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whose influence is wisely exercised in preventing his followers from adopting mischievous and reactionary party cries. The leader of the country party is not inattentive to dress, does not eschew fancy waistcoats, and during the progress of debate has to look down for so many hours upon his trowsers and boots, that he likes to see them well cut and symmetrical. The candid observer who regards the other chiefs of opposition-Pakington, Henley, Walpole, Napier, Fitzroy Kelly, and Thesiger-may haply rejoice, whatever his politics, that these men have been called to her Majesty's councils, since he may trace the influence of the responsibilities of office in a more largely-developed conscientiousness, a more enlightened patriotism, and a more candid appreciation of the difficulties of government. Some very small Ministerialist may, perhaps, in the course of the debate, taunt the opposition with the differences existing among their leaders on the subject of national education; but who thinks the worse of either Sir John Pakington or Mr. Henley, because they avow different opinions on this momentous subject? Mr. Henley's speeches have evinced a practical good sense and knowledge of human nature which have won the applause of those who differ from him in the conclusions to which he has arrived. Sir John Pakington has been usefully employed in collecting evidence to shew the need of education among the lower classes, and has shewn so much liberality and superiority to the prejudices of his caste, that he is at the present moment the most popular member of the opposition among the gentlemen on the right of the Speaker's chair. Sir John is clear and distinct as a speaker, and addresses the House with ease, self-possession, and all the advantages of a good elocution. Mr. Henley, with less polish and a somewhat abrupt manner, has a native shrewdness which secures a respectful attention for everything he says. Whether his faculty of perception is wide and extended may be matter for discussion, but the bee does not see more clearly whatever comes within the range of its vision. Mr. Walpole's highly educated intellect and courteous demeanour give him a leading place among the opposition chiefs, but he scarcely occupies so high a position in the favour of the House as his two neighbours. Two other prominent men on this bench may be seen holding their hands to their ears, to assist a sluggish aural nerve. One of these is the greatest novelist of the day, upon the model of whose heroes the middle-aged men of 1857 fashioned themselves in their youth, and who, as poet, politician, brilliant pamphleteer, satirist, has exercised an amount of political, literary, and social influence upon his time, which must be left to a future generation impartially to estimate. The features are still handsome, intellectual, and thorough-bred; but the frame is weak and languid, and the utterance often so thick and indistinct, that some of the keenest shafts escape the hearer, and only hit their mark in the newspapers of the following day. Next to Sir Bulwer Lytton is Mr. Napier, with whose infirmity every one also sympathises, and whose interest in political debate is as unmistakeable as his personal amiability. Near them are Mr. Whiteside, tall in person and formidable in debate, the only oratorical Irishman left in St. Stephen's, who requires a whole chapter to himself;-Augustus Stafford, handsome and genial, whose hearty laugh in conversation with his friends cannot make even the Speaker look grave, and who has amply redeemed, in fever-ship and cholera-hospital, the youthful escapades of his secretariat of the Admiralty;-Baillie, of Inverness, a speaker not inferior to Cardwell in force and clearness, and who has no favour to ask of fate and destiny, except the air and temperament of a happy man; Lord Stanley, tall, and "more like his father than

his father himself," as somebody (doubtless an Irishman) averred;-Sir Fitzroy Kelly and Sir Frederick Thesiger, accomplished advocates, who have seen their rivals promoted over their heads to the "cushions" of the law-courts, until they must begin to believe that they are changelings, who were born Chief Justices, but have never come into their rights, and are doomed to wander about for an indefinite period in search of the judicial ermine.

The opposition benches behind are not less thickly occupied. Here may be found Mr. Malins, sometimes verbose on questions of law reform; -Lord Robert Cecil, who has shewn cleverness to mark him out, in the opinion of some, for the future leadership of a party;-the Marquis of Granby, who cannot fail to be respected as a high-minded nobleman, in whichever House he may sit, and whether his opinions meet with popular concurrence or not;-Mr. Miles, whose emancipation from the prejudices of his youth, and present outspoken honesty and candour, make us proud of our English country gentlemen, when they give their intellects fair play; -Sir J. Y. Buller, one of Sir R. Peel's model county members;-Mr. Edward Ball, an honest man, with a loud, full voice ;-Mr. Spooner, not so good-looking, perhaps, as Colonel Forester, nor so picturesque as Sir R. Peel, but whose white neckerchief and solemn and imposing voice the House would be sorry to miss, and who has made immense advances of late in its good graces;-Mr. Newdegate, still more heavy and solemn, but beginning to be listened to;-Sir Charles Burrell, the venerable father of the House of Commons, tall, active, and in the enjoyment of a green old age, who was returned for Shoreham as soon as he was of age, and has continued to represent the same borough without a single interval for more than half a century;-Col. Dunne, who claims no descent from Solon, but who, having been for a short time clerk to the Ordnance, has much to say on military subjects, and looms especially large on the discussion of the army estimates;-Lord Claud Hamilton, who speaks with a fervour that ought to be highly moving at a champagne dinner-party, when the guests are sure the orator means more than he can express, and give him uproarious credit for his good intentions;-Mr. George Hudson, seldom seen in the House, and uneasily conscious that he is under a cloud;-Dr. Samuel Warren, who would give "ten thousand a-year" to know why the House sometimes laughs at him, and is never so grave as he.

But we must hasten to the benches below the gangway on the opposition side; and here we shall probably encounter Sir W. Heathcote, Mr. Gladstone's colleague in the representation of Oxford;-the Marquis of Blandford, an authority upon Church questions;-Mr. Deedes, a sensible and judicious county member;-Mr. Cayley, great upon a silver currency, and with strong views upon the malt-tax ;-Mr. Beckett Denison, shrewd and long-headed, but reproaching himself for not having sooner suspected the gigantic forgeries of the Great Northern ;- Mr. Fitzstephen French, an Irish member, whose bark at Lord Palmerston is worse than his bite ;Sir Stafford Northcote, a new member, of philanthropic aims and unprepossessing manner;—Mr. Adderley, who will not unlikely raise his fluent voice and well-balanced periods on the first night of the session against any renewal of transportation to colonies that refuse to take our convicts ;and Mr. Brady, once a surgeon in the Blackfriars-road, and who, like other Irishmen, had a far better chance of finding himself a member of Parliament than men in the same position in life on this side the Channel. Upon the bench behind them will be found the Irish brigade, whom Pal

from God, and by His command, as she believed that our Saviour has redeemed us from the sufferings of hell."

This was Joan's invincible conviction. But whether we agree with her and with her biographer in believing that she had in very truth a supernatural mission to fulfil, or regard her mysterious messages of counsel and command as delusions generated by an overheated imagination and an unenlightened devotion, it will be in either case clear that she had, in addition to the inspiration of her love of France, that still grander inspiration of a faith in God, which has in many another noble instance given birth to undertakings as romantic and successes as complete as hers. The efficacy of this faith was manifested first amidst the humble cares and occupations of her daily life at Domremy. She proved its temper well by the unwearied industry with which she plied her needle and her spinningwheel, or performed the common duties of the household; by her obedience and her affection to her parents; by her charitable succour to the poor; by her constancy and earnestness in prayer; and, in a word, by the whole tenor of a life-passed, be it observed, not, as is commonly supposed, as a shepherd-girl in the fields, but under a pious mother's eye at home-so striking for its goodness and its purity, as to win for her the admiration and esteem of peasants, priests, and nobles of the neighbourhood that she dwelt in and adorned. And this was no short or slight novitiate it continued throughout five years-during which there was no deviation from this beautiful blamelessness of conduct, and no cessation of the voices which, with an ever-increasing urgency, impelled her to set forth upon the crowning work they had commanded her to do.

It was in the beginning of her eighteenth year that Joan departed from Domremy on her strange and perilous expedition. By the very greatness of her undertaking we may estimate the truth and strength of her dependence on Divine aid for its accomplishment. The untaught and inexperienced peasant-girl, with no protection but her purpose and her purity and faith, began a journey of a hundred and fifty leagues, throughout a district overrun by the insolent and unrestrained soldiers of a victorious army of invaders, in order as the consummation of her enterprize-to deliver France from her triumphant enemies, and to confer the crown, and the powers of actual sovereignty, upon that discredited Dauphin whom she had been taught by her mysterious visitants to look upon as rightful inheritor of the throne. As, with this intent, the maiden quitted her hamlet-home, how miserably inadequate, in any human judgment, must her means have seemed in relation to that momentous end!

But it was Joan's good-fortune to win new credit and support at every pause upon her way. At Vaucouleurs, her first resting-place, many believed in the reality of her mission; the captain of the place somewhat reluctantly accorded her an escort and a sword; and the common people zealously subscribed to provide for her a horse and a man's dress, which she regarded as an indispensable equipment on her journey. Above all, the two chiefs of her escort were so penetrated with her own undoubting faith, that, on arriving at the Dauphin's court, they manifested the utmost enthusiasm in making known to all whom they approached, how marvellously they had been preserved upon their perilous route, how matchless and how manifold were the heroine's virtues, and how complete was their own belief that her commission came from God.

It must be confessed that the train of events which followed Joan's arrival at the Dauphin's court were not ill-calculated, in a credulous age, to

men of learning. It was desirable that a life of Joan of Arc, founded entirely upon those authentic materials, should be written for the popular use; and this is what has been done in the work before us, with admirable taste and skill, by M. Abel Desjardins. He makes no statement of any moment without a reference to the volume and the page of M. Quicherat's publication, by which it is supported; so that his appendix of references, as a consequence of this minute fidelity, amounts upon the whole to very nearly half as many pages as the life which it authenticates. It is one of the many merits of the work, that this necessity of following old, and often ill-written, documents with close conformity, has not at all impeded the freedom or the grace of M. Desjardins' own agreeable style.

To

The story of Joan of Arc, as our author tells it, is a very sweet and sad one. The charm that binds our hearts to her in her heroic days, and bids us weep for her as she wins her martyr's crown, begins to exercise itself even in the earliest dawn of her attractive and uncommon infancy. The loving and devout nature, with all its strange and solemn earnestness of feeling and of faith, is quite as visible in the child's pursuits and aspirations as in the most wonderful of the noble-hearted heroine's achievements. labour and to pray were the two lessons that her mother taught her, and they struck root deeply in her being. Another important influence-the love of her native land-came to her from her father. Altogether, her parents were no common people. The mother's piety and the father's patriotism bore fruit which has made their poor cottage-home in Domremy memorable for ever. In that miserable hamlet in a far-off valley of the land, when evening grouped the family around their lowly hearth, a faithful thought was given to the state of France; and, amidst the hardship of their own daily lot of toil and want, they mourned over the misfortunes of their country, and prayed for its deliverance from the double curse of a distracted and divided government, helpless for defence on the one hand, and, on the other, foreign invaders of the soil, pillaging and ravaging at will. Their own personal sufferings, grievous as they often might be, were never allowed to harden them against this great national affliction. And whilst these nightly colloquies were fostering the poor child's love of France, other colloquies, unheard by mortal ears, were fostering her love of God. In a chapel on the green hill-side, before her father's door, it was her great delight to indulge in those services by which the Roman Catholic Church encourages devotion; and often-stealing from her young companions, as they danced and played on the grassy slope, or in the adjacent wood-she found a deeper joy in carrying her hoarded offering into the sanctuary, and pouring forth at the Virgin's feet her heart-felt thanksgivings and prayers. And heavenly voices, as she fondly thought, soon answered her. It was in her father's garden, at noon on a summer-day, that the child—she was then only in her thirteenth year-heard for the first time, in fear and awe, the voice of the archangel urging her to a virtuous and a pious life, promising her God's aid, and impressing on her, above all else, that she must go forth to the assistance of the realm of France. This, however, was but the beginning of a long succession of what Joan, at least, had amplest faith in as Divine communications. From that time she continued to be visited, as often as twice or three times within a week, by the archangel Michael, and by Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, and the constant burden of their sweet and solemn messages was evermore the same. And "she believed in these voices," in the words of her own eloquent assurance on her trial, "as she believed in the Christian faith: she believed that they came

and she was made aware of the consternation which her fall had given rise to, than she was again armed and mounted, and encouraging her wearied soldiers in their unrelenting work. At length, as the day waned, the courage of her troops began to waver, and then it was that Joan, withdrawing for a while in fervent prayer, returned to animate them to a last triumphant effort. As her standard touched the rampart, a white dove flew over her, and, availing herself of the augury, she cried out to her followers, "Enter, children; they are ours!" The impulse was an irresistible one, and the siege of Orleans was from that moment raised. The English commander, Talbot, set fire to his works on the following morning, and retired from them with the ruins of his army. At the same time, Joan "assembled at the foot of an altar raised in the open air, outside the city's walls, the whole of that population whom she had delivered in three days. The majestic hymn Te Deum burst forth from their united voices, and ascended towards heaven, just as the last battalions of the English were disappearing at the horizon."

Great as the public faith in Joan had been before, what bounds could be put to it after this unparalleled success? No wonder that the path she travelled by to meet the Dauphin was crowded by a grateful people anxious to behold her; no wonder that the women kneeled before her on her way, and the poor pressed forward eagerly to touch her armour, or to kiss her feet and hands; no wonder, even, to those who understood the simplicity of that piety from which her power arose, that these tokens of an admiration and a gratitude without bounds afflicted and alarmed, instead of gratifying, her; and that, in the midst of them, she sighed with her whole soul for solitary self-communing!

In spite, however, of the unexpected triumph of the French arms, there were amongst the advisers of the Dauphin many who were still afraid of depending upon Joan's guidance in an immediate march to Rheims. The country to be passed through was in the possession of the English and Burgundian troops; and commanders who had learned the art of war painfully, and by a long and dearly-bought experience, had naturally some reluctance in confronting enemies so powerful with what were, in any military estimate, at least, inferior and inadequate forces. They had not faith enough in Joan's announcement of a Divine arm outstretched to help them, or not philosophy enough to understand the influence of that faith in inspiring with a tenfold strength the sinews of the men who fought, as they believed, with saints and angels battling in their van. Her endeavours to surmount this obstacle were eager and unceasing. Casting herself, on one occasion, on her knees before the Dauphin and his council, she besought them, with a passionate earnestness, to put their trust in Him whose aid was promised them through her, and not to cast from them the great deliverance He had placed within their reach. The eloquent appeal persuaded them :-" Renouncing the calculations of human wisdom, they suffered themselves to be carried away by an enthusiasm which came from God."

The campaign which followed this decision was a succession of triumphs. In twice as many days, four strongly-fortified places had either yielded to her or been taken by force; she had been victorious in the hard-fought and important battle of Patay; and three memorable captains of the EnglishSuffolk, Scales, and Talbot-had become her prisoners. And all this had been achieved, not by the great commanders and the veteran knights who were her companions in the strife, but-as they themselves were the readiest to bear witness-by the wisdom, and the courage, and the military skill of