No Englishman of that day, or of Shakespeare’s day, could do justice to the fiery, Gallic courage, the self-devotion, the religious ennoblement of that earnest, gallant soul who was called the Maid of Orleans. A far better notion of her presence and power than Shakespeare gave is brought to mind by that recent French painting of Bastien-Lepage--so well known by engraving--which aims to set forth the vision and the voices that came to her amid the forest silence and shadows. Amid those shadows she stands--startled: a strong, sweet figure of a peasant maiden; stoutly clad and simply; capable of harvest-work with the strongest of her sisterhood; yet not coarse; redeemed through every fibre of body and soul by a light that shines in her eye, looking dreamily upward; seeing things others see not; hoping things others hope not, and with clenched hand putting emphasis to the purpose--which the hope and the vision kindle; pitying her poor France, and nerved to help her--as she did--all the weary and the troublesome days through, till the shameful sacrifice at English hands, on the market-place of Rouen, closed her life and her story. The two closing portions of the Henry VI. dramas relate to home concerns. There is much blood in them and tedium too (if one dare say this), and flashes of wit--a crazy tangle of white and red roses in that English garden--cleared up at last in Shakespeare’s own way, when Richard III.[63] comes, in drama of his own, and crookedness, and Satanry of his own, and laughs his mocking laugh over the corpses he makes of kings and queens and princes; and at last in Bosworth field, upon the borders of Warwickshire and near to the old Roman Watling Street, the wicked hunchback, fighting like a demon, goes down under the sword-thrust of that Henry (VII.) of Richmond, who, as I have said, was grandson to Katharine of Valois, of the coquettish courtship. No chronicler of them all, commonplace or painstaking as he might be, has so planted the image of the crooked Richard III. in men’s minds as Shakespeare: though it is to be feared that he used somewhat too much blood in the coloring; and doubtful if the hump-backed king was quite the monster which Garrick, Booth, and Macready have made of him. _Caxton and First English Printing._ In the midst of those draggling, dreary, dismal war-times, when no poet lifted his voice in song, when no chronicler who has a worthy name wrote any story of the years, there came into vogue in Europe and in England, a trade--which in its issues had more to do with the life and spread of good literature, than any poet, or any ten poets could accomplish. You will guess at once what the trade was; it was the trade of Printing.