But who sees not that, in all such cases, the poet sufficiently and completely reverses the unjust sentence of contemporaries, by representing the sufferer as undeserving of it?--that, by depicting her as innocent, he anticipates and introduces the equitable judgment of posterity? When Schiller had described the Maid of Orleans as pious in heart--as the chosen of Heaven, he had at once reversed the sentence of the court of Rouen. It was assuredly not necessary that he should conceal the fact of any such sentence having been passed, in order to exculpate Johanna: and to exculpate, or to spare, the august judges, was no part of the business of the poet. Socrates dies in prison, denounced as a corrupter of youth. He himself is sufficiently vindicated when he is shown to be no corrupter of youth. Is there any sentiment of equity that would prompt us to suppress the fact, that he died by the public executioner of Athens? Or would it be doing honour to history--to this great tribunal of appeal--to stifle our indignation against the unjust and criminal sentences which she has had to repeal? No doubt the poet would have had difficulties to contend with, in following the course of history. In particular, as he had chosen to represent Johanna as veritably inspired, he would have been tasked to reconcile this severity of her fate, on the one hand, with the justice of Heaven towards its own missionary; or on the other, with the unblemished character of his heroine. Either Heaven must appear forgetful of Johanna, or Johanna must be represented as having forfeited a right to its protection. But this difficulty Schiller has not entirely escaped in his own plot, and he has shown how it may be encountered. Johanna might well yield to the tenderness of a human passion without forfeiting our sympathy, or incurring a stain upon her moral character; and yet this aberration of heart--this dereliction from the austere purity required by her sacred mission--might, in a theological point of view, be supposed to have forfeited her claim to the miraculous interposition of Heaven in her behalf. So that, in the closing scenes, though Johanna might have no claim on the miraculous favours of Heaven, she would still be a saint at heart, and entitled to our deepest sympathy; and Heaven would receive back, if not its prophetess and champion, yet a noble child of earth, still further purified by more than expiatory sufferings.