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 sundry diabolic miracles, she having publicly preached heresy, shown herself a witch, and even tried hard to corrupt the principles of six church pillars.”  In the mean time, all this deistical confession of Joanna’s, besides being suicidal for the interest of her cause, is opposed to the depositions upon both trials.  The very best witness called from first to last deposes that Joanna attended these rites of her Church even too often; was taxed with doing so; and, by blushing, owned the charge as a fact, though certainly not as a fault.  Joanna was a girl of natural piety, that saw God in forests, and hills, and fountains; but did not the less seek him in chapels and consecrated oratories.

This peasant girl was self-educated through her own natural meditativeness.  If the reader turns to that divine passage in Paradise Regained, which Milton has put into the mouth of our Saviour when first entering the wilderness, and musing upon the tendency of those great impulses growing within himself—­