THE CZAR, THE TURKS, THE ALLIES. but it all the ambition of Peter or Nicholas, com-¡ case he might have been successful; bined with all the passions that animate the proved that the people on this great occasion ignorance of the priests and the fanaticism was its own Prime Minister. He thought of the people. The Russians, too, may be there must ever be two adverse Powers in said to care little about defeat, which, from its Western Europe and two adverse parties in constant recurrence, they look upon as a ne- the British Parliament. How such expeccessary accompaniment of all their wars. But, tations have been deceived may be a lesson to while it seems likely that the successor of his son not to trust a policy because it was sucNicholas will continue the contest that his cessful in times from which our own differ so father began, Europe need not fear that his much. If he will now recede from a desperate hereditary policy will prevail through any contest and give guarantees to Europe, he blindness on our part. Russia's involuntary may live to reign respected and lead his ementrance into a desperate conflict and the ca-pire into a new path of greatness. If, urged lamities she has since suffered are in no small on by false pride or false hopes, he perseveres, degree due to the late Czar's imperfect concep- he must expect to bring on his empire worse tion of the moral changes which had taken disasters than the destruction of that great place in Europe. He thought he had merely arsenal the loss of which he so deeply deto do with statesmen, and if that had been the plores. scendants in a way that mere money never can BOYS BETTER THAN THEIR FATHERS. do, and is a better investment than any one you THE New-York Daily Times in a Memoir, just have ever made." Practical, philanthropic, skil published, of the late Mr. Abbot Lawrence, who ful, clever, wise, and fortunate, it is impossible to died on the 18th ult., who had raised himself, by quote a higher human authority than Mr. Abbot his own exertions, to be Minister at St. James's Lawrence, and he solemnly told the boys of his from a humble shopboy, says of him :-"Well native village, meaning to give them the best lesmight Mr. Lawrence at this time have looked son he could, that it was in their power to beback upon his career with pride. The old home- come GREATER, WISER AND BETTER men than stead at Groton, the humble store the starting any who have preceded them." His testimony, point, and the Court of St. James the goal. therefore, freely given-given for a practical obTruly did he remark, on a recent occasion, when ject - having no view, apparently, to theory - is addressing the boys of his native village: 'Boys! a strong corroboration of what we suppose must you have everything to encourage you; and it is now or soon be every man's creed, that here on in your power to become greater, wiser, and bet-carth the human race is in a state of progressive improvement. Man lives under the great law of ter men than any who have preceded you.' Mr. Lawrence was not only a shopboy and a development, which natural philosophers have Minister, he was a great merchant and manufac- traced throughout the greater portion of material turer a politician and a legislator; he was well creation. known amongst ourselves as a polished gentleman; and his long and successful career, closed in peace and honor, proves him to have been an eminently practical man. To every Anglo-Saxon he is recommended by the fact that he made for himself a colossal fortune. He was rich enough and generous enough to give $50,000 to Harvard College for founding the Lawrence Scientific School, which made his brother Amos say, in a letter to Abbot:-"I thank God I am spared to this day, to see accomplished by one so near and dear to me, this last best work ever done by one of our name, which will prove a better title to true nobility than any from the potentates of the world. It is more honorable and more to be coveted than the highest public station in our country." "It enriches your de If the progressive moral improvement of the species were not consistent with the laws of nature, it could not take place. But all history informs us that it has taken place. In spite of much written to the contrary, there is abundant reason to suppose that the physical development of the species has gone hand in hand with the moral development. Civilization is the natural development of the individual and the race. For all youth there is great encouragement in the fact, and we quote the statement to encourage them, that boys may be better, wiser, and greater than their fathers, and girls more beautiful, amiable, and graceful than their mothers. They are not to believe in degeneration, and therefore despair; · Economist. but must believe in successive improvement, and must hope and must achieve it. JOAN OF ARC. From The Athenæum. Joan of Arc: her Mission and her Martyrdom Historical Doubt-[Doute Historique]. By O. may remain M. Delepierre, in his Doute Historique,' claims merit for the Bibliophiles, and with some reason, since to their researches are we indebted for the crumbling of many a tower of fiction, that had assumed to the general eye an aspect of unimpeachable history. The researches of the accomplished gentleman in question have ONE of the best-remembered monuments in served to add a supplementary chapter to the France is the statue of Joan of Arc in the biography of Joan, and those who market-place at Rouen. No Englishman, we unconvinced by the testimony he brings forsuppose, has ever stayed for an hour in that ward will not fail to acknowledge that it is of picturesque and pleasant city without spending extraordinary interest. The case stands as folsome few minutes before that mailed and serene lows:-The learned Oratorian, Father Vignier, figure: witness of noble heroism and frantic when engaged, in the seventeenth century, in superstition. Another monument, still more examining various papers among the archives imposing, has within a year been erected in the of Metz, came upon one which formed part of same gracious name at Orleans. Are these a manuscript register containing a record of lo-' memorials of a myth? Is it possible, in spite of cal events and incidents. We subjoin a transwitnesses in bronze and marble, that there lation of this singular document. It will be only never was a Joan of Arc? Can we suppose necessary to request the reader to bear in mind that Joan, the fervid and successful peasant that Joan (Jeanne Darc, as the French have girl, is a mere dream of the Gallic imagination, recently discovered may be the legal spelling of accepted by Europe and ratified by story? the name, but we prefer the form in which alone Shakspeare, it is true, has sung of her; and poetry knows the heroine of this poetical story) so has Voltaire, and Schiller, and Southey. Joan, we say, is supposed to have been exeBut does this poetic celebration make her real? cuted in 1431: Does it not rather tend to impeach her claim of reality? What if she prove, on close investigation, to be a mere "being of the mind," immortal, yet not historical,—like Desdemona or Amalia? - In the year 1436, Messire Phlin Marcou, being Echevin of Metz; on the 20th day of May, of the who had been in France, to the Grange at the year above named, there came the Maid Jeanne, to speak to some of the gentlemen of Metz-unElms, near St. Privé, whither she was conducted, der the name of Claude. On the same day there came to see her her two brothers, of whom one was a knight, named Messire Pierre, and the other Petit Jehan," an esquire. They thought she had been burned (et cuidoient qu'elle fut arse). As soon as they saw her they recognized her, as she did them. We put the doubt broadly. But when it is considered that the proof of any existence lies chiefly in the external evidence which remains of deeds done or suffered,-and that in the particular case of the Maid of Orleans the burning at Rouen was the most absolute fact left in testimony of her life, her service and her melancholy end,-it will be seen that dence which disturbs our belief in the reality any eviof that martyrdom not unnaturally disturbs our faith in the whole story of her life. A man's death is generally the best attested fact in his history; and we will venture to say, that the evidence in favor of the burning of the Maid the horse, and said several things to the Sieur And the said Maid ably mounted of Orleans by the English at Rouen is better of Nicole, by which he understood very well that it its kind, more conclusive in quality and quan- known by many signs to be the Maid Jeanne de was she who had been in France; and she was tity, than that in support of any other fact of her career. What, then, are we to think, France, who had conducted King Charles to when M. Delepierre tells us we ought not to eral who said she had been burned in Normandy, Rheims, to be crowned. And there came sevbelieve in that cremation too readily; that we and she spoke much in parables, saying that she ought to dismiss the sentiment of the subject did so designedly; and she added, that she was from our minds, and weigh with him the facts powerless until the festival of St. John the Bapof the case, until we doubt it altogether? tist. But after her brothers had taken her away, Only think of the Maid of Orleans marrying she appeared at Whitsuntide, in the town of a man of business, paying weekly bills, hid- Marnelle, where she remained three weeks, and ing her sons' peccadilloes, and looking out sharply for suitable matches for her daughters. The idea of Joan surviving, to be married and to become the "mother of men," is certainly a matter for mirth. But, on the other hand, there are myths at which we ought not to be merry; and this, perhaps, is one of them. then left for Notre-Dame d'Alliance on the third day (of Whitsuntide ?). And when she was about setting forth, many of the Metz people went to and recognized her as the Maid Jeanne de Marnelle to see her, and made her many presents, France. She then went to Erlon, in the duchy of Luxembourg, where there was a great con course to see her. She was taken thence, by the Count of Wuenbourg, to Cologne, near his fath- | Metz. But who shall answer to us for the auer's residence, (de costé son père). And the said thenticity of the "ancient manuscript?" DeCount loved her extremely, and subsequently laverdy, Vignier, and Polluche believed in the gave her a handsome cuirass for her defence. Afterwards she returned to the before-named Er lon, and there was celebrated the marriage of Messire de Hermoise, knight, with the said Jeanne the Maid; and then the said Sieur de Hermoise went with his wife the Maid, to Metz, where they resided in a house, opposite the Church of Ste.-Seglenne, where they remained till it pleased them to leave. marriage of Joan after the year of her alleged In our opinion, the most remarkable document given by the last-named gentleman in support of his extraordinary case, is one cited by the impartial Pasquier, who copied it from the accounts of the receivers of the domain of Orleans. It is dated 1444. thirteen years after the assumed burning, by the English, at Rouen -a date which M. Delepierre requests his reader not to forget. The document is to M. Delepierre rightly conjectures that the reverend father would not have thought much of this document, first seen by him in 1645, but for a subsequent circumstance: he happened to be a guest at the residence of a M. des Armoises, in Lorraine; and one day after dinner, his host opened the family muniment chest, that the Fa- this effect: ther might amuse himself with its contents. Fancy the ecstasy of the lucky Oratorian Having heard the supplication of Messire Pierwhen he found therein a contract of marriage re, stating that, out of Loyalty to our Lord the between "Robert des Armoises, Knight, with King and the Duke of Orleans, he had left his Jeanne d'Arcy, surnamed the Maid of Orleans." native place to enter into the service of the King This discovery was made in the middle of the and the Duke, in company with his sister, Jeanne seventeenth century; and though it excited the Maid, with whom, up to the time of her absence, some sensation, M. Delepierre acknowledges his life and property in the service and wars and from that time to the present, he has risked it had been well-nigh forgotten, when, in 1740, of the King, by resisting the ancient enemies of a member of the Literary Society of Orleans the kingdom, besieging Orleans, as also by madiscovered, among the archives of the Maison king several journeys and accomplishing certain de Villeundertakings for the benefit of the King, etc. An account of Jecques the silversmith, in which, under the dates 1435 and 1436, he found Pierre's object, in which he succeeded, was a sum of 11 francs 8 sous for refreshments given to obtain the restitution of an island belonging to the messenger who had brought letters from to him, situated on the Loire; and M. DeleJeanne the Maid; and another sum of 12 livres pierre asks whether it is likely that he would given by the magistrates, on the 21st of August have limited himself to an allusion to the time 1436, to John du Lils (Lys), brother of Jeanne the Maid, to help him on his way back to his sister. He had been received by the King, who had accorded him a gift of 100 francs. - The name of De Lys - let us remind the forgetful reader was that by which the family of Darc was ennobled. A subsequent entry in the account is to this effect: To Jeanne Darmoises, as a gift presented to her on the 1st of August 1439, after deliberation on the part of the council of the city, for services rendered by her at the siege of the said city, 210 livres. of his sister's absence or disappearance, if he could have more powerfully supported the prayer of his petition, by alluding to her death as a martyr to her country? The point is a strong one. This is not the only singularity. The popu lar belief that some one had been executed in the place of Joan, led to the appearance of many pseudo-Maids; but these were punished, and sometimes pilloried - that is, were exposed, as imposters, to the gaze of the people. Such was not the case with that Orleans Joan who married the Sieur Darmoises, and the authorities at Orleans must have known whether she was, or was not, an imposter; for the person Assuredly, as M. Delepierre very pertinently of the Maid was well known to all. Here, then, remarks, if Joan received this sum of money in is another important fact of a negative kind, 1439, as a reward for her services at the siege it is true- yet, bearing, in the circumstances, of Orleans, they must be very obstinate people an ascertainable value. M. Delepierre alludes indeed who can still believe that she was burnt to the fact of the Papal condemnation of the by the English at Rouen in 1431. The chief sentence against Joan (in 1455) being pubquestion that arises here is: Are the documents lished without any reference to the execution, authentic? The first document cited above is as an additional evidence towards a proof that asserted by deed of notary, in the seventeenth she did not suffer death at Rouen. What is to century, as being the faithful transcript from be made of the grave documents here cited. an ancient manuscript in the archives of and which seem to allow of the existence of "the Maid" long after she is said to have per-1 If there be little that is new in M. Renzi's ished in the Market Place at Rouen? Is Joan "Joan," the old details are skilfully re-arranged, a mere poetic fantasy? and with admirable impartiality. We do not The poets, it may be observed, have been as know if he intended to convey to his readers much perplexed with the story of Joan of Arc the conclusions at which we ourselves arrived as the historians. Shakspeare sends her, curs-on closing his book. We are in some doubt, ing, to the stake. Voltaire represents her in indeed, as to whether the author has any wellthe view taken by many of the knights who defined conclusion, save one of admiration. reluctantly followed the banner borne by a Nevertheless, we think that no one, supposing peasant girl. Schiller- - who wrote history as him to read the story of Joan for the first time well as poetry-gives her a lover, and saves in M. Renzi's volume, could reach the last page her from the stake. Southey follows the popu- without feeling convinced that the inspired girl lar tradition. No poet, however, of whom we was the well-selected and unconscious dupe of ever heard has been so perplexed by historical a political party, who, having failed to discover doubts as the English dramatic bard, Mr. Fitz- the right man for the right place, luckily found ball. Just thirty-three years ago, Mr. Fitzball out a woman who might serve their purpose as brought out a melo-drama, entitled "Joan of well, and who, after service, might be more Arc," which was as curiously constructed as that readily got rid of. Siege of Troy" at Astley's, wherein Mr. Am- It yet remains inexplicable how Joan - if herst reversed all the parts, made the immor- she were a real personage-after saving her tal horse a device of the Trojans, and showed king and country (the first was hardly worth the Greeks closely besieged "quelque part the trouble), came to be abandoned by the dans les Indes." This piece puzzled young party who owed to her a vast and enduring classical students wonderfully; but it was not triumph. It was her ill fortune to be ignobly more at issue with fact than Mr. Fitzball's treated by all parties: by the sovereign whom "Joan of Arc." This ingenious author repre- she had served, by the hostile government into sented Charles of France as being in dire ex- whose hands she fell, and by the Church — tremity, not from the English, but from the re- some of whose ministers first prompted her to bellion of his own subjects, headed by a cer- her task, other of whose clerks condemned her tain "Beauvais." Of an English power there to a dreadful death for yielding to such promptis no mention throughout the piece. Joan is ing - denouncing it as of the devil. The the divinely-appointed Maid who comes to the head of the Church would not listen to her aprescue of the King, but she is captured by the peal. When the poor girl had been burnt French rebel, who condemns her to the stake. if she ever were burnt- the French began to The flames are just about to lay hold of her tu- talk of honoring her memory, the English nic, when Charles rushes in, rescues the lady, ceased to denounce her as a witch, and the and vows eternal gratitude. Mrs. Egerton and Church solemnly declared that she had been Lewis used to look charmingly interesting at unrighteously condemned. Since this imperthis moment; but we suppose there never was fect expiation, we have had commemorative anything in history like it. It beat M. Dele- processions and statues; and we confess that pierre and his "Doubt" hollow. The humor we have never witnessed the one nor gazed at of Mr. Fitzball's piece consisted in the "tacit the other without a feeling of gloomy satisfacassertion" that there were no English armies tion that in the judicial murder of "the Maid " Occupying France at that time. Voltaire's mis- there were at least three confederates: - if representations of what the leaders and ladies England planted the stake, France bound the were doing there are not more contrary to fact victim, and the Church fired the faggots. they are even less so than the version of imaginative Mr. Fitzball. The Constitutional Text-Book: a practical and fa- is clearly and moderately done, somewhat after miliar Exposition of the Constitution of the the plan of our law-books explanatory of acts of United States. Designed chiefly for the use Parliament. The text is first presented, and then of Schools, etc. By Furman Sheppard. a commentary on each part, with some account The Constitutional Text-Book is an American of the working. The book contains a brief narexposition of the actual constitution of the rative of the measures preceding the settlement United States, as contained in the written text of the present constitution, and in an appendix itself, and the various amendments or interpre- a variety of historical documents connected with tations that have since been made to it by Con- the subject, as the Declaration of Rights, 1774gress and the supreme Court. This exposition '75; the Declaration of Independence, 1776. joys, or the memory of the joys, which can be his no more. Face to face with death-the "great friend; on the point of solving the deep riddle of fact" of life-the common enemy or the common existence; in the felt, and about to step into the seen, presence of the Supreme Ruler;-and far from insensible of the proximity of all these sublime realities,-he amuses himself as it were in playing with them all; and pours forth volume upon volume of the most riotous pleasantry, the finest fancies, the tenderest longings, and the most poignant regrets. HENRI HEINE is a German lyric poet of won, derful powers; of great, but hardly of good, repute in his own country. Here he is scarcely known at all; perhaps it is scarcely possible to make him known; probably it is not desirable that he should be known;-for he is one of those erratic spirits who in their wanderings and wars have forgotten to distinguish between the con- Heine, we should say, in all his vagaries is a ventional fetters which honest men may right- true friend to freedom and a true lover of his eously shake off, and those fitting and natural re-kind-in the mass. Taking his own account of straints which all decent men will respect and wear. himself as recently given in the "Confessions of a Poet," he began life as a democrat of the exThis earth presents no spectacle to our eyes so tremest sect and an atheist of the deepest dye, profoundly sad as the jests of the wretched and and he preached the doctrines of socialism and the follies of the wise;-genius, wild with suffer- impiety with equal fervor; but he was cured of ing and bitter from disenchantment; scoffing at both follies by hearing his blasphemies echoed everything even at his own tenderness; mock-from vulgar lips and finding himself hailed as "a ing everything-even its own woes; in restless man and a brother" by coarse and dirty artisans. antagonism with everything-even the lingering "While our religious doctrines remained the goodness of its own better self;-brilliant and secret privilege of an aristocracy of lettered and glowing fancy, and a keen and subtle wisdom, clever men, and were discussed in learned landesigned to be joy to the possessor and profit to guage and in special coteries, so that we could the world, but poisoned at their source, and turn-blaspheme in comfort, without being understood ed by some evil spirit into mere instruments of torture and perversion. And no man ever so exactly fealized all this as Heine. He has much in common with all the great humorists who have gone before him,-with Lucian, Rabelais, Voltaire, and Swift; but to our thinking he is more interesting than any. He resembles Rabelais most nearly; he has not the malignity of Swift nor the bitterness of Voltaire; and he has often, even in his levity, the intense earnestness which the Frenchman always lacks. by the servants who waited behind our chairs, I belonged to the class esprits forts. But when I found the mob discussing the same questions in their dirty pot-houses, where tallow candles replaced chandeliers and wax-lights, when atheism began to smell of oil, of schnaps and of vile tobacco,-then my eyes were unsealed; I understood from disgust what I had not understood by reason, and I paid my adieus to atheism." His cultivated mind led him by a similar process to abjure democracy. would hold his hand over the fire to purify it if ever it had the misfortune to touch that of a king:-I answered that I should go and wash my hand if the sovereign people had ever grasped it." It is difficult to say what quality or faculty "Civilization would be destroyed by the Compredominates in Heine. He has all the qualities munists; and though in theory a generous disand faculties of a poet. An ardent imagination, position inclined me to sacrifice the sage and the melting tenderness, vivid realization of joy and artist to the wants of the suffering masses, neverbeauty, power of picturing the happiest and most theless, when it came to facts, I have always had unsophisticated life, meet and blend strangely a horror of the multitude and I cannot abide their with the wildest irony, the most vehement assaults contact. I love the people, but at a distance; on all recognized authorities and opinions, and I have always fought for their emancipation, but the most outrageous and whimsical impiety.-in the hottest moments of the contest I could He is a man of large and warm sympathies, of never bear to shake hands with them. A furious infinite jest, and of no reverence for anything in democrat of Germany once said to me that he the heavens above or in the earth beneath. His wit is the most sparkling, ceaseless, startling, and audacious, to be met with in any author or in any language-it breaks out on every occasion and in the most unexpected form-in the midst of the most earnest polemics, the most The pathetic wit and the indescribable sadness solemn thoughts, or the tenderest and fondest of some of poor Heine's dying jests-(for, though love-in the bosom of joy, and on the bed of still alive, he has been long dying)-had made death. It overrides everything and spares noth-us mark them for citation. But we find it iming. Such as it was when five and twenty years ago he visited Paris in the prime of youth, vigor, hope, and joyousness,-such it is at this day, when he lies in Amsterdam, dying slowly of a painful and tedious disease,-looking daringly, laughingly, scoffingly down into the abyss before him,-standing on the verge of the two worlds, speculating on and ridiculing both, and clinging with a tenacity-sad and fearful to behold, yet apparently not painful to himself-to the possible. The English public would not tolerate and, indeed, would scarcely relish or understand their wild and reckless humor. And this reminds us that we must not lay down our pen without explaining why we hope that the commenced American translation of Heipe's writings of which the first part has been sent us, may not be continued. It would be unjust to Heine to translate him unless it could be done faithfully as well as skilfully; and we do not believe that |