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[Footnote A: “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, amongst 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 two thousand, and those in French to one thousand. 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.]

3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English males in another. None of us lads could have written the Opera Omnia of Mr. a Kempis; neither could any of our lasses 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 amongst men, wore a male military harness. That reason and that example authorized 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 amongst 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, my dear? 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 pent” 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. Whilst 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.