On recalling to mind the story of Joan d'Arc, what is the point of view in which that singular person presents herself to us? Joan d'Arc--whom we shall call, after her title in the play, Johanna--a village maiden, and a fugitive from her home, turned the tide of victory in the great war which, in her time, was raging in France. As she effected this through the influence which a belief in her supernatural power and celestial inspiration exerted upon the army of Charles; and as, on the other hand, the cruel fate she herself personally encountered from her enemies, was the consequence of an opposite belief in her witchcraft, or possession by the devil; the unhappy maiden presents herself to us, in a strictly historical point of view, as one of those wild visionaries whom solitude occasionally rears, become suddenly the sport of the tumultuous feelings of two rival hosts, elevated by the one to a saint and the companion of angels, and by the other blackened into a witch and the associate of demons. History has relieved her moral character from the aspersions thrown upon it, and philosophy has quite denuded her of the least claims to supernatural power, whether derived from above or from below: nothing remains but the enthusiast and the visionary, and the strange position into which circumstances conducted her. And this position of the thought-bewildered maid is rendered the more striking, when we consider that it was her own countrymen who judged of her in so contradictory a manner; for the war which raged around her was rather a civil war, in which one of the parties had formed an alliance with England, than a national war between France and England. It was by Frenchmen that she was extolled and reverenced, and by Frenchmen that she was condemned and executed: it was under the auspices, and with the blessings, of the church that she conquered; it was the church that execrated her, and sent her as an abomination to the stake.