Coming to our own days we have quite a crowd of writers who have written with enthusiasm on the Maid of Domremy.  It is sufficient to name the most prominent of these—­Landor, Sir James Mackintosh, John Sterling, Lord Mahon, De Quincey, and J.R.  Green.

No.  II.

JOAN OF ARC IN POETRY.

The Maid of Orleans (though a more poetical figure cannot be found in all history) has not been more fortunate at the hands of the poets than at those of the historians.

To begin with her own countrywoman—­for the first who sang of Joan of Arc was appropriately enough a fellow-countrywoman—­Christine de Pisan.

As the name indicates, this poetess was an Italian by origin, but appears to have lived most of her life in France.  The latter part she passed in a convent.

In the year 1429, Christine was sixty-seven years old; she had been living in some conventual establishment for eleven years.  Her verses in praise of Joan of Arc—­which number several hundred stanzas—­were undoubtedly written in the heroine’s life-time.  They are supposed to have been the last lines she wrote.  These stanzas were completed shortly after the coronation of Charles VII.  A manuscript copy of this poem exists in which Joan of Arc is compared to Deborah, Judith, and Queen Esther.  These poems are curious and quaint in their old French expressions, but they are quite unreadable for any but French students well versed in the literature of the fifteenth century.

In 1440, Martin le France, provost of the Cathedral of Lausanne, bestows some lines on Joan of Arc in his poem called the Champion des dames.  In 1487, Martial de Paris published, under the title of Vigiles du roi Charles VII., a rhymed translation of Jean Chartrier’s chronicle of that monarch.

Villon has left some charming lines in which he has placed the heroine’s name as it were on a string of pearls; they occur in his exquisite ballad ‘Dames du temps jadis,’ and, as it would be profanation to try and translate, I give them here in the original:—­

    ’La Reine blanche comme un lys
    Qui chantait a voix de sirene,
    Berthe au grand pied, Bietris, Allis,
    Haremburge qui tint le Maine,
    Et Jeanne la bonne Lorraine
    Qu’ Anglais brulerent a Rouen,
    Ou sont-ils, vierge souveraine? 
    Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?’

Long before those beautiful lines were written by Villon, a play called Le Mystere du Siege d’Orleans had been acted.  As early as the year 1435 this performance appears to have taken place on the anniversary of the deliverance of the city, and the dramatic piece was probably acted on the return of that day for many a year after.  This was one of the so-called ‘Miracle Plays,’ popular both in France and in England at that period.  The author or authors of the play are not known.

Some one has taken the trouble to count the number of lines:  they amount to 20,529, and are all in dialogue!