After all, it is a question whether our sympathies be not thrown away when we affect to feel for Jeanne Darc. M. Delepierre, the Belgian Secretary of Legation, has printed, for private circulation, his “Doute Historique.” This work consists chiefly of official documents, showing that the “Maid” never suffered at all, but that some criminal having been executed in her place, she survived to be a pensioner of the government, a married lady, and the mother of a family! The work in which these documents are produced, is not to be easily procured, but they who have any curiosity in the matter will find the subject largely treated in the _Athenæum_. This “Historical Doubt” brings us so closely in connection with romance, that we, perhaps, can not do better in illustrating our subject, than turn to a purely romantic subject, and see of what metal the champions of Christendom were made, with respect to chivalry. THE CHAMPIONS OF CHRISTENDOM GENERALLY AND HE OF ENGLAND IN PARTICULAR. “Are these things true? Thousands are getting at them in the streets.” _Sejanus His Fall._ I can hardly express the delight I feel as a biographer in the present instance, in the very welcome fact that no one knows anything about the parentage of St. George. If there had been a genealogical tree of the great champion’s race, the odds, are that I should have got bewildered among the branches. As there is only much conjecture with a liberal allowance of assertion, the task is doubly easy, particularly as the matter itself is of the very smallest importance. The first proof that our national patron ever existed at all, according to Mr. Alban Butler, is that the Greeks reverenced him by the name of “the Great Martyr.” Further proof of a somewhat similar quality, is adduced in the circumstance that in Greece and in various parts of the Levant, there are or were dozens of churches erected in honor of the chivalrous saint; that Georgia took the holy knight for its especial patron; and that St. George, in full panoply, won innumerable battles for the Christians, by leading forward the reserves when the vanguard had been repulsed by the infidels, and the Christian generals were of themselves too indolent, sick, or incompetent, to do what they expected St. George to do for them.