th him. Trouble us not, lawyer, with your quillets. We are
illegal blockheads; so thoroughly without law, that we don't know even if
we have a right to be blockheads; and our mind is made up--that the first
man drawn from the oven of coronation at Rheims, is the man that is baked
into a king. All others are counterfeits, made of base Indian meal, damaged
by sea-water.

La Pucelle, before she could be allowed to practise as a warrior, was put
through her manual and platoon exercise, as a juvenile pupil in divinity,
before six eminent men in wigs. According to Southey (v. 393, Book III., in
the original edition of his "Joan of Arc") she "appall'd 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, B. III. It is a double impossibility; 1st, because a piracy from
Tindal's _Christianity as Old as the Creation:_ now a piracy _a parte post_
is common enough; but a piracy _a parte ante_, and by three centuries,
would (according to our old English phrase[5]) drive a coach-and-six
through any copyright act that man born of woman could frame. 2dly, it is
quite contrary to the evidence on Joanna's trial; for Southey's "Joan" of
A. Dom. 1796 (Cottle, Bristol), tells the doctors, amongst other secrets,
that she never in her life attended--1st, Mass; nor 2d, the Sacramental
table; nor 3d, Confession. Here's a precious windfall for the doctors;
they, by snaky tortuosities, had hoped, through the aid of a corkscrew,
(which every D. D. or S.T.P. is said to carry in his pocket,) for the
happiness of ultimately extracting from Joanna a few grains of heretical
powder or small shot, which might have justified their singeing her a
little. And just at such a crisis, expressly to justify their burning her
to a cinder, up gallops Joanna with a brigade of guns, unlimbers, and
serves them out with heretical grape and deistical round-shot enough to lay
a kingdom under interdict. Any miracles, to which Joanna might treat the
grim D. Ds. after _that_, would go to the wrong side of her little account
in the clerical books. Joanna would be created a _Dr_. herself, but not of
Divinity. For in the Joanna page of the ledger the entry would be--"Miss
Joanna, in acct. with the Church, _Dr._ by sundr