the maid of Orleans, has been variously characterized; but all now agree, that she was worthy of a better fate than the horrid death she was doomed to die. (See JOAN D'ARC, Encycl.) But did she actually die that death? An ingenious writer in the Monthly Magazine has proved, we think, that she did not.

The bishop of Beauvais (says he) is accused by all parties of treachery and trick in the conduct of the trial: it was his known propensity to gain his ends by stratagem, craft, manoeuvre, fraud, dexterity. He fecks out, and brings forward, such testimony only as relates to ecclesiastical offences, and then hands over the decision to the secular judges, whose clemency he invokes. Joan says to him publicly, "You promised to restore me to the church, and you deliver me to my enemies." The intention of the bishop, then, must have been, that the secular judges, for want of evidence, should see no offence against the state; as the clerical judges, notwithstanding the evidence, had declined to see any against the church. A fatal sentence was, however, pronounced; and the fulfilment of it entrusted to the ecclesiastical authorities. Immediately after the auto da fé, one of the executioners ran to two friars, and said, "that he had never been so shocked at any execution, and that the English had built up a scaffolding of plaster (un échafaud de plâtre) so lofty, that he could not approach the culprit, which must have caused her sufferings to be long and horrid." She was, therefore, by some unusual contrivance, kept out of the reach and observation even of the executioners.

Some time after, when public commiseration had succeeded to a vindictive bigotry, a woman appeared at Metz, who declared herself to be Joan of Arc. She was everywhere welcomed with zeal. At Orleans, especially, where Joan was well known, she was received with the honours due to the liberatrices of the town. She was acknowledged by both her brothers, Jean and Pierre d'Arc. On their testimony she was married by a gentleman of the house of Ambroise, in 1436. At their solicitation her sentence was annulled in 1456. The Parisians, indeed, long remained incredulous: they must else have punished those ecclesiastics whose humanity, perhaps, confired with the bishop of Beauvais to withdraw her from real execution down a central chimney of brick and mortar; or, as the executioner called it, a scaffolding of plaster. The king, for the woman seems to have shunned no confirmation, is stated to have received her with these words: "Pucelle, m'amie, soyez la tres bien reconnue, au nom de Dieu." She is then said to have communicated to him, kneeling, the artifice practised. Can this woman be an impostor? Our author thinks not, and appeals to Voltaire, who, in his prose works, seems willing to allow that she was not, as is too commonly imagined, one of those half insane enthusiasts, employed as tools to work upon the vulgar; whom the one party endeavoured to cry up as a prophetess, and the other to cry down as a witch; but that she was a real heroine, superior to vulgar prejudice, and no less remarkable by force of mind than for a courage and strength unusual in her sex. This opinion is certainly countenanced by her behaviour in adversity, and during her trial, which was firm without insolence, and exalted without affectation.