ron leur belle et
simple litterature est sceptique, judaique, satanique.' It is
pitiable that so distinguished a writer as was Michelet should pen
such rubbish, but when a Frenchman writes on the subject of Joan of
Arc much should be forgiven him. More serious than the abuse of the
English in Michelet's work are the inaccuracies in his account of Joan
of Arc. For instance, he writes of the heroine watching the English
coast from her prison in the castle of Crotoy. Her eyesight must have
been telescopic had she been able to do so, for eighty miles of sea
stretch between the site of Crotoy and the English coast.

We next come to Henry Martin's history of France. In this work a third
part of the sixth volume is consecrated to Joan of Arc, whom he calls
the 'Messiah of France.'

M. Wallon, however, is the writer who has given France the most
complete biography of her heroine. This work, published by Hachette,
had in 1879 attained its fifth edition. A most sumptuously illustrated
edition appeared in 1876, one of those splendidly illustrated books in
which the French press has no rival. That book is the finest monument
which has appeared to honour the memory of the Maid of Orleans. Its
illustrations contain views of all places and memorials connected with
the heroine from the fifteenth to the middle of the nineteenth
century. The text of Wallon's Life is, however, wanting in charm, and
it is, as M. Veuillot writes of it, 'un livre serieuse et solide.'
Sainte-Beuve has been still more severe in his judgment on Wallon's
book, which he calls 'la faiblesse meme.'

Some slighter histories may be alluded to: one by Lamartine, unworthy
of the author and the subject; another by M. Abel Desjardins; a third
by Villaume; a fourth by M. Lafontaine. There is an interesting study
by Simon Luce on Joan of Arc's early years; and last, but certainly
not least, the three works by M. Joseph Fabre, relating to Joan of
Arc's life, her trial, her condemnation, and her rehabilitation. In
the two last works the whole of the long examination appears for the
first time, translated into French from the Latin--documents
invaluable to any one studying the heroine's life.

In England little has been written in prose relating to Joan of Arc
that will be likely to live. The early chroniclers were monstrously
unjust to her. It is enough to allude to the lying and scurrilous
abuse which such writers as Robert Fabyan, in his chronicles on the
history of E