e from God. Her voice was raised in
prayer as death approached, the last word heard from her lips being
"Jesus!"

"Would that my soul were where I believe the soul of that woman is!"
cried two of her judges, on seeing her die.

And Tressart, secretary to Henry VI. of England, said, on his return
from the place of execution, "We are all lost; we have burned a saint!"

A saint she was, an inspired one. She died, but France was saved.

_THE CAREER OF A KNIGHT-ERRANT._

Mediaeval history would be of greatly reduced interest but for its
sprightly stories of knights and their doings. In those days when men,
"clad in complete steel," did their fighting with spear, sword, and
battle-axe, and were so enamoured of hard blows and blood-letting that
in the intervals of war they spent their time seeking combat and
adventure, much more of the startling and romantic naturally came to
pass than can be looked for in these days of the tyranny of commerce and
the dominion of "villanous saltpetre." This was the more so from the
fact that enchanters, magicians, demons, dragons, and all that uncanny
brood, the creation of ignorance and fancy, made knighthood often no
sinecure, and men's haunting belief in the supernatural were frequently
more troublesome to them than their armed enemies. But with this
misbegotten crew we have nothing to do. They belong to legend and
fiction, not to history, and it is with the latter alone that we are
here concerned. But as more than one example has been given of how
knights bore themselves in battle, it behooves us to tell something of
the doings of a knight-errant, one of those worthy fellows who went
abroad to prove their prowess in single combat, and win glory in the
tournament at spear's point.

Such a knight was Jacques de Lelaing, "the good knight without fear and
without doubt," as his chroniclers entitle him, a Burgundian by birth,
born in the chateau of Lelaing early in the fifteenth century. Jacques
was well brought up for a knight. Literature was cultivated in Burgundy
in those days, and the boy was taught the arts of reading and writing,
the accomplishments of French and Latin, and in his later life he
employed the pen as well as the sword, and did literary work of which
specimens still survive.

In warlike sports he excelled. He was still but a youth when the nephew
of Philip the Good of Burgundy (Philip the _Bad_ would have hit the mark
more nearly) carried him off to his uncle'