most circulated—­know him disadvantageously.  That book is a rhapsody of incoherence.  M. Michelet was light-headed, I believe, when he wrote it:  and it is well that his keepers overtook him in time to intercept a second part.  But his History of France is quite another thing.  A man, in whatsoever craft he sails, cannot stretch away out of sight when he is linked to the windings of the shore by towing ropes of history.  Facts, and the consequences of facts, draw the writer back to the falconer’s lure from the giddiest heights of speculation.  Here, therefore—­in his France,—­if not always free from flightiness, if now and then off like a rocket for an airy wheel in the clouds, M. Michelet, with natural politeness, never forgets that he has left a large audience waiting for him on earth, and gazing upwards in anxiety for his return:  return, therefore, he does.  But History, though clear of certain temptations in one direction, has separate dangers of its own.  It is impossible so to write a History of France, or of England—­works becoming every hour more indispensable to the inevitably-political man of this day—­without perilous openings for assault.  If I, for instance, on the part of England, should happen to turn my labors into that channel, and (on the model of Lord Percy going to Chevy Chase)—­

  ——­“A vow to God should make
  My pleasure in the Michelet woods
  Three summer days to take,”

—­probably from simple delirium, I might hunt M. Michelet into delirium tremens.  Two strong angels stand by the side of History, whether French History or English, as heraldic supporters:  the angel of Research on the left hand, that must read millions of dusty parchments, and of pages blotted with lies; the angel of Meditation on the right hand, that must cleanse these lying records with fire, even as of old the draperies of asbestos were cleansed, and must quicken them into regenerated life.  Willingly I acknowledge that no man will ever avoid innumerable errors of detail:  with so vast a compass of ground to traverse, this is impossible:  but such errors (though I have a bushel on hand, at M. Michelet’s service) are not the game I chase:  it is the bitter and unfair spirit in which M. Michelet writes against England.  Even that, after all, is but my secondary object:  the real one is Joanna, the Pucelle d’Orleans for herself.

I am not going to write the History of La Pucelle:  to do this, or even circumstantially to report the history of her persecution and bitter death, of her struggle with false witnesses and with ensnaring judges, it would be necessary to have before us all the documents, and, therefore, the collection only now forthcoming in Paris.  But my purpose is narrower.  There have been great thinkers, disdaining the careless judgments of contemporaries, who have thrown themselves boldly on the judgment of a far posterity, that should have had time to review,