towering in the fluctuating crowd are phantoms that belong to departed hours.  There is the great English Prince, Regent of France.  There is my Lord of Winchester, the princely Cardinal, that died and made no sign.  There is the Bishop of Beauvais, clinging to the shelter of thickets.  What building is that which hands so rapid are raising?  Is it a martyr’s scaffold?  Will they burn the child of Domremy a second time?  No:  it is a tribunal that rises to the clouds; and two nations stand around it, waiting for a trial.  Shall my Lord of Beauvais sit again upon the judgment-seat, and again number the hours for the innocent?  Ah! no:  he is the prisoner at the bar.  Already all is waiting; the mighty audience is gathered, the Court is hurrying to their seats, the witnesses are arrayed, the trumpets are sounding, the judge is going to take his place.  Oh! but this is sudden.  My lord, have you no counsel?  “Counsel I have none:  in heaven above, or on earth beneath, counsellor there is none now that would take a brief from me:  all are silent.”  Is it, indeed, come to this?  Alas! the time is short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd stretches away into infinity, but yet I will search in it for somebody to take your brief:  I know of somebody that will be your counsel.  Who is this that cometh from Domremy?  Who is she that cometh in bloody coronation robes from Rheims?  Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walking the furnaces of Rouen?  This is she, the shepherd girl, counsellor that had none for herself, whom I choose, Bishop, for yours.  She it is, I engage, that shall take my lord’s brief.  She it is, Bishop, that would plead for you:  yes, Bishop, SHE—­when heaven and earth are silent.

NOTES.

[NOTE 1.

Arc:—­Modern France, that should know a great deal better than myself, insists that the name is not d’Arc, i.e. of Arc, but Darc.  Now it happens sometimes, that if a person, whose position guarantees his access to the best information, will content himself with gloomy dogmatism, striking the table with his fist, and saying in a terrific voice—­“It is so; and there’s an end of it,”—­one bows deferentially; and submits.  But if, unhappily for himself, won by this docility, he relents too amiably into reasons and arguments, probably one raises an insurrection against him that may never be crushed; for in the fields of logic one can skirmish, perhaps, as well as he.  Had he confined himself to dogmatism; he would have entrenched his position in darkness, and have hidden his own vulnerable points.  But coming down to base reasons, he lets in light, and one sees where to plant the blows.  Now, the worshipful reason of modern France for disturbing the old received spelling, is—­that Jean Hordal, a descendant of La Pucelle’s brother, spelled the name Darc, in 1612.  But what of that?  Beside the chances that M. Hordal might be a gigantic blockhead, it is notorious that what small matter of spelling Providence had thought fit to disburse amongst man in the seventeenth century, was all monopolized by printers:  in France, much more so.]