left the play--originally written,
we think, by Greene--very much as he found it. It is not indeed till
the fifth act, when Joan is represented as a magician, and when the
grotesqueness of the author passes even the limits of burlesque, that
we fail to see a shred of the poet's skill. Nothing in Shakespeare is
at once so unpoetical as well as so untrue to history as the last
scene, in which Joan repudiates her father. If it is by
Shakespeare--which we cannot believe--it must have been one of the
very earliest of his historical plays; and, with Ben Jonson, we could
wish that the passages referring to the Maid of Orleans had been
freely blotted.

The era of the Renaissance brought with it in France no poets to sing
of Joan of Arc, and we only find--besides the mystery play of the
_Siege of Orleans_--one literary work relating to her at this period;
that is a five-act tragedy written by a Jesuit priest named Fronton du
Duc, a gloomy piece, which was acted in 1580 at Pont-a-Mousson. In the
beginning of the seventeenth century appeared another tragedy by a
Norman squire named Virey: it was titled _Jeanne d'Arques, dite la
Pucelle d'Orleans_. This very mellifluous production was published at
Rouen in the year 1600.

Another tragedy on the same subject appeared in 1642, written by the
Abbe d'Aubignac--a very pedantic play.

Next appears an 'heroic poem' by Chapelain, published in 1656,
entitled _La Pucelle_. Great things had been expected of this poem,
but it fell very flat after a long expectancy of thirty years when it
at length saw the light. Chapelain's ridiculous poem gave the idea to
Voltaire of his licentious one.

Even Voltaire was ashamed of his work, and long denied that he was its
author. As a very slight reparation for his deed, he writes of Joan of
Arc in his _Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des natives_, that the
heroine would have had altars built in the days when altars were
erected by primitive men to their liberators.

Southey, referring to Voltaire's infamous production, said, 'I never
committed the crime of reading Voltaire's _Pucelle_.'

After all, Voltaire did infinitely more harm to himself by writing his
poem _La Pucelle_ than he did to the memory of the Maid of Orleans,
for it revealed to the world what an amount of depravity was mixed up
within that wonderful shrewd mind, and how it weakened its genius. The
great Revolution which swept so many shams away with its terrible
breath, venerated, t