In the love-sick classical heroines of Corneille and Racine there is nothing more Frenchified, more absurd, more revolting. Then he makes her die victorious on the field of battle defending the oriflamme;—far, far more glorious as well as more pathetic her real death—but it offended against Schiller’s æsthetic conception of the dignity of tragedy. Lastly, we have Southey’s epic: what shall be said of it?—even what he said of the Lusiad of Camoens, “that it is read with little emotion, and remembered with little pleasure.” No. I do not wish to see Joan turned into a heroine of tragedy or tale, because, as it seems to me, the whole life and death of this martyred girl is too near us, and too historically distinct, and, I will add, too sacred, to be dressed out in romantic prose or verse. What Walter Scott might have made of her I do not know—something marvellously picturesque and life-like, no doubt—and yet I am glad he did not try his hand on her. But she remains a legitimate and most admirable subject for representative art; and as yet nothing has been done in sculpture to fix the ideal and heroic in her character, nor in painting, worthy of her exploits. There exists no contemporary portrait of her except in the brief description of her in the old French Chronicle of the Siege of Orleans, where it is said that her figure was tall and slender, her bust fine, her hair and eyes black; that she wore her hair short, and could never be persuaded to put on a head-piece, and farther (and in this respect both Schiller and Southey have wronged her), that she had never slain a man, using her consecrated sword merely to defend herself. I should like to see a fine equestrian statue of her by one of our best English sculptors, set up in a conspicuous place among us, as a national expiation. Southey mentions that in the beginning of the last war, about 1795, when popular feeling, excited almost to frenzy, raged against France, a pantomime, or ballet, was performed at Covent Garden, from the story of Joan of Arc, at the conclusion of which she is carried away by demons, like a female Don Juan. This denouement caused such a storm of indignation, that the author—one James Cross—was obliged, after the first two or three representations, to change the demons into angels, and send her straight into Heaven:—an anecdote pleasant to record as illustrating the sure ultimate triumph of truth over falsehood; of all the better sympathies over prejudice and wrong;—in spite of history, and, what is more, in spite of Shakspeare! [Illustration] [Illustration] CHARACTERS FROM SHAKSPEARE. Joan of Arc is not, however, a Shakspearian character; and, in fact, there are very few of his personages susceptible of sculptural treatment. They are too dramatic, too profound, too complex in their essential nature where they are tragic; too many-sided and picturesque where they are comic.