field. The chamber is like every large body; it is puts them into shape, and gives them to the as childish as the audience in a theatre. The press. They manage the thing much more finest things, if badly played, are hissed off. Ces conveniently in France, and to a certain messieurs are all very wise legislatures, but, collec-extent in England also, where the drudgery tively, they have all the defects of a pit audience.' "That confirms me,' I subjoined, in the be- is done by young litterateurs and steady lief, how much a good deputy may learn even from old factotums; whilst the author reserves a bad actor. It struck me, during yesterday's de- to himself only the intellectual part of the bate, that these gentlemen were not familiar with labor. But, besides this difference as to the simplest rudiments of the art of dealing with outward method, there is another inward a multitude. They did not even know how to and radical difference, which we have never enforce silence. The worst actor knows that. If he is in the middle of a sentence, and people are words of Baron Arnim :-" A German, an seen more happily symbolized than in the talking in the boxes, clapping doors, or showing in other ways their impatience at his bad perform- Englishman, and a Frenchman were seveance, what does he do? He suddenly stops speak-rally required to portray a camel. ing. Every one sees, every one hears this. The actor is silent. Why is he silent? All eyes are bent on him, a deep stillness ensues, and the cunning player proceeds uninterruptedly with his part.' "Very true,' said Thiers. When I want to procure silence, 1 very often adopt the expedient of uttering a gross paradox. That brings the uproar to a climax. I let them all shout until they are tired; it gives me time to recover my breath, and presently the noise subsides, for every one is curious to know how I prove my proposition, and The Frenchman went straightway to the Jardin des Plantes, and on the following day produced a clever, though not perfectly accurate sketch of the camel. The Englishman set out with the first steamer for the Afri can desert, carefully observed the camels he saw there, made drawings of them, and, after some months, completed a picture of the animal, true to the very life. Meanwhile the German had shut himself up in his study, in order to construe the camel out of the depth of his own moral consciousness. According to the most recent auThe conversation next turned on language.thentic intelligence he is still at it." Gutzkow remarked that German is very ill adapted for oratory. the chamber is all attention."" "The English tongue,' he said, 'is as natural as passion itself. French is the language of conversation, of mutual understanding and amiable persuasion. The German language, though our poets find in it a free stream of abounding beauty, is yet far too abstract for ordinary purposes; it expresses nothing right out, is full of paraphrases, and is far too much a curial language to be all the orator requires. The same thing may be said of our historical style.' "You would soon have both an historical style and a language of eloquence,' replied Thiers, if Germany was in full possession of free institutions. Good speaking can only be found where there exists the right of speeking freely. History can only be written where men can make history. The mere scholar can do very well as a collector of historical materials; but to scrutinize, sift, and embody those materials belongs only to the scholar, who is at the same time a statesman. Machiavelli and Du Thou were statesmen; therefore they had an historical style." There is a very great difference, as our author remarks, between the manner of proceeding of a French and German historian. The latter, when he meditates the production of some magnum opus, first spends ten years in piling up a mountain of materials; another ten years are employed in reading these: and, in the course of a third ten, he Guizot's opinion of Thiers is thus reported from his own lips : "M. Thiers, my indefatigable rival, has the misfortune with all his talent to be only an imitator. At one time he imitates Louis XIV., at another the Jacobins; to-day the Directory, and tomorrow Napoleon. It seems as though, notwithstanding his knowledge of the modern history of France, he has no other way of helping himself out of a difficult case than by asking himself, 'How would the monarchy, how would the republic, how would the empire have acted under these circumstances? There is much truth in this remark. 666 Lonis Philippe, Molé, and Guizot, each lost his father by the guillotine. Louis Philippe fears the French, Molé flatters them, Guizot despises them. Not one of the three manifests towards them oblivion of the past-forgiveness-love. "Guizot has seen great, but assuredly no virThat fine tuous times. Why then hate ours? soul that could read, with steadfast voice, out of Bossuet to his dying wife, that manly spirit that I could restrain his tears as he cast the first handful Bewusstseins zu construiren. There are multitudes "Um das Kameel aus der Tiefe seines sittlichen of German metaphysical words and phrases, for which it is impossible to find equivalents in English, and this sittlichen Bewusstseins' is one of them. word moral' must be taken in its most abstract In the phrase which we have substituted for it, the sense, and not as implying 'morality' in its ordinary and limited acceptation." of earth on the coffin of his son,-why thus filled | illusion, that we have written without a censoronly with distrust towards the age, towards a ship-until the book is confiscated." whole people? Does faith in mankind vanish with youth? Are they alone wise, they alone worthy of esteem, whose heads are whitened with the snows of age? Were it possible to blend Guizot and Lamartine together, there would not perhaps be a majority in the Chamber, but a majority there would be in the hearts of all who see in politics the suit which man has been carrying on with nature for thousands of years past, with no prospect as yet of winning." Our author reports an amusing lecture given him indirectly by Cormenin (Timon), the celebrated pamphleteer, on the terrible prolixity of the German writers. Taking up a big book by Lamennais, and a very little one by himself, Timon began thus: "Such a book as this, look you, is far too big. It is a capital book by all means, but who reads it? Who buys it? Who has time and money enough? The great thing is to operate effectively on the people. Look at this slender little book. It is cheap, and can be read quickly. Many thousand copies are dispersed over France. To-day, the little thing appears in Paris; to-morrow it is in the provinces. One must write pamphlets that can be understood by the academician and by the vinedresser, books that will lie on the boudoir-table and on the poor man's chimney-piece, that can be carried in the pocket, and read during a walk in the forest, books that do not give us too much to retain in mind, and therefore not much to forget. Pray recommend all German writers to work in this way for the people. C'est la propagande la plus sûre, la plus sincère. I hereby do it solemnly. "But there is one thing friend Cormenin forgot. In France, it is necessary to make books as small as possible, inasmuch as the reading of them is a matter of such difficulty among the populace. To read the little book on Centralization,' costs the vine-dresser of Burgundy a month's time. Perhaps three individuals in a village can read, that is to say, can spell through a book. What an effort for them to decypher such a gigantic work as a pamphlet of six sheets! How many winter evenings must be spent, how many lamps burnt out, before its contents can be hammered into the hard head of a Bretagne peasant! A Monsieur Blondin, a communist tailor, who refused to make me a pair of trowsers because he deemed me capable of turning up my nose at philosophers and great social reformers, who can neither read nor write, keeps a needle-woman in his workshop to read the newspapers every morning to himself, and his equally erudite journeymen. In Germany, where every peasant has read through the family Bible at least three times, and his old sermon-book four times, it is allowable to give a little more bulk to one's pamphlets. Besides, it is notorious, that it is only in right of twenty printed sheets per volume, that we enjoy a sort of freedom of the press, through which we may at least indulge the fond Is there anything in this world so bad, that nothing good can come out of it? Even the censorship, it seems, has its literary advantages. In reply to Villemain's question, "How did the able writers of Germany contrive to accommodate themselves to the horrible yoke of the censorship?" Gutzkow answered : "We strive so much the more to write in an original style.' the same thing in Benjamin Constant. So long as he wrote under censorship, he was a great stylist. As he was compelled to go round about the truth, his pen swept, in its serpentine evolutions, through the most masterly and graceful curves. Afterwards, when he was free to write whatever he pleased, he became slovenly, and nobody would read him. Be assured, however, that for the sake of a free press, we would rather read bad books, than have good stylists, with a censorship.'" That is true,' said Villemain; we have seen A LEARNED Turk.-The new Cheik-ul-Islam, Ismet-Ben-Zade-Arif-Hiemet Bey, is considered the most learned man in Asiatic literature in the whole Ottoman empire. But he is better than learned-he is enlightened; he is known to be a warm advocate of reform principles, and he was appointed to his present post as the head of the magistrature, and, under the Sultan, the head of the religion of the country, by the express recommendation of the grand vizier, Rechid Pacha. This Cheik-ul-Islam Oriental books that exists as private property in the possesses the finest and most voluminous library of world. The rigor of his virtue is said, too, to be equal to his erudition, and of this he has already, since he has been advanced to his present dignity, given proof. The Cheiks-ul-Islam, his predecessors, have, since the Sultan Mahmoud, been supported by the public Treasury. They have received about 2,000 dollars per month from that source; but at the same time, according to ancient practice, they received also the product of particular taxes and Hiemet Bey, however, has refused to accept of this monopolies which were set aside for their support. last provision, saying that the monthly purses sent him from the Treasury were more than sufficient to support the dignity of his office. By this Act he has renounced for himself and his predecessors more than 30,000 dollars per annum-an act of patriotism which will find few parallels in any country, which is without example here, and which has super-excellent value, because disinterestedness in Turkey is precisely that heroic virtue which is essentially good hope in the future destinies of the empire.— needed as the sine qua non of all reform, and of all Chronicle Correspondent at Constantinople. STATUE TO MRS. SIDDONS.-A Statue of Mrs. Siddons, the great tragedian, is to be placed in Westminster Abbey. The chosen sculptor is Mr. Thomas Campbell, who has just finished the model. From the English Review. JOAN OF ARC--SCHILLER'S DRAMA. 1. Procès de Condamnation et de Réhabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc, dite la Pucelle, publiées pour la première fois d'après les Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Royale, suivis de tous les documents historiques qu'on a pu réunir, et accompagnés de notes et d'éclaircissements. Par JULES QUICHERAT. Tom. i.-iii. Paris, 1841-5. 2. The Maid of Orleans. A romantic tragedy, translated from the German of Friedrich von Schiller. Burns' Fire-side Library. London, no date. HERSELF more like an apparition than like | fallible Church of Rome solemnly recants a reality, a creature of romance rather than a sentence solemnly pronounced, and that a historical character, the heroine of Dom in a case involving questions of faith, by Remi has yet left on the face of her own the dread tribunal to which she has comage so deep a mark of her fleet and passing mitted the guardianship of her orthodoxy. footstep, that in spite of the difficulty of reducing her tale to the sober proportions of historic truth, and separating matter of fact from matter altogether visionary, the historian cannot avoid dealing with this most perplexing episode in the annals of modern times. And while the historian is thus compelled to insert among the records of well-authenticated transactions a story scarcely less fabulous than that of the Trojan war, philosophers exhaust their ingenuity to fathom the depth, and poets weary the wing of their fancy to rise to the height, of that most enigmatic and most poetic of subjects-Joan of Arc. These are the leading facts about which there can be no dispute; they are of a character sufficiently extraordinary to induce an inquiry into the means by which so powerful an influence was exercised over the world by one whom her sex, her age, her birth, and her education, all alike disqualified, according to the ordinary rules of judgment, for the task she undertook, and for the career which she accomplished. The course of that inquiry, instead of explaining so singular a phenomenon in the history of human affairs, on the contrary tends to increase the mystery, and still further to perplex the mind; till at last it seems as if the whole were a riddle cast forth upon the tide of events on very purpose to teach us that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy." That the keen edge of this lesson was felt by the vain and shallow philosophers to know all and to explain all, is attested, of the encyclopædist school, who pretended not only by the many untenable and often ridiculous hypotheses, which were advanced with a view to account for the exthe history of the Maid of Orleans; but, traordinary circumstances connected with above all, by the infamous production by which the corypheus of that school unwittingly bore witness to the close connexion between unbelief and moral corruptness, Setting aside all the curious details with which her story is rife, and all the embellishments which it has at different times received, taking merely the broad outline of the facts, as they stand forth undeniably in the general history of the times, the tale is marvellous enough. A simple country lass, obscure and unlettered, not out of her teens, suddenly appears on the stage of the world; by her appearance she changes the whole tide of events; victorious armies are put to the rout, the fallen fortunes of a fugitive king are repaired, and the royal diadem is set on his brow; in the midst of her career she falls into the hands of her enemies, and is subjected to a legal procedure of the most appalling as well as perplexing nature; she is placed before the tribunal of the Inquisition, where she defies the power, and baffles the wiles of her judges; and a conviction being at last pro*The most absurd, perhaps, of all the suppositions cured by the most disgraceful perversion of which have been started in explanation of the mysjustice, she dies with the fortitude of a terious tale of Jeanne d'Arc is that of Mr. Caze: he martyr. But even here her power does not sets about gravely to prove that she was an illegi end; long after her death the proceedings timate daughter of Isabel of Bavaria and Louis of Orleans, who was put in her infancy under the taken against her are subjected to a search-charge of her supposed parents, and had accidentally ing revision, and the result is, that the in- become acquainted with the secret of her birth. the standard-bearer of infidelity exhibiting | heroic maiden. Besides a variety of smallhimself, to his own irretrievable disgrace, er poems, and several pieces written for in the character of a "filthy dreamer" and a "brute beast." the stage, there have been no less than four epic poems produced on the subject since the restoration of the Bourbons; one by M. Pierre Duménil, one by Mme. de Choiseul, one by Mlle. Bigot, and the fourth by M.. Alexandre Soumet, the only one of the four which has in France itself met with considerable success. Against this abomination the purer moral sense and the loftier poetic feeling, both of England and of Germany, revolted. Almost simultaneously, and apparently without any knowledge of each other's performance, appeared Southey's epic, "Joan of Arc," and Schiller's "Maid of Orleans, a romantic But it is not in the field of poetry alone tragedy." The former, with all its imper- that our French neighbors have exerted fections, frankly acknowledged by the great themselves to make the amende honorable laureate himself in the preface to the new to the injured memory of their national edition of it, published, in 1841, in the heroine. As far back as the middle of the collection of his poetical works, atones last century Lenglet Dufresnoy had publargely for the coarse blows dealt to "the lished a history of the Maid of Orleans, Mission'd Maid" by the misplaced patriot- abridged from the manuscript compilation ism of the Bard of Avon. The latter, by of Richer; which was succeeded by the its great and deserved popularity, contri- still more copious work of M. de Laverbuted in no small degree to the diffusion of dy, during the early part of the revonobler and more worthy views on the sub-lution. The restoration of the Bourject in the public mind, and so helped to bons, and the taste for mediæval and realize Schiller's own prophecy, in one of "Catholic" subjects, which it brought in his short lyric poems, of which, as neither of the two English versions which we have seen of it, is sufficiently faithful to convey a correct idea of the original, we shall venture to give a translation of our own : Humanity to foul, the scoffer lewd Low through the dust thy virgin form did hale; Wit against beauty bears eternal feud, Spurns God and angel, like a fabled tale : Whate'er the heart holds dear, it basely reaves, Whate'er or fancy dreams, or faith believes. But, like thyself, sprung from a childlike race, Does clasp and bear thee to th' eternal skies; To soil whate'er is bright, to drag down low To gaping crowds let Momus shake his bells; It was not to be supposed that the most egotistical people in the world, on this side the Atlantic, would long submit to the indignity of allowing foreign literature to monopolize one of the noblest themes of their national history. The more the poems of Southey and Schiller became known in France, the more was Voltaire's Pucelle felt to be a national disgrace, and pen after pen was set to work, to celebrate in strains more worthy of her the pure and its train, gave a new impulse to this line of study; M. Berriat Saint-Prix endeavored to bring the adventures of Joan into an accurate chronological arrangement; and M. Lebrun de Charmettes gave an abstract of her history, with detailed accounts of the proceedings in her cause, taken from the original manuscript documents preserved in the Bibliotheque du Roi. But by far the most important and the most valuable of the recent historical labors on this subject, is the publication of the original documents themselves by M. Quicherat, under the auspices of the Société de l' Histoire de France. The work is to be preceded, in a fourth volume, by a general introduction; but the three volumes which are before the public, contain the whole of the judicial proceedings instituted for the condemnation of Joan, afterwards for her réhabilitation, together with some extrajudicial pieces written during her lifetime. These authentic documents contain ample and most interesting materials for appreciating the real character of the mysterious maiden; and if they disprove the supposition of her being a delegate of heaven, which M. Lebrun endeavors to support, they furnish equally clear evidence that she was neither herself an impostor, nor the dupe and tool of a crafty policy; but that, in whatever way the phenomenon may be accounted for, she was herself sincerely persuaded of her divine mission, and of the reality of her visions. The witnesses examined in the place of her birth unanimously depose to the spotless character of her childhood and youth. She was the daughter of poor, but honest and respectable rustics, and down to the time of her sallying forth for the rescue of France from the English yoke, she had never left her parents. Her occupations were of the same nature as those of other girls in her station: she was employed in spinning and in household work; sometimes she followed the plough with her father; and when his turn came to provide for the custody of the cattle of the parish on the common pasture, the task was performed by her. For a short time the inhabitants of Dom Remi were obliged to fly in a body to Neufchateau, when she too went thither in the company of her parents. On their return they found their own village, and the church itself, reduced to ashes; a circumstance which appears to have made a strong impression on the mind of Joan. Her education was of the most limited kind; it extended not beyond the knowledge of the Creed, the Pater-noster, and Ave-Maria, and such legendary lore of saints and angels as an intelligent girl, diligent in her attendance upon all the solemnities of Romish worship, could not fail to acquire. Her fervent piety was the only remarkable feature in her character; she was frequent and regular at confession and at the Holy Communion, heard mass on all the festivals, and when the bell for prayer sounded, she would either repair to the church, or else say her prayers standing, with her knees bent, in the place where she was. On Sundays it was her custom, moreover, to make a short pilgrimage to a chapel dedicated to "the Blessed Lady of Bermont," at a short distance from Dom Remi. She was liberal after her power in offerings to the Church, and in almsgiving, and took pleasure in solacing her sick neighbors. Two points respecting the early life of Joan, which are generally introduced into the histories and poems, and which were much insisted on by her judges also, among the counts of the indictment, are wholly disposed of by the witnesses of Dom Remi, and by Joan's own answers on her trial; viz. the allegation that she had for some time served the unfeminine office of ostler at an inn, and the legend about the haunted oak. The former was intended on her trial to support the general charge of looseness of conduct; and among a certain class of her biographers, the circumstance helps to explain the interest which she took in the political events of the day, by the various tales of wayfaring and warfaring men, with which in that situation she is supposed to have become familiar. It turns out, however, on inquiry, that the whole is a perversion of the simple fact, that during the flight of the people of Don Remi to Neufchateau, she lent a helping hand, in the general confusion, to the mistress of the house in which, with her parents, she had taken refuge for a few days. As for the haunted oak, it appears that there was indeed a fine old beech-tree not far from her native village, under which the old gossips would have it that the fairies used to hold their nightly revels in days of yore. But in the days of Joan's childhood it was chiefly noted as the favorite resort of the promenaders of all ranks and ages; and on certain village holidays in spring and autumn, and especially on the Sunday called Des Fontaines, or the Sunday Latare Jerusalem, i. e. the fourth Sunday in Lent, it was the custom for the maidens of the village to repair to the old beech, which they decorated with wreaths of flowers, danced and sang around it, and afterwards feasted under its shade upon cakes baked for the occasion, and drank of a brook which ran close by it. Whatever connexion this custom might have had originally with superstitious notions about the fairies, it is clear that it had long ceased to be regarded in any other light than that of innocent mirth; for, as one of the witnesses gravely deposes, "although it was anciently reported that the fairies met there, yet he had never seen any of them, nor had he ever heard in his own lifetime of their meeting under that tree." In this amusement it appears that Joan had usually taken part, in her younger years, with the other girls of the village; and this circumstance was on her trial tortured into an evidence of her dealing with "familiar spirits." In two respects this part of her examination is curious and interesting; first, because it affords a striking illustration of the unfair nature of the proceedings against her; and, secondly, because her answers prove how clearly she distinguished in her own mind between fairy superstitions, which she utterly repudiated, and the heavenly visitations of which she believed herself to be the favored object. Notwithstanding that she disclaimed all knowledge of, or belief in the fairies or |