The ambitious quarto on which Cottle prided himself not a little was now published (1796). To assign its true place to _Joan of Arc_, we must remember that narrative poetry in the eighteenth century was of the slenderest dimensions and the most modest temper. Poems of description and sentiment seemed to leave no place for poems of action and passion. Delicately finished cabinet pictures, like Shenstone’s _Schoolmistress_ and Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_, had superseded fresco. The only great English epic of that century is the prose Odyssey of which Mr. Tom Jones is the hero. That estimable London merchant, Glover, had indeed written an heroic poem containing the correct number of Books; its subject was a lofty one; the sentiments were generous, the language dignified; and inasmuch as Leonidas was a patriot and a Whig, true Whigs and patriots bought and praised the poem. But Glover’s poetry lacks the informing breath of life. His second poem, _The Athenaid_, appeared after his death, and its thirty books fell plumb into the water of oblivion. It looked as if the narrative poem _à longue haleine_ was dead in English literature. Cowper had given breadth, with a mingled gaiety and gravity, to the poetry of description and sentiment; Burns had made the air tremulous with snatches of pure and thrilling song; the _Lyrical Ballads_ were not yet. At this moment, from a provincial press, _Joan of Arc_ was issued. As a piece of romantic narrative it belongs to the new age of poetry; in sentiment it is revolutionary and republican; its garment of style is of the eighteenth century. Nowhere, except it be in the verses which hail “Inoculation, lovely Maid!” does the personified abstraction, galvanized into life by printer’s type and poet’s epithet, stalk more at large than in the unfortunate ninth book, the Vision of the Maid, which William Taylor, of Norwich, pronounced worthy of Dante. The critical reviews of the time were liberal in politics, and the poem was praised and bought. “Brissot murdered” was good, and “the blameless wife of Roland” atoned for some offences against taste; there was also that notable reference to the “Almighty people” who “from their tyrant’s hand dashed down the iron rod.” The delegated maid is a creature overflowing with Rousseauish sensibility; virtue, innocence, the peaceful cot, stand over against the wars and tyranny of kings, and the superstition and cruelty of prelates. Southey himself soon disrelished the youthful heats and violences of the poem; he valued it as the work which first lifted him into public view; and, partly out of a kind of gratitude, he rehandled the _Joan_ again and again. It would furnish an instructive lesson to a young writer to note how its asperities were softened, its spasm subdued, its swelling words abated. Yet its chief interest will be perceived only by readers of the earlier text. To the second book Coleridge contributed some four hundred lines, where Platonic philosophy