We wish to state distinctly on what grounds we make our objection; because there is current among a class of critics a censure for the mere departure from historical truth--made, it would seem, out of a sensitive regard for history--in which we by no means acquiesce. We have no desire to bind a poet to history, merely because it is history. He has his own ends to accomplish, and by those shall he be judged. As, assuredly, we should not accept it as the least excuse for the least measure of dulness, on the part of the poet, that he had followed faithfully the historical narrative, so neither do we impose upon him a very close adherence to it. We censure the course which Schiller has here pursued, not because he has marred history, but because he has marred his own poem. The objection lies entirely within the boundary of his own art. He has selected a personage for his drama with whom a certain fate is so indissolubly associated, that it is impossible to think of her without recalling it to mind; and this ineffaceable trait in her history he has attempted, for the time, to obliterate from our memory. By this procedure, the imagination of the reader is divided and distracted. The picture presented by the poet _is and is not_ a portrait of the historical figure which lives in our recollection. There are many points of resemblance; but the chief is omitted. And we always feel that it is omitted; for history here is too strong for the poet: he cannot expel her from the territory he wishes to enclose for himself. As well might one describe a Socrates who did not drink the hemlock--as well a Napoleon who did not die at St Helena, as a Joan d'Arc who did not suffer in the flames of Rouen. _Von Hinrich_, in his critical work upon Schiller, gives a curious defence of this departure from history:--"The martyrdom," he says, "of the forlorn maiden could hardly satisfy us on the stage. In history it is different; we see these events in their connexion with the past and the future, and we do not abstract some single fact, and judge of it apart from all others. The history of the world is the tribunal of the world. It has justified Johanna; posterity has restored to her the fame and honour of which a malicious fate had for a season deprived her. The poet was obliged to change his catastrophe, in order to introduce, in his own epoch, that finger of justice which, in reality, revealed itself only at a subsequent period."[1] [1] Part II., p. 183.