We next come to Henry Martin’s history of France.  In this work a third part of the sixth volume is consecrated to Joan of Arc, whom he calls the ‘Messiah of France.’

M. Wallon, however, is the writer who has given France the most complete biography of her heroine.  This work, published by Hachette, had in 1879 attained its fifth edition.  A most sumptuously illustrated edition appeared in 1876, one of those splendidly illustrated books in which the French press has no rival.  That book is the finest monument which has appeared to honour the memory of the Maid of Orleans.  Its illustrations contain views of all places and memorials connected with the heroine from the fifteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century.  The text of Wallon’s Life is, however, wanting in charm, and it is, as M. Veuillot writes of it, ‘un livre serieuse et solide.’  Sainte-Beuve has been still more severe in his judgment on Wallon’s book, which he calls ‘la faiblesse meme.’

Some slighter histories may be alluded to:  one by Lamartine, unworthy of the author and the subject; another by M. Abel Desjardins; a third by Villaume; a fourth by M. Lafontaine.  There is an interesting study by Simon Luce on Joan of Arc’s early years; and last, but certainly not least, the three works by M. Joseph Fabre, relating to Joan of Arc’s life, her trial, her condemnation, and her rehabilitation.  In the two last works the whole of the long examination appears for the first time, translated into French from the Latin—­documents invaluable to any one studying the heroine’s life.

In England little has been written in prose relating to Joan of Arc that will be likely to live.  The early chroniclers were monstrously unjust to her.  It is enough to allude to the lying and scurrilous abuse which such writers as Robert Fabyan, in his chronicles on the history of England and of France, published in 1516, heaped upon Joan of Arc.  Hall’s and Holinshed’s chronicles, from which the author of the First Part of King Henry VI. borrowed so largely, sinned as deeply.  Hall’s authorities among French writers were Monstrelet, Bouchet, Mayer, Argentan, Gile Corozet, and the annals of France and Aquitaine—­and of English writers, Fabyan, Caxton, John Harding, Sir Thomas More, Basset, Balantyne, and the Chronicle of London.

The annalist Stow, Hume’s ‘honest historian,’ is less unjust and bitter in his account of Joan of Arc than are Hall and Holinshed.  Thomas Fuller appears not to have settled to his satisfaction whether Joan of Arc was a witch or a heroine.

In the seventeenth century we have only a handful of poor writers who have treated more or less badly of the Maid, such as Daniel, Martyn, and Sir Richard Baker.  It is not until well into the eighteenth century that a man of letters appears capable of giving an unprejudiced and true history of the life of Joan of Arc:  this historian is Guthrie, who published, between the years 1744 and 1751, a long history of England.  M. Darmesteter has named this author ’a village Bossuet.’