise, as a pupil in divinity, at the bar of six eminent men in wigs. According to Southey (v. 393, bk. iii., in the original edition of his "Joan of Arc,") she "appalled the doctors." It's not easy to do that: but they had some reason to feel bothered, as that surgeon would assuredly feel bothered who, upon proceeding to dissect a subject, should find the subject retaliating as a dissector upon himself, especially if Joanna ever made the speech to them which occupies v. 354-391, bk. iii. It is a double impossibility: 1st, because a piracy from Tindal's "Christianity as old as the Creation"—a piracy a parte ante, and by three centuries; 2d, it is quite contrary to the evidence on Joanna's trial. Southey's "Joan" of A.D. 1796 (Cottle, Bristol) tells the doctors, among other secrets, that she never in her life attended—1st, Mass; nor 2d, the Sacramental Table; nor 3d, Confession. In the meantime, all this deistical confession of Joanna's, besides being suicidal for the interest of her cause, is opposed to the depositions upon both trials. The very best witness called from first to last deposes that Joanna attended these rites of her Church even too often; was taxed with doing so; and, by blushing, owned the charge as a fact, though certainly not as a fault. Joanna was a girl of natural piety, that saw God in forests and hills and fountains, but did not the less seek him in chapels and consecrated oratories.

This peasant girl was self-educated through her own natural meditativeness. If the reader turns to that divine passage in "Paradise Regained" which Milton has put into the mouth of our Saviour when first entering the wilderness, and musing upon the tendency of those great impulses growing within himself——-

"Oh, what a multitude of thoughts at once Awakened in me swarm, while I consider What from within I feel myself, and hear What from without comes often to my ears, Ill sorting with my present state compared! When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing; all my mind was set Serious to learn and know, and thence to do, What might be public good; myself I thought Born to that end——"

he will have some notion of the vast reveries which brooded over the heart of Joanna in early girlhood, when the wings were budding that should carry her from Orleans to Rheims; when the golden chariot was dimly revealing itself that should carry her from the kingdom of France Delivered to the Eternal Kingdom.

It is not requisite for the honour of Joanna, nor is there in this place room, to pursue her brief career of action. That, though wonderful, forms the earthly part of her story; the spiritual part is the saintly passion of her imprisonment, trial, and execution. It is unfortunate, therefore, for Southey's "Joan of Arc" (which, however, should always be regarded as a juvenile effort), that precisely when her real glory begins the poem ends. But this limitation of the interest grew, no doubt, from the constraint inseparably attached to the law of epic unity. Joanna's history bisects into two opposite hemispheres, and both could not have been presented to the eye in one poem, unless by sacrificing all unity of theme, or else by involving the earlier half, as a narrative episode, in the latter; which, however, might have been done, for it might have been communicated to a fellow-prisoner, or a confessor, by Joanna herself. It is sufficient, as concerns this section of Joanna's life, to say that she fulfilled, to the height of her promises, the restoration of the prostrate throne. France had become a province of England, and for the ruin of both, if such a yoke could be maintained. Dreadful pecuniary exhaustion caused the English energy to droop; and that critical opening La Pucelle used with a corresponding felicity of audacity and suddenness (that were in themselves portentous) for introducing the wedge of French native resources, for rekindling the national pride, and for planting the dauphin once more upon his feet. When Joanna appeared, he had been on the point of giving up the struggle with the English, distressed as they were, and of flying to the south of France. She taught him to blush for such abject counsels. She liberated Orleans, that great city, so decisive by its fate for the issue of the war, and then beleaguered by the English with an elaborate application of engineering skill unprecedented in Europe. Entering the city after sunset on the 29th of April, she sang mass on Sunday, May 8th, for the entire disappearance of the besieging force. On the 29th of June she fought and gained over the English the decisive battle of Patay; on the 9th of July she took Troyes by a coup-de-main from a mixed garrison of English and Burgundians; on the 15th of that month she carried the dauphin into Rheims; on Sunday the 17th she crowned him; and there she rested from her labour of triumph. All that was to be done she had now accomplished; what remained was—to suffer.

All this forward movement was her own; excepting one man, the whole council was against her. Her enemies were all that drew power from earth. Her supporters were her own strong enthusiasm, and the headlong contagion by which she carried this sublime frenzy into the hearts of women, of soldiers, and of all who lived by labour. Henceforward she was thwarted; and the worst error that she committed was to lend the sanction of her presence to counsels which she had ceased to approve. But she had now accomplished the capital objects which her own visions had dictated. These involved all the rest. Errors were now less important; and doubtless it had now become more difficult for herself to pronounce authentically what were errors. The noble girl had achieved, as by a rapture of motion, the capital end of clearing out a free space around her sovereign, giving him the power to move his arms with effect, and, secondly, the inappreciable end of winning for that sovereign what seemed to all France the heavenly ratification of his rights, by crowning him with the ancient solemnities. She had made it impossible for the English now to step before her. They were caught in an irretrievable blunder, owing partly to discord among the uncles of Henry VI, partly to a want of funds, but partly to the very impossibility which they believed to press with tenfold force upon any French attempt to forestall theirs. They laughed at such a thought; and, while they laughed, she did it. Henceforth the single redress for the English of this capital oversight, but which never could have redressed it effectually, was to vitiate and taint the coronation of Charles VII as the work of a witch. That policy, and not malice (as M. Michelet is so happy to believe), was the moving principle in the subsequent prosecution of Joanna. Unless they unhinged the force of the first coronation in the popular mind by associating it with power given from hell, they felt that the sceptre of the invader was broken.

But she, the child that, at nineteen, had wrought wonders so great for France, was she not elated? Did she not lose, as men so often have lost, all sobriety of mind when standing upon the pinnacle of success so giddy? Let her enemies declare. During the progress of her movement, and in the centre of ferocious struggles, she had manifested the temper of her feelings by the pity which she had everywhere expressed for the suffering enemy. She forwarded to the English leaders a touching invitation to unite with the French, as brothers, in a common crusade against infidels—thus opening the road for a soldierly retreat. She interposed to protect the captive or the wounded; she mourned over the excesses of her countrymen; she threw herself off her horse to kneel by the dying English soldier, and to comfort him with such ministrations, physical or spiritual, as his situation allowed. "Nolebat," says the evidence, "uti ense suo, aut quemquam interficere." She sheltered the English that invoked her aid in her own quarters. She wept as she beheld, stretched on the field of battle, so many brave enemies that had died without confession. And, as regarded herself, her elation expressed itself thus: on the day when she had finished her work, she wept; for she knew that, when her triumphal task was done, her end must be approaching. Her aspirations pointed only to a place which seemed to her more than usually full of natural piety, as one in which it would give her pleasure to die. And she uttered, between smiles and tears, as a wish that inexpressibly fascinated her heart, and yet was half fantastic, a broken prayer that God would return her to the solitudes from which he had drawn her, and suffer her to become a shepherdess once more. It was a natural prayer, because nature has laid a necessity upon every human heart to seek for rest and to shrink from torment. Yet, again, it was a half-fantastic prayer, because, from childhood upward, visions that she had no power to mistrust, and the voices which sounded in her ear for ever, had long since persuaded her mind that for her no such prayer could be granted. Too well she felt that her mission must be worked out to the end, and that the end was now at hand. All went wrong from this time. She herself had created the funds out of which the French restoration should grow; but she was not suffered to witness their development or their prosperous application. More than one military plan was entered upon which she did not approve. But she still continued to expose her person as before. Severe wounds had not taught her caution. And at length, in a sortie from Compigne (whether through treacherous collusion on the part of her own friends is doubtful to this day), she was made prisoner by the Burgundians, and finally surrendered to the English.

Now came her trial. This trial, moving of course under English influence, was conducted in chief by the Bishop of Beauvais. He was a Frenchman, sold to English interests, and hoping, by favour of the English leaders, to reach the highest preferment. "Bishop that art, Archbishop that shalt be, Cardinal that mayest be," were the words that sounded continually in his ear; and doubtless a whisper of visions still higher, of a triple crown, and feet upon the necks of kings, sometimes stole into his heart. M. Michelet is anxious to keep us in mind that this bishop was but an agent of the English. True. But it does not better the case for his countryman that, being an accomplice in the crime, making himself the leader in the persecution against the helpless girl, he was willing to be all this in the spirit, and with the conscious vileness of a cat's-paw. Never from the foundations of the earth was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defence and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honour thy flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning, and true as God's lightning to its mark, that ran before France and laggard Europe by many a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood! Is it not scandalous, is it not humiliating to civilization, that, even at this day, France exhibits the horrid spectacle of judges examining the prisoner against himself; seducing him, by fraud, into treacherous conclusions against his own head; using the terrors of their power for extorting confessions from the frailty of hope; nay (which is worse), using the blandishments of condescension and snaky kindness for thawing into compliances of gratitude those whom they had failed to freeze into terror? Wicked judges! barbarian jurisprudence!—that, sitting in your own conceit on the summits of social wisdom, have yet failed to learn the first principles of criminal justice—sit ye humbly and with docility at the feet of this girl from Domrmy, that tore your webs of cruelty into shreds and dust. "Would you examine me as a witness against myself?" was the question by which many times she defied their arts. Continually she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any business before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous charges against her. General questions were proposed to her on points of casuistical divinity; two-edged questions, which not one of themselves could have answered, without, on the one side, landing himself in heresy (as then interpreted), or, on the other, in some presumptuous expression of self-esteem. Next came a wretched Dominican, that pressed her with an objection, which, if applied to the Bible, would tax every one of its miracles with unsoundness. The monk had the excuse of never having read the Bible. M. Michelet has no such excuse; and it makes one blush for him, as a philosopher, to find him describing such an argument as "weighty," whereas it is but a varied expression of rude Mahometan metaphysics. Her answer to this, if there were room to place the whole in a clear light, was as shattering as it was rapid. Another thought to entrap her by asking what language the angelic visitors of her solitude had talked—as though heavenly counsels could want polyglot interpreters for every word, or that God needed language at all in whispering thoughts to a human heart. Then came a worse devil, who asked her whether the Archangel Michael had appeared naked. Not comprehending the vile insinuation, Joanna, whose poverty suggested to her simplicity that it might be the costliness of suitable robes which caused the demur, asked them if they fancied God, who clothed the flowers of the valleys, unable to find raiment for his servants. The answer of Joanna moves a smile of tenderness, but the disappointment of her judges makes one laugh exultingly. Others succeeded by troops, who upbraided her with leaving her father; as if that greater Father, whom she believed herself to have been serving, did not retain the power of dispensing with his own rules, or had not said that for a less cause than martyrdom man and woman should leave both father and mother.

On Easter Sunday, when the trial had been long proceeding, the poor girl fell so ill as to cause a belief that she had been poisoned. It was not poison. Nobody had any interest in hastening a death so certain. M. Michelet, whose sympathies with all feelings are so quick that one would gladly see them always as justly directed, reads the case most truly. Joanna had a twofold malady. She was visited by a paroxysm of the complaint called homesickness. The cruel nature of her imprisonment, and its length, could not but point her solitary thoughts, in darkness and in chains (for chained she was), to Domrmy. And the season, which was the most heavenly period of the spring, added stings to this yearning. That was one of her maladies—nostalgia, as medicine calls it; the other was weariness and exhaustion from daily combats with malice. She saw that everybody hated her and thirsted for her blood; nay, many kind-hearted creatures that would have pitied her profoundly, as regarded all political charges, had their natural feelings warped by the belief that she had dealings with fiendish powers. She knew she was to die; that was not the misery! the misery was that this consummation could not be reached without so much intermediate strife, as if she were contending for some chance (where chance was none) of happiness, or were dreaming for a moment of escaping the inevitable. Why, then, did she contend? Knowing that she would reap nothing from answering her persecutors, why did she not retire by silence from the superfluous contest? It was because her quick and eager loyalty to truth would not suffer her to see it darkened by frauds which she could expose, but others, even of candid listeners, perhaps, could not; it was through that imperishable grandeur of soul which taught her to submit meekly and without a struggle to her punishment, but taught her not to submit—no, not for a moment—to calumny as to facts, or to misconstruction as to motives. Besides, there were secretaries all around the court taking down her words. That was meant for no good to her. But the end does not always correspond to the meaning. And Joanna might say to herself, "These words that will be used against me to-morrow and the next day, perhaps, in some nobler generation, may rise again for my justification." Yes, Joanna, they are rising even now in Paris, and for more than justification!

Woman, sister, there are some things which you do not execute as well as your brother, man; no, nor ever will. Pardon me if I doubt whether you will ever produce a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great scholar. By which last is meant—not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life. If you can create yourselves into any of these great creators, why have you not?

Yet, sister woman, though I cannot consent to find a Mozart or a Michael Angelo in your sex, cheerfully, and with the love that burns in depths of admiration, I acknowledge that you can do one thing as well as the best of us men—a greater thing than even Milton is known to have done, or Michael Angelo; you can die grandly, and as goddesses would die, were goddesses mortal. If any distant worlds (which may be the case) are so far ahead of us Tellurians in optical resources as to see distinctly through their telescopes all that we do on earth, what is the grandest sight to which we ever treat them? St. Peter's at Rome, do you fancy, on Easter Sunday, or Luxor, or perhaps the Himalayas? Oh, no! my friend; suggest something better; these are baubles to them; they see in other worlds, in their own, far better toys of the same kind. These, take my word for it, are nothing. Do you give it up? The finest thing, then, we have to show them is a scaffold on the morning of execution. I assure you there is a strong muster in those far telescopic worlds, on any such morning, of those who happen to find themselves occupying the right hemisphere for a peep at us. How, then, if it be announced in some such telescopic world by those who make a livelihood of catching glimpses at our newspapers, whose language they have long since deciphered, that the poor victim in the morning's sacrifice is a woman? How, if it be published in that distant world that the sufferer wears upon her head, in the eyes of many, the garlands of martyrdom? How, if it should be some Marie Antoinette, the widowed queen, coming forward on the scaffold, and presenting to the morning air her head, turned gray by sorrow—daughter of Caesars kneeling down humbly to kiss the guillotine, as one that worships death? How, if it were the noble Charlotte Corday, that in the bloom of youth, that with the loveliest of persons, that with homage waiting upon her smiles wherever she turned her face to scatter them—homage that followed those smiles as surely as the carols of birds, after showers in spring, follow the reappearing sun and the racing of sunbeams over the hills—yet thought all these things cheaper than the dust upon her sandals, in comparison of deliverance from hell for her dear suffering France! Ah! these were spectacles indeed for those sympathising people in distant worlds; and some, perhaps, would suffer a sort of martyrdom themselves, because they could not testify their wrath, could not bear witness to the strength of love and to the fury of hatred that burned within them at such scenes, could not gather into golden urns some of that glorious dust which rested in the catacombs of earth.

On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 1431, being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before mid-day, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform of prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets supported by occasional walls of lath and plaster, and traversed by hollow spaces in every direction for the creation of air currents. The pile "struck terror," says M. Michelet, "by its height"; and, as usual, the English purpose in this is viewed as one of pure malignity. But there are two ways of explaining all that. It is probable that the purpose was merciful. On the circumstances of the execution I shall not linger. Yet, to mark the almost fatal felicity of M. Michelet in finding out whatever may injure the English name, at a moment when every reader will be interested in Joanna's personal appearance, it is really edifying to notice the ingenuity by which he draws into light from a dark corner a very unjust account of it, and neglects, though lying upon the highroad, a very pleasing one. Both are from English pens. Grafton, a chronicler, but little read, being a stiff-necked John Bull, thought fit to say that no wonder Joanna should be a virgin, since her "foule face" was a satisfactory solution of that particular merit. Holinshead, on the other hand, a chronicler somewhat later, every way more important, and at one time universally read, has given a very pleasing testimony to the interesting character of Joanna's person and engaging manners. Neither of these men lived till the following century, so that personally this evidence is none at all. Grafton sullenly and carelessly believed as he wished to believe; Holinshead took pains to inquire, and reports undoubtedly the general impression of France. But I cite the case as illustrating M. Michelet's candour. [Footnote: Amongst the many ebullitions of M. Michelet's fury against us poor English are four which will be likely to amuse the reader; and they are the more conspicuous in collision with the justice which he sometimes does us, and the very indignant admiration which, under some aspects, he grants to us. 1. Our English literature he admires with some gnashing of teeth. He pronounces it "fine and sombre," but, I lament to add, "skeptical, Judaic, Satanic—in a word, antichristian." That Lord Byron should figure as a member of this diabolical corporation will not surprise men. It will surprise them to hear that Milton is one of its Satanic leaders. Many are the generous and eloquent Frenchmen, besides Chateaubriand, who have, in the course of the last thirty years, nobly suspended their own burning nationality, in order to render a more rapturous homage at the feet of Milton; and some of them have raised Milton almost to a level with angelic natures. Not one of them has thought of looking for him below the earth. As to Shakspere, M. Michelet detects in him a most extraordinary mare's nest. It is this: he does "not recollect to have seen the name of God" in any part of his works. On reading such words, it is natural to rub one's eyes, and suspect that all one has ever seen in this world may have been a pure ocular delusion. In particular, I begin myself to suspect that the word "la gloire" never occurs in any Parisian journal. "The great English nation," says M. Michelet, "has one immense profound vice"—to wit, "pride." Why, really, that may be true; but we have a neighbour not absolutely clear of an "immense profound vice," as like ours in colour and shape as cherry to cherry. In short, M. Michelet thinks us, by fits and starts, admirable—only that we are detestable; and he would adore some of our authors, were it not that so intensely he could have wished to kick them.

2. M. Michelet thinks to lodge an arrow in our sides by a very odd remark upon Thomas Kempis: which is, that a man of any conceivable European blood—a Finlander, suppose, or a Zantiote—might have written Tom; only not an Englishman. Whether an Englishman could have forged Tom must remain a matter of doubt, unless the thing had been tried long ago. That problem was intercepted for ever by Tom's perverseness in choosing to manufacture himself. Yet, since nobody is better aware than M. Michelet that this very point of Kempis having manufactured Kempis is furiously and hopelessly litigated, three or four nations claiming to have forged his work for him, the shocking old doubt will raise its snaky head once more—whether this forger, who rests in so much darkness, might not, after all, be of English blood. Tom, it may be feared, is known to modern English literature chiefly by an irreverent mention of his name in a line of Peter Pindar's (Dr Wolcot) fifty years back, where he is described as

"Kempis Tom, Who clearly shows the way to Kingdom Come"

Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of John Wesley Among those few, however, happens to be myself, which arose from the accident of having, when a boy of eleven, received a copy of the "De Imitatione Christi" as a bequest from a relation who died very young, from which cause, and from the external prettiness of the book— being a Glasgow reprint by the celebrated Foulis, and gaily bound—I was induced to look into it, and finally read it many times over, partly out of some sympathy which, even in those days, I had with its simplicity and devotional fervour, but much more from the savage delight I found in laughing at Tom's Latinity that, I freely grant to M Michelet, is inimitable. Yet, after all, it is not certain whether the original was Latin. But, however that may have been, if it is possible that M Michelet [Footnote: "If M. Michelet can be accurate"—However, on consideration, this statement does not depend on Michelet. The bibliographer Barbier has absolutely specified sixty in a separate dissertation, soixante traductions among those even that have not escaped the search. The Italian translations are said to be thirty. As to mere editions, not counting the early MSS. for half a century before printing was introduced, those in Latin amount to 2000, and those in French to 1000. Meantime it is very clear to me that this astonishing popularity so entirely unparalleled in literature, could not have existed except in Roman Catholic times, nor subsequently have lingered in any Protestant land. It was the denial of Scripture fountains to thirsty lands which made this slender rill of Scripture truth so passionately welcome.] can be accurate in saying that there are no less than sixty French versions (not editions, observe, but separate versions) existing of the "De Imitatione," how prodigious must have been the adaptation of the book to the religious heart of the fifteenth century! Excepting the Bible, but excepting that only in Protestant lands, no book known to man has had the same distinction. It is the most marvellous bibliographical fact on record.

3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English males in another. None of us men could have written the Opera Omnia of Mr. Kempis; neither could any of our girls have assumed male attire like La Pucelle. But why? Because, says Michelet, English girls and German think so much of an indecorum. Well, that is a good fault, generally speaking. But M. Michelet ought to have remembered a fact in the martyrologies which justifies both parties—the French heroine for doing, and the general choir of English girls for not doing. A female saint, specially renowned in France, had, for a reason as weighty as Joanna's—viz., expressly to shield her modesty among men—worn a male military harness. That reason and that example authorised La Pucelle; but our English girls, as a body, have seldom any such reason, and certainly no such saintly example, to plead. This excuses them. Yet, still, if it is indispensable to the national character that our young women should now and then trespass over the frontier of decorum, it then becomes a patriotic duty in me to assure M. Michelet that we have such ardent females among us, and in a long series; some detected in naval hospitals when too sick to remember their disguise; some on fields of battle; multitudes never detected at all; some only suspected; and others discharged without noise by war offices and other absurd people. In our navy, both royal and commercial, and generally from deep remembrances of slighted love, women have sometimes served in disguise for many years, taking contentedly their daily allowance of burgoo, biscuit, or cannon-balls— anything, in short, digestible or indigestible, that it might please Providence to send. One thing, at least, is to their credit: never any of these poor masks, with their deep silent remembrances, have been detected through murmuring, or what is nautically understood by "skulking." So, for once, M. Michelet has an erratum to enter upon the fly-leaf of his book in presentation copies.

4. But the last of these ebullitions is the most lively. We English, at Orleans, and after Orleans (which is not quite so extraordinary, if all were told), fled before the Maid of Arc. Yes, says M. Michelet, you did: deny it, if you can. Deny it, mon cher? I don't mean to deny it. Running away, in many cases, is a thing so excellent that no philosopher would, at times, condescend to adopt any other step. All of us nations in Europe, without one exception, have shown our philosophy in that way at times. Even people "qui ne se rendent pas" have deigned both to run and to shout, "Sauve qui peut!" at odd times of sunset; though, for my part, I have no pleasure in recalling unpleasant remembrances to brave men; and yet, really, being so philosophic, they ought not to be unpleasant. But the amusing feature in M. Michelet's reproach is the way in which he improves and varies against us the charge of running, as if he were singing a catch. Listen to him: They "showed their backs" did these English. (Hip, hip, hurrah! three times three!) "Behind good walls they let themselves be taken." (Hip, hip! nine times nine!) They "ran as fast as their legs could carry them" (Hurrah! twenty- seven times twenty-seven!) They "ran before a girl"; they did. (Hurrah! eighty-one times eighty-one!) This reminds one of criminal indictments on the old model in English courts, where (for fear the prisoner should escape) the crown lawyer varied the charge perhaps through forty counts. The law laid its guns so as to rake the accused at every possible angle. While the indictment was reading, he seemed a monster of crime in his own eyes; and yet, after all, the poor fellow had but committed one offence, and not always that. N. B.—Not having the French original at hand, I make my quotations from a friend's copy of Mr. Walter Kelly's translation; which seems to me faithful, spirited, and idiomatically English—liable, in fact, only to the single reproach of occasional provincialisms.]

The circumstantial incidents of the execution, unless with more space than I can now command, I should be unwilling to relate. I should fear to injure, by imperfect report, a martyrdom which to myself appears so unspeakably grand. Yet, for a purpose, pointing not at Joanna, but at M. Michelet—viz, to convince him that an Englishman is capable of thinking more highly of La Pucelle than even her admiring countrymen—I shall, in parting, allude to one or two traits in Joanna's demeanour on the scaffold, and to one or two in that of the bystanders, which authorise me in questioning an opinion of his upon this martyr's firmness. The reader ought to be reminded that Joanna D'Arc was subjected to an unusually unfair trial of opinion. Any of the elder Christian martyrs had not much to fear of personal rancour. The martyr was chiefly regarded as the enemy of Csar; at times, also, where any knowledge of the Christian faith and morals existed, with the enmity that arises spontaneously in the worldly against the spiritual. But the martyr, though disloyal, was not supposed to be therefore anti- national; and still less was individually hateful. What was hated (if anything) belonged to his class, not to himself separately. Now, Joanna, if hated at all, was hated personally, and in Rouen on national grounds. Hence there would be a certainty of calumny arising against her such as would not affect martyrs in general. That being the case, it would follow of necessity that some people would impute to her a willingness to recant. No innocence could escape that. Now, had she really testified this willingness on the scaffold, it would have argued nothing at all but the weakness of a genial nature shrinking from the instant approach of torment. And those will often pity that weakness most who, in their own persons, would yield to it least. Meantime, there never was a calumny uttered that drew less support from the recorded circumstances. It rests upon no positive testimony, and it has a weight of contradicting testimony to stem. And yet, strange to say, M, Michelet, who at times seems to admire the Maid of Arc as much as I do, is the one sole writer among her friends who lends some countenance to this odious slander. His words are that, if she did not utter this word recant with her lips, she uttered it in her heart. "Whether she said the word is uncertain; but I affirm that she thought it."

Now, I affirm that she did not; not in any sense of the word "thought" applicable to the case. Here is France calumniating La Pucelle; here is England defending her. M. Michelet can only mean that, on a priori principles, every woman must be presumed liable to such a weakness; that Joanna was a woman; ergo, that she was liable to such a weakness. That is, he only supposes her to have uttered the word by an argument which presumes it impossible for anybody to have done otherwise. I, on the contrary, throw the onus of the argument not on presumable tendencies of nature, but on the known facts of that morning's execution, as recorded by multitudes. What else, I demand, than mere weight of metal, absolute nobility of deportment, broke the vast line of battle then arrayed against her? What else but her meek, saintly demeanour won, from the enemies that till now had believed her a witch, tears of rapturous admiration? "Ten thousand men," says M. Michelet himself—"ten thousand men wept"; and of these ten thousand the majority were political enemies knitted together by cords of superstition. What else was it but her constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic English soldier—who had sworn to throw a fagot on her scaffold as his tribute of abhorrence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow— suddenly to turn away a penitent for life, saying everywhere that he had seen a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the ashes where she had stood? What else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to his share in the tragedy? And, if all this were insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upward in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of girls think only for him, the one friend that would not forsake her, and not for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care for his own preservation, but to leave her to God. That girl, whose latest breath ascended in this sublime expression of self-oblivion, did not utter the word recant either with her lips or in her heart. No; she did not, though one should rise from the dead to swear it.

* * * * *

Bishop of Beauvais! thy victim died in fire upon a scaffold—thou upon a down bed. But, for the departing minutes of life, both are oftentimes alike. At the farewell crisis, when the gates of death are opening, and flesh is resting from its struggles, oftentimes the tortured and the torturer have the same truce from carnal torment; both sink together into sleep; together both sometimes kindle into dreams. When the mortal mists were gathering fast upon you two, bishop and shepherd girl—when the pavilions of life were closing up their shadowy curtains about you —let us try, through the gigantic glooms, to decipher the flying features of your separate visions.

The shepherd girl that had delivered France—she, from her dungeon, she, from her baiting at the stake, she, from her duel with fire, as she entered her last dream—saw Domrmy, saw the fountain of Domrmy, saw the pomp of forests in which her childhood had wandered. That Easter festival which man had denied to her languishing heart—that resurrection of springtime, which the darkness of dungeons had intercepted from her, hungering after the glorious liberty of forests—were by God given back into her hands as jewels that had been stolen from her by robbers. With those, perhaps (for the minutes of dreams can stretch into ages), was given back to her by God the bliss of childhood. By special privilege for her might be created, in this farewell dream, a second childhood, innocent as the first; but not, like that, sad with the gloom of a fearful mission in the rear. This mission had now been fulfilled. The storm was weathered; the skirts even of that mighty storm were drawing off. The blood that she was to reckon for had been exacted; the tears that she was to shed in secret had been paid to the last. The hatred to herself in all eyes had been faced steadily, had been suffered, had been survived. And in her last fight upon the scaffold she had triumphed gloriously; victoriously she had tasted the stings of death. For all, except this comfort from her farewell dream, she had died—died amid the tears of ten thousand enemies—died amid the drums and trumpets of armies—died amid peals redoubling upon peals, volleys upon volleys, from the saluting clarions of martyrs.

Bishop of Beauvais! because the guilt-burdened man is in dreams haunted and waylaid by the most frightful of his crimes, and because upon that fluctuating mirror—rising (like the mocking mirrors of mirage in Arabian deserts) from the fens of death-most of all are reflected the sweet countenances which the man has laid in ruins; therefore I know, bishop, that you also, entering your final dream, saw Domrmy. That fountain, of which the witnesses spoke so much, showed itself to your eyes in pure morning dews; but neither dews, nor the holy dawn, could cleanse away the bright spots of innocent blood upon its surface. By the fountain, bishop, you saw a woman seated, that hid her face. But, as you draw near, the woman raises her wasted features. Would Domrmy know them again for the features of her child? Ah, but you know them, bishop, well! Oh, mercy! what a groan was that which the servants, waiting outside the bishop's dream at his bedside, heard from his labouring heart, as at this moment he turned away from the fountain and the woman, seeking rest in the forests afar off. Yet not so to escape the woman, whom once again he must behold before he dies. In the forests to which he prays for pity, will he find a respite? What a tumult, what a gathering of feet is there! In glades where only wild deer should run armies and nations are assembling; towering in the fluctuating crowd are phantoms that belong to departed hours. There is the great English Prince, Regent of France. There is my Lord of Winchester, the princely cardinal, that died and made no sign. There is the bishop of Beauvais, clinging to the shelter of thickets. What building is that which hands so rapid are raising? Is it a martyr's scaffold? Will they burn the child of Domrmy a second time? No; it is a tribunal that rises to the clouds; and two nations stand around it, waiting for a trial. Shall my Lord of Beauvais sit again upon the judgment-seat, and again number the hours for the innocent? Ah, no! he is the prisoner at the bar. Already all is waiting: the mighty audience is gathered, the Court is hurrying to their seats, the witnesses are arrayed, the trumpets are sounding, the judge is taking his place. Oh, but this is sudden! My lord, have you no counsel? "Counsel I have none; in heaven above, or on earth beneath, counsellor there is none now that would take a brief from me: all are silent." Is it, indeed, come to this? Alas! the time is short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd stretches away into infinity; but yet I will search in it for somebody to take your brief; I know of somebody that will be your counsel. Who is this that cometh from Domrmy? Who is she in bloody coronation robes from Rheims? Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walking the furnaces of Rouen? This is she, the shepherd girl, counsellor that had none for herself, whom I choose, bishop, for yours. She it is, I engage, that shall take my lord's brief. She it is, bishop, that would plead for you; yes, bishop, she—when heaven and earth are silent.



NOTES

THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH

"In October 1849 there appeared in Blackwood's Magazine an article entitled The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion. There was no intimation that it was to be continued; but in December 1849 there followed in the same magazine an article in two sections, headed by a paragraph explaining that it was by the author of the previous article in the October number, and was to be taken in connexion with that article. One of the sections of this second article was entitled The Vision of Sudden Death, and the other Dream- Fugue on the above theme of Sudden Death. When De Quincey revised the papers in 1854 for republication in volume iv of the Collective Edition of his writings, he brought the whole under the one general title of The English Mail-Coach, dividing the text, as at present, into three sections or chapters, the first with the sub-title The Glory of Motion, the second with the sub-title The Vision of Sudden Death, and the third with the sub-title Dream-Fugue, founded on the preceding theme of Sudden Death. Great care was bestowed on the revision. Passages that had appeared in the magazine articles were omitted; new sentences were inserted; and the language was retouched throughout."—MASSON. Cf. as to the revision, Professor Dowden's article, "How De Quincey worked," Saturday Review, Feb. 23, 1895. This selection is found in Works, Masson's ed., Vol. XIII, pp. 270-327; Riverside ed., Vol. I, pp. 517-582.

1 6 HE HAD MARRIED THE DAUGHTER OF A DUKE: "Mr. John Palmer, a native of Bath, and from about 1768 the energetic proprietor of the Theatre Royal in that city, had been led, by the wretched state in those days of the means of intercommunication between Bath and London, wand his own consequent difficulties in arranging for a punctual succession of good actors at his theatre, to turn his attention to the improvement of the whole system of Post-Office conveyance, and of locomotive machinery generally, in the British Islands. The result was a scheme for superseding, on the great roads at least, the then existing system of sluggish and irregular stage-coaches, the property of private persons and companies, by a new system of government coaches, in connexion with the Post-Office, carrying the mails and also a regulated number of passengers, with clockwork precision, at a rate of comparative speed, which he hoped should ultimately be not less than ten miles an hour. The opposition to the scheme was, of course, enormous; coach proprietors, innkeepers, the Post-Office officials themselves, were all against Mr. Palmer; he was voted a crazy enthusiast and a public bore. Pitt, however, when the scheme was submitted to him, recognized its feasibility; on the 8th of August 1784 the first mail-coach on Mr. Palmer's plan started from London at 8 o'clock in the morning and reached Bristol at 11 o'clock at night; and from that day the success of the new system was assured.—Mr. Palmer himself, having been appointed Surveyor and Comptroller-General of the Post-Office, took rank as an eminent and wealthy public man, M. P. for Bath and what not, and lived till 1818. De Quincey makes it one of his distinctions that he "had married the daughter of a duke," and in a footnote to that paragraph he gives the lady's name as "Lady Madeline Gordon." From an old Debrett, however, I learn that Lady Madelina Gordon, second daughter of Alexander, fourth Duke of Gordon, was first married, on the 3d of April 1789, to Sir Robert Sinclair, Bart., and next, on the 25th of November 1805, to Charles Palmer, of Lockley Park, Berks, Esq. If Debrett is right, her second husband was not John Palmer of Mail- Coach celebrity, and De Quincey is wrong."—MASSON.

1 (footnote) INVENTION OF THE CROSS: Concerning the Inventio sanctae crucis, see Smith, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, Vol. I, p. 503.

2 4 NATIONAL RESULT: Cf. De Quincey's paper on Travelling, Works, Riverside ed., Vol. II, especially pp. 313-314; Masson's ed., Vol. I, especially pp. 270-271.

3 13 THE FOUR TERMS OF MICHAELMAS, LENT, EASTER, AND ACT: These might be called respectively the autumn, winter, spring, and summer terms. Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, is on September 29. Hilary and Trinity are other names for Lent term and Act term respectively. Act term is the last term of the academic year; its name is that originally given to a disputation for a Master's degree; such disputations took place at the end of the year generally, and hence gave a name to the summer term. Although the rules concerning residence at Oxford are more stringent than in De Quincey's time, only eighteen weeks' residence is required during the year, six in Michaelmas, six in Lent, and six in Easter and Act.

3 17 GOING DOWN: Cf. "Going down with victory," i.e. from London into the country.

3 30 POSTING-HOUSES: inns where relays of horses were furnished for coaches and carriages. Cf. De Quincey on Travelling, loc. cit.

4 3 AN OLD TRADITION... from the reign of Charles II: Then no one sat outside; later, outside places were taken by servants, and were quite cheap.

4 9 ATTAINT THE FOOT: The word is used in its legal sense. The blood of one convicted of high treason is "attaint," and his deprivations extend to his descendants, unless Parliament remove the attainder.

4 14 PARIAHS: The fate of social outcasts seems to have taken early and strong hold upon De Quincey's mind; one of the Suspiria was to have enlarged upon this theme. Strictly speaking, the Pariahs is that one of the lower castes of Hindoo society of which foreigners have seen most; it is not in all districts the lowest caste, however.

5 6 OBJECTS NOT APPEARING, ETC.: De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est lex, a Roman legal phrase.

5 16 "SNOBS": Apparently snob originally meant "shoemaker"; then, in university cant, a "townsman" as opposed to a "gownsman." Cf. Gradus ad Cantabrigiam (1824), quoted in Century Dictionary: "Snobs.—A term applied indiscriminately to all who have not the honour of being members of the university; but in a more particular manner to the 'profanum vulgus,' the tag-rag and bob-tail, who vegetate on the sedgy banks of Camus." This use is in De Quincey's mind. Later, in the strikes of that time, the workmen who accepted lower wages were called snobs; those who held out for higher, nobs.

7 33 FO FO... FI FI: "This paragraph is a caricature of a story told in Staunton's Account of the Earl of Macartney's Embassy to China in 1792."—MASSON.

8 4 A IRA ("This will do," "This is the go"): "a proverb of the French Revolutionists when they were hanging the aristocrats in the streets, &c., and the burden of one of the most popular revolutionary songs, 'a ira, a ira, a ira.'"—MASSON.

8 18 ALL MORALITY,—ARISTOTLE'S, ZENO'S, CICERO'S: Each of these three has a high place in the history of ethical teaching. Aristotle wrote the so-called Nicomachean Ethics. According to his teaching, "ethical virtue is that permanent direction of the will which guards the mean [to mson] proper for us... Bravery is the mean between cowardice and temerity; temperance, the mean between inordinate desire and stupid indifference; etc." (Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 169). Zeno, who died about 264 B.C., founded about 308 the Stoic sect, which took its name from the "Painted Porch" (Stoa poklae) in the Agora at Athens, where the master taught. The Stoics held that men should be free from passion, and undisturbed by joy or grief, submitting themselves uncomplainingly to their fate. Such austere views are, of course, as far as possible removed from those of the Eudmonist, who sought happiness as the end of life. Cicero was the author of De Officiis, "Of Duties."

9 9 ASTROLOGICAL SHADOWS: misfortunes due to being born under an unlucky star; house of life is also an astrological term.

9 24 VON TROIL'S ICELAND: The Letters on Iceland (Pinkerton's Voyages and Travels, Vol. I, p. 621), containing Observations ... made during a Voyage undertaken in the year 1772, by Uno Von Troil, D.D., of Stockholm, contains no chapter of the kind. Such a chapter had appeared, however, in N. Horrebow's (Danish, 1758) Natural History of Iceland: "Chap. LXXII. Concerning snakes. No snakes of any kind are to be met with throughout the whole island." In Boswell's Johnson, Vol. IV, p. 314, Temple ed., there is a much more correct allusion, which may have been in De Quincey's mind: "Langton said very well to me afterwards, that he could repeat Johnson's conversation before dinner, as Johnson had said that he could repeat a complete chapter of The Natural History of Iceland, from the Danish of Horrebow, the whole of which was exactly thus: 'Chap. LXXII. Concerning Snakes. There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island.'"

9 25 A PARLIAMENTARY RAT: one who deserts his own party when it is losing.

10 16 "JAM PROXIMUS," etc.: neid, II, lines 311-312: "Now next (to Deiphobus' house) Ucalegon (i.e. his house) blazes!"

11 27 QUARTERINGS: See p. 47, footnote, and note 47 2.

11 32 WITHIN BENEFIT OF CLERGY: Benefit of clergy was, under old English law, the right of clerics, afterward extended to all who could read, to plead exemption from trial before a secular judge. This privilege was first legally recognized in 1274, and was not wholly abolished until 1827.

12 9 QUARTER SESSIONS: This court is held in England in the counties by justices of the peace for the trial of minor criminal offenses and to administer the poor laws, etc.

12 26 FALSE ECHOES OF MARENGO: General Desaix was shot through the heart at the battle of Marengo (June 14, 1800); he died without a word, and his body was found by Rovigo (cf. Memoirs of the Duke of Rovigo, London, 1835, Vol. I, p. 181), "stripped of his clothes, and surrounded by other naked bodies." Napoleon, however, published three different versions of an heroic and devoted message from Desaix to himself, the original version being: "Go, tell the First Consul that I die with this regret,—that I have not done enough for posterity." (Cf. Lanfrey, History of Napoleon the First, 2d ed., London, 1886, Vol. II, p. 39.) Napoleon himself was credited likewise with the words De Quincey adopts. "Why is it not permitted me to weep" is one version (Bussey, History of Napoleon, London, 1840, Vol. I, p. 302). Cf. Hazlitt, Life of Napoleon, 2d ed., London, 1852, Vol. II, p. 317, footnote.

12 (footnote) THE CRY OF THE FOUNDERING LINE-OF-BATTLE SHIP "VENGEUR": On the 1st of June, 1794, the English fleet under Lord Howe defeated the French under Villaret-Joyeuse, taking six ships and sinking a seventh, the Vengeur. This ship sank, as a matter of fact, with part of her crew on board, imploring kid which there was not time to give them. Some two hundred and fifty men had been taken off by the English; the rest were lost. On the 9th of July Barrere published a report setting forth "how the Vengeur, ... being entirely disabled, ... refused to strike, though sinking; how the enemies fired on her, but she returned their fire, shot aloft all her tricolor streamers, shouted Vive la Rpublique, ... and so, in this mad whirlwind of fire and shouting and invincible despair, went down into the ocean depths; Vive la Rpublique and a universal volley from the upper deck being the last sounds she made." Cf. Carlyle, Sinking of the Vengeur, and French Revolution, Book XVIII, Chap. VI.

12 (footnote) LA GARDE MEURT, ETC.: "This phrase, attributed to Cambronne, who was made prisoner at Waterloo, was vehemently denied by him. It was invented by Rougemont, a prolific author of mots, two days after the battle, in the Indpendant."—Fournier's L'Esprit dans l'Histoire, trans. Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, p. 661.

13 25 BRUMMAGEM: Birmingham became early the chief place of manufacture of cheap wares. Hence the name Brummagem, a vulgar pronunciation of the name of the city, has become in England a common name for cheap, tawdry jewelry. Cf. also Shakespeare, Richard III, Act I, sc. iv, 1. 55:

False, fleeting, perjured Clarence.

13 27 LUXOR occupies part of the site of ancient Thebes, capital of Egypt; its antiquities are famous.

14 9 BUT ON OUR SIDE... WAS A TOWER OF MORAL STRENGTH, ETC.: Cf. Shakespeare, Richard III, Act V, sc. in, 11. 12-13:

Besides, the king's name is a tower of strength, Which they upon the adverse party want.

14 20 FELT MY HEART BURN WITHIN ME: Cf. Luke xxiv. 32.

14 32 A VERY FINE STORY FROM ONE OF OUR ELDER DRAMATISTS: The dramatist in question has not been identified. I am indebted indirectly to Professor W. Strunk, Jr., of Cornell University, for reference to Johann Caius' Of English Dogs, translated by A. Fleming, in Arber's English Garner, original edition, Vol. III, p. 253 (new edition, Social England Illustrated, pp. 28-29), where, after telling how Henry the Seventh, perceiving that four mastiffs could overcome a lion, ordered the dogs all hanged, the writer continues: "I read an history answerable to this, of the selfsame HENRY, who having a notable and an excellent fair falcon, it fortuned that the King's Falconers, in the presence and hearing of his Grace, highly commended his Majesty's Falcon, saying, that it feared not to intermeddle with an eagle, it was so venturous and so mighty a bird; which when the king heard, he charged that the falcon should be killed without delay: for the selfsame reason, as it may seem, which was rehearsed in the conclusion of the former history concerning the same king."

15 l OMRAHS... FROM AGRA AND LAHORE: There seems to be a reminiscence here of Wordsworth's Prelude, Book X, 11. 18-20:

The Great Mogul, when he Erewhile went forth from Agra or Lahore, Rajahs and Omrahs in his train.

Omrah, which is not found in Century Dictionary, is itself really plural of Arabic amir (ameer), a commander, nobleman.

15 23 THE 6TH OF EDWARD LONGSHANKS: a De Quinceyan jest, of course. This wrould refer to a law of the sixth year of Edward I, or 1278, but there are but fifteen chapters in the laws of that year.

16 8 NOT MAGNA LOQUIMUR,... BUT VIVIMUS: not "we speak great things," but "we live" them.

17 21 MARLBOROUGH FOREST is twenty-seven miles east of Bath, where De Quincey attended school.

18 18 ULYSSES, ETC.: The allusion is, of course, to the slaughter of the suitors of Penelope, his wife, by Ulysses, after his return. Cf. Odyssey, Books XXI-XXII.

19 3 ABOUT WATERLOO: i.e. about 1815. This phrase is one of many that indicate the deep impression made by this event upon the English mind. Cf. p. 58.

19 17 "SAY, ALL OUR PRAISES," ETC.: Cf. Pope, Moral Essays: Epistle III, Of the Use of Riches, II. 249-250:

But all our praises why should lords engross, Rise, honest Muse! and sing the Man of Ross.

20 3 TURRETS: "Tourettes fyled rounde" appears in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, 1. 1294, where it means the ring on a dog's collar through which the leash was passed. Skeat explains torets as "probably eyes in which rings will turn round, because each eye is a little larger than the thickness of the ring." Cf. Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe, Part I, sec. 2, "This ring renneth in a maner turet," "this ring runs in a kind of eye." But Chaucer does not refer to harness.

21 2 MR. WATERTON TELLS ME: Charles Waterton, the naturalist, was born in 1782 and died in 1865. His Wanderings in South America was published in 1825.

23 11 EARTH AND HER CHILDREN: This paragraph is about one fifth of the length of the corresponding paragraph as it appeared in Blackwood. For the longer version see Masson's ed., Vol. XIII, p. 289, note 2.

24 14 THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE: The present office was opened Sept. 23, 1829. St. Martin's-le-Grand is a church within the "city" of London, so named to distinguish it from St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, which faces what is now Trafalgar Square, and is, as the name indicates, outside the "city." The street takes its name from the church.

28 10 BARNET is a Hertfordshire village, eleven miles north of London.

29 33 A "COURIER" EVENING PAPER, CONTAINING THE GAZETTE: A gazette was originally one of the three official papers of the kingdom; afterwards any official announcement, as this of a great victory.

30 17 FEY: This is not a Celtic word; it is the Anglo-Saxon faege retained in Lowland Scotch, which is the most northerly English dialect. The word appears frequently in descriptions of battles, the Anglo-Saxon fatalistic philosophy teaching that, certain warriors entered the conflict faege, "doomed." Now the meaning is altered slightly: "You are surely fey," would be said in Scotland, as Professor Masson remarks, to a person observed to be in extravagantly high spirits, or in any mood surprisingly beyond the bounds of his ordinary temperament,—the notion being that the excitement is supernatural, and a presage of his approaching death, or of some other calamity about to befall him.

31 27 THE INSPIRATION OF GOD, ETC.: This is an indication—more interesting than agreeable, perhaps—of the heights to which the martial ardor of De Quincey's toryism rises.

33 13 CSAR THE DICTATOR, AT HIS LAST DINNER-PARTY, ETC.: related by Suetonius in his life of Julius Csar, Chap. LXXXVII: "The day before he died, some discourse occurring at dinner in M. Lepidus' house upon that subject, which was the most agreeable way of dying, he expressed his preference for what is sudden and unexpected" (repentinum inopinatumque praetulerat). The story is told by Plutarch and Appian also.

35 13 BIATHANATOS: "De Quincey has evidently taken this from John Donne's treatise: BIATHANATOS, A Declaration of that Paradoxe or Thesis, That Self-homicide is not so naturally Sin, that it may never be otherwise, 1644. See his paper on Suicide, etc., Masson's ed., VIII, 398 [Riverside, IX, 209]. But not even Donne's precedent justifies the word formation. The only acknowledged compounds are biaio-thanasia, 'violent death,' and biaio-thanatos, 'dying a violent death.' Even bia thanatos, 'death by violence,' is not classical."—HART. But the form biathanatos is older than Donne and is said to be common in MSS. It should be further remarked that neither of the two compounds cited is classical. As to De Quincey's interpretation of Csar's meaning here, cf. Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire, Chap. XXI, where he translates Csar's famous reply: "That which is least expected." Cf. also Shakespeare, Julius Csar, Act II, sc. ii, 1. 33.

37 25 "NATURE, FROM HER SEAT," ETC.: Cf. Milton's Paradise Lost, Book IX, 11. 780-784:

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck'd, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe, That all was lost.

38 2 SO SCENICAL, ETC.: De Quincey's love for effects of this sort appears everywhere. Cf. the opening paragraphs of the Revolt of the Tartars, Masson's ed., Vol. VII; Riverside ed., Vol. XII.

39 4 JUS DOMINII: "the law of ownership," a legal term.

39 14 JUS GENTIUM: "the law of nations," a legal term.

39 30 "MONSTRUM HORRENDUM," ETC..: neid, III, 658. Polyphemus, one of the Cyclopes, whose eye was put out by Ulysses, is meant. Cf. Odyssey, IX, 371 et seq.; neid, III, 630 et seq.

40 1 ONE OF THE CALENDARS, ETC.: The histories of the three Calenders, sons of kings, will be found in most selections from the Arabian Nights. A Calender is one of an order of Dervishes founded in the fourteenth century by an Andalusian Arab; they are wanderers who preach in market places and live by alms.

40 10 AL SIRAT: According to Mahometan teaching this bridge over Hades was in width as a sword's edge. Over it souls must pass to Paradise.

40 12 UNDER THIS EMINENT MAN, ETC.: For these two sentences the original in Blackwood had this, with its addition of good De Quinceyan doctrine: "I used to call him Cyclops Mastigophorus, Cyclops the Whip-bearer, until I observed that his skill made whips useless, except to fetch off an impertinent fly from a leader's head, upon which I changed his Grecian name to Cyclops Diphrelates (Cyclops the Charioteer). I, and others known to me, studied under him the diphrelatic art. Excuse, reader, a word too elegant to be pedantic. And also take this remark from me as a gage d'amiti—that no word ever was or can be pedantic which, by supporting a distinction, supports the accuracy of logic, or which fills up a chasm for the understanding."

41 1 SOME PEOPLE HAVE CALLED ME PROCRASTINATING: Cf. Page's (Japp's) Life, Chap. XIX, and Japp's De Quincey Memorials, Vol. II, pp. 45,47,49-

42 11 THE WHOLE PAGAN PANTHEON: i.e. all the gods put together; from the Greek Pantheion, a temple dedicated to all the gods.

43 2 SEVEN ATMOSPHERES OF SLEEP, ETC.: Professor Hart suggests that De Quincey is here "indulging in jocular arithmetic. The three nights plus the three days, plus the present night, equal seven." Dr. Cooper compares with this a reference to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. But it seems doubtful whether any explanation is necessary.

43 17 LILLIPUTIAN LANCASTER: the county town of Lancashire, in which Liverpool and Manchester, towns of recent and far greater growth, are situated.

44 (footnote) "Giraldus Cambrensis," or Gerald de Barry (1146-1220), was a Welsh historian; one of his chief works is the Itinerarium Cambrica, or Voyage in Wales.

47 2 QUARTERING: De Quincey's derivation of this word in his footnote is correct, but its use in this French sense is not common. De Quincey, however, has it above, p. 11.

49 8 THE SHOUT OF ACHILLES: Cf. Homer, Iliad, XVIII, 217 et seq.

50 10 BUYING IT, ETC.: De Quincey refers, no doubt, to the pay of common soldiers and to the practice of employing mercenaries.

52 1 FASTER THAN EVER MILL-RACE, ETC.: the change in the wording of this sentence in De Quincey's revision is, as Masson remarks, particularly characteristic of his sense of melody; it read in Blackwood, "We ran past them faster than ever mill-race in our inexorable flight."

52 15 HERE WAS THE MAP, ETC.: This sentence is an addition in the reprint. Masson remarks "how artistically it causes the due pause between the horror as still in rush of transaction and the backward look at the wreck when the crash was past."

53 18 "WHENCE THE SOUND," ETC.: Paradise Lost, Book XI, 11. 558- 563.

54 3 WOMAN'S IONIC FORM: In thus using the word Ionic, De Quincey doubtless has in mind the character of Ionic architecture, with its tall and graceful column, differing from the severity of the Doric on the one hand and from the floridity of the Corinthian on the other. Probably he is thinking of a caryatid. Cf. the following version of the old story of the origin of the styles of Greek architecture in Vitruvius, IV, Chap. I (Gwilt's translation), quoted by Hart: "They measured a man's foot, and finding its length the sixth part of his height, they gave the column a similar proportion, that is, they made its height six times the thickness of the shaft measured at the base. Thus the Doric order obtained its proportion, its strength, and its beauty from the human figure. With a similar feeling they afterward built the Temple of Diana. But in that, seeking a new proportion, they used the female figure as a standard; and for the purpose of producing a more lofty effect they first made it eight times its thickness in height. Under it they placed a base, after the manner of a shoe to the foot; they also added volutes to its capital, like graceful curling hair hanging on each side, and the front they ornamented with cymatia and festoons in the place of hair. On the shafts they sunk channels, which bear a resemblance to the folds of a matronal garment. Thus two orders were invented, one of a masculine character, without ornament, the other bearing a character which resembled the delicacy, ornament, and proportion of a female. The successors of these people, improving in taste, and preferring a more slender proportion, assigned seven diameters to the height of the Doric column, and eight and a half to the Ionic."

55 3 CORYMBI: clusters of fruit or flowers.

55 28 QUARREL: the bolt of a crossbow, an arrow having a square, or four-edged head (from Middle Latin quadrellus, diminutive of quadrum, a square).

58 20 WATERLOO AND RECOVERED CHRISTENDOM! Cf. note 19 3.

61 20 THEN A THIRD TIME THE TRUMPET SOUNDED: There are throughout this passage, as Dr. Cooper remarks, many reminiscences of the language of the Book of Revelation. Cf. this with Revelation viii. 10; cf. 61 28 with Revelation xii. 5, and 62 5 with ix. 13.

63 29 THE ENDLESS RESURRECTIONS OF HIS LOVE: The following, which Masson prints as a postscript, was a part of De Quincey's introduction to the volume of the Collective Edition containing this piece:

"'THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH.'—This little paper, according to my original intention, formed part of the 'Suspiria de Profundis'; from which, for a momentary purpose, I did not scruple to detach it, and to publish it apart, as sufficiently intelligible even when dislocated from its place in a larger whole. To my surprise, however, one or two critics, not carelessly in conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links of the connexion between its several parts. I am myself as little able to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, as these critics found themselves to unravel my logic. Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case. I will therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according to my original design, and then leave the reader to judge how far this design is kept in sight through the actual execution.

"Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the dead of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness of an appalling scene, which threatened instant death in a shape the most terrific to two young people whom I had no means of assisting, except in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their danger; but even that not until they stood within the very shadow of the catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of deaths by scarcely more, if more at all, than seventy seconds.

"Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of this paper radiates as a natural expansion. This scene is circumstantially narrated in Section the Second, entitled 'The Vision of Sudden Death.'

"But a movement of horror, and of spontaneous recoil from this dreadful scene, naturally carried the whole of that scene, raised and idealised, into my dreams, and very soon into a rolling succession of dreams. The actual scene, as looked down upon from the box of the mail, was transformed into a dream, as tumultuous and changing as a musical fugue. This troubled dream is circumstantially reported in Section the Third, entitled 'Dream-Fugue on the theme of Sudden Death.' What I had beheld from my seat upon the mail,—the scenical strife of action and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving in ghostly silence,—this duel between life and death narrowing itself to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared; all these elements of the scene blended, under the law of association, with the previous and permanent features of distinction investing the mail itself; which features at that time lay—1st, in velocity unprecedented, 2dly, in the power and beauty of the horses, 3dly, in the official connexion with the government of a great nation, and, 4thly, in the function, almost a consecrated function, of publishing and diffusing through the land the great political events, and especially the great battles, during a conflict of unparalleled grandeur. These honorary distinctions are all described circumstantially in the First or introductory Section ('The Glory of Motion'). The three first were distinctions maintained at all times; but the fourth and grandest belonged exclusively to the war with Napoleon; and this it was which most naturally introduced Waterloo into the dream. Waterloo, I understand, was the particular feature of the 'Dream-Fugue' which my censors were least able to account for. Yet surely Waterloo, which, in common with every other great battle, it had been our special privilege to publish over all the land, most naturally entered the dream under the licence of our privilege. If not—if there be anything amiss—let the Dream be responsible. The Dream is a law to itself; and as well quarrel with a rainbow for showing, or for not showing, a secondary arch. So far as I know, every element in the shifting movements of the Dream derived itself either primarily from the incidents of the actual scene, or from secondary features associated with the mail. For example, the cathedral aisle derived itself from the mimic combination of features which grouped themselves together at the point of approaching collision—viz. an arrow-like section of the road, six hundred yards long, under the solemn lights described, with lofty trees meeting overhead in arches. The guard's horn, again—a humble instrument in itself—was yet glorified as the organ of publication for so many great national events. And the incident of the Dying Trumpeter, who rises from a marble bas-relief, and carries a marble trumpet to his marble lips for the purpose of warning the female infant, was doubtless secretly suggested by my own imperfect effort to seize the guard's horn, and to blow the warning blast. But the Dream knows best; and the Dream, I say again, is the responsible party."

JOAN OF ARC

This article appeared originally in Taifs Magazine for March and August, 1847; it was reprinted by De Quincey in 1854 in the third volume of his Collected Writings. It is found in Works, Masson's ed., Vol. V, pp. 384-416; Riverside ed., Vol. VI, pp. 178-215.

64 10 LORRAINE, now in great part in the possession of Germany, is the district in which Domrmy, Joan's birthplace, is situated.

65 14 VAUCOULEURS: a town near Domrmy; cf. p. 70.

65 28 EN CONTUMACE: "in contumacy," a legal term applied to one who, when summoned to court, fails to appear.

66 13 ROUEN: the city in Normandy where Joan was burned at the stake.

66 25 THE LILIES OF FRANCE: the royal emblem of France from very early times until the Revolution of 1789, when "the wrath of God and man combined to wither them."

67 5 M. MICHELET: Jules Michelet (1798-1874) is said to have spent forty years in the preparation of his great work, the History of France. Cf. the same, translated by G. H. Smith, 2 vols., Appleton, Vol. II, pp. 119-169; or Joan of Arc, from Michelet's History of France, translated by O. W. Wight, New York, 1858.

67 8 RECOVERED LIBERTY: The Revolution of 1830 had expelled the restored Bourbon kings.

67 20 THE BOOK AGAINST PRIESTS: Michelet's lectures as professor of history in the Collge de France, in which he attacked the Jesuits, were published as follows: Des Jsuites, 1843; Du Prtre, de la Femme et de la Famille, 1844; Du Peuple, 1845. To the second De Quincey apparently refers.

67 26 BACK TO THE FALCONER'S LURE: The lure was a decoy used to recall the hawk to its perch,—sometimes a dead pigeon, sometimes an artificial bird, with some meat attached.

68 6 ON THE MODEL OF LORD PERCY: These lines, as Professor Hart notes, in Percy's Folio, ed. Hales and Furnivall, Vol. II, p. 7, run:

The stout Erle of Northumberland a vow to God did make, his pleasure in the Scottish woods 3 sommers days to take.

68 27 PUCELLE D'ORLANS: Maid of Orleans (the city on the Loire which Joan saved).

69 1 THE COLLECTION, ETC.: The work meant is Quicherat, Procs de Condamnation et Rhabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc, 5 vols., Paris, 1841-1849. Cf. De Quincey's note.

69 21 DELENDA EST ANGLIA VICTRIX! "Victorious England must be destroyed!" Cf. Delenda est Carthago! "Carthage must be destroyed!" Delenda est Karthago is the version of Florus (II, 15) of the words used by Cato the Censor, just before the Third Punic War, whenever he was called upon to record his vote in the Senate on any subject under discussion.

69 27 HYDER ALI (1702-1782), a Mahometan adventurer, made himself maharajah of Mysore and gave the English in India serious trouble; he was defeated in 1782 by Sir Eyre Coote. Tippoo Sahib, his son and successor, proved less dangerous and was finally killed at Seringapatam in 1799.

70 4 NATIONALITY IT WAS NOT: i.e. nationalism—patriotism—it was not. Cf. Revolt of the Tartars, Riverside ed., Vol. XII, p. 4; Masson's ed., Vol. VII, p. 370, where De Quincey speaks of the Torgod as "tribes whose native ferocity was exasperated by debasing forms of superstition, and by a nationality as well as an inflated conceit of their own merit absolutely unparalleled." Cf. also footnote, p. 94.

70 4 SUFFREN: the great French admiral who in 1780-1781 inflicted so much loss upon the British.

70 10 MAGNANIMOUS JUSTICE OF ENGLISHMEN: As Professor Hart observes, the treatment of Joan in Henry VI is hardly magnanimous.

71 29 THAT ODIOUS MAN: Cf. pp. 79-80.

72 12 THREE GREAT SUCCESSIVE BATTLES: Rudolf of Lorraine fell at Crcy (1346); Frederick of Lorraine at Agincourt (1415); the battle of Nicopolis, which sacrificed the third Lorrainer, took place in 1396.

73 24 CHARLES VI (1368-1422) had killed several men during his first fit of insanity. He was for the rest of his life wholly unfit to govern. He declared Henry V of England, the conqueror of Agincourt, his successor, thus disinheriting the Dauphin, his son.

74 2 THE FAMINES, ETC.: Horrible famines occurred in France and England in 1315, 1336, and 1353. Such insurrections as Wat Tyler's, in 1381, are probably in De Quincey's mind.

74 6 THE TERMINATION OF THE CRUSADES: The Crusades came to an end about 1271. "The ulterior results of the crusades," concludes Cox in Encyclopedia Britannica, "were the breaking up of the feudal system, the abolition of serfdom, the supremacy of a common law over the independent jurisdiction of chiefs who claimed the right of private wars."

74 7 THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TEMPLARS: This most famous of the military orders, founded in the twelfth century for the defense of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, having grown so powerful as to be greatly feared, was suppressed at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

74 7 THE PAPAL INTERDICTS: "De Quincey has probably in mind such an interdict as that pronounced in 1200, by Innocent III, against France. All ecclesiastical functions were suspended and the land was in desolation."—HART. England was put under interdict several times, as in 1170 (for the murder of Becket) and 1208.

74 8 THE TRAGEDIES CAUSED OR SUFFERED BY THE HOUSE OF ANJOU, AND BY THE EMPEROR: "The Emperor is Konradin, the last of the Hohenstaufen, beheaded by Charles of Anjou at Naples, 1268. The subsequent cruelties of Charles in Sicily caused the popular uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers, 1282, in which many thousands of Frenchmen were assassinated."—HART.

74 10 THE COLOSSAL FIGURE OF FEUDALISM, ETC.: The English yeomen at Crecy, overpowering the mounted knights of France, took from feudalism its chief support,—the superiority of the mounted knight to the unmounted yeoman. Cf. Green, History of the English People, Book IV, Chap. II.

74 15 THE ABOMINABLE SPECTACLE OF A DOUBLE POPE: For thirty-eight years this paradoxical state of things endured.

75 15 THE ROMAN MARTYROLOGY: a list of the martyrs of the Church, arranged according to the order of their festivals, and with accounts of their lives and sufferings.

76 4 "ABBEYS THERE WERE," ETC.: Cf. Wordsworth, Peter Bell, Part Second:

Temples like those among the Hindoos, And mosques, and spires, and abbey windows, And castles all with ivy green.

76 17 THE VOSGES ... HAVE NEVER ATTRACTED MUCH NOTICE, ETC.: They came into like prominence after De Quincey's day in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

76 31 THOSE MYSTERIOUS FAWNS, ETC.: In some of the romances of the Middle Ages, especially those containing Celtic material, a knight, while hunting, is led by his pursuit of a white fawn (or a white stag or boar) to a fee (i.e. an inhabitant of the "Happy Other-world") or into the confines of the "Happy Other-world" itself. Sometimes, as in the Guigemar of Marie de France, the knight passes on to a series of adventures in consequence of his meeting with the white fawn. I owe this note to the kindness of Mr. S. W. Kinney, A.M., of Baltimore.

76 33 THAT ANCIENT STAG: See Englische Studien, Vol. V, p. 16, where additions are made to the following account from Hardwicke's Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore, Manchester and London, 1872, p. 154:

This chasing of the white doe or the white hart by the spectre huntsman has assumed various forms. According to Aristotle a white hart was killed by Agathocles, King of Sicily, which a thousand years beforehand had been consecrated to Diana by Diomedes. Alexander the Great is said by Pliny to have caught a white stag, placed a collar of gold about its neck, and afterwards set it free. Succeeding heroes have in after days been announced as the capturers of this famous white hart. Julius Caesar took the place of Alexander, and Charlemagne caught a white hart at both Magdeburg, and in the Holstein woods. In 1172 William [Henry] the Lion is reported to have accomplished a similar feat, according to a Latin inscription on the walls of Lubeck Cathedral. Tradition says the white hart has been caught on Rothwell Hay Common, in Yorkshire, and in Windsor Forest.

This reference I owe indirectly to Professor J. M. Manly, of Chicago.

77 4 OR, BEING UPON THE MARCHES OF FRANCE, A MARQUIS: Marquis is derived from march, and was originally the title of the guardian of the frontier, or march.

77 13 AGREED WITH SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY THAT A GOOD DEAL MIGHT BE SAID ON BOTH SIDES: This expression, as has been pointed out to me, is from the middle of Spectator No. 122, where Sir Roger, having been appealed to on a question of fishing privileges, replied, "with an air of a man who would not give his judgment rashly, that much might be said on both sides." It is likely, however, that De Quincey may have connected it in his mind with the discussion of witchcraft at the beginning of Spectator No. 117, where Addison balances the grounds for belief and unbelief somewhat as De Quincey does here.

78 7 BERGERETA: a very late Latin form of French bergerette, "a shepherdess."

78 15 M. SIMOND, IN HIS "TRAVELS": The reference is to Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain during the years 1810 and 1811, by Louis Simond, 2d ed. (Edinburgh, 1817), to which is added an appendix on France, written in December, 1815, and October, 1816. De Quincey refers to this story with horror several times, but such scenes are not yet wholly unknown.

79 21 A CHEVALIER OF ST. LOUIS: The French order of St. Louis was founded by Louis XIV in 1693 for military service. After its discontinuance at the Revolution this order was reinstated in 1814; but no knights have been created since 1830. "Chevalier" is the lowest rank in such an order; it is here erroneously used by De Quincey as a title of address.