ered dismay
and terror amongst their enemies. Shouts are heard from without, and
Johanna enters. Here the course of history is followed in the account
the maid gives of herself, and the proofs she affords of her divine
mission.

At the opening of the second act, we find that Orleans has been relieved
by the inspired Johanna. Talbot and Lionel, the English leaders,
attribute the late defeat to the Burgundians; the Duke of Burgundy
retorts. These angry chiefs are on the point of separating, and
terminating their alliance, when the queen-mother Isabeau enters, and
reconciles them. But when Isabeau, who, from her unnatural hatred to her
son Charles, and a certain coarseness of temper, is altogether a very
disagreeable personage, offers, woman against woman, to lead her own
party against Johanna, they all unite in bidding her return forthwith to
Paris. The army, they say, is dispirited when it thinks it fights for
_her_ cause--the cause of the mother against the son. Isabeau says:--

"Ye know not, weak souls, that ye are the rights
Of a wrong'd mother. I, for my part, love
Who honours me; who injures me, I hate;
And should this be my own begotten son,
He is for this more hateful. I gave life,
And I will take--if he, with shameless rage,
Scandal the womb that bore him. Ye proud nobles
Who war against my son, ye have no right
To pillage him. What injury has he done
To you? what duty violated?
Ambition and low envy spur ye on:
I, who begot him, have a right to hate."

While the English are still in their camp, little dreaming of surprise,
the maiden rushes on them, conquers and disperses them. Here passes a
scene between Johanna and Montgomery, a young Welsh knight, who begs for
his life in a truly Homeric manner--pleading his youth, the anguish of
his mother, and the sweet bride he had left upon the Severn. It is quite
Homeric, professedly and successfully so, and therefore quite out of
place. The Welsh knight speaks in a most unknightly strain. And the
change of metre that is adopted assists in giving to the whole the air
of a mere poetical exercise. The scene is not, however, without its
purpose in the development of the character of the maid, because it
shows how utterly she is at this time engrossed in her warlike mission;
she is not a moment affected by the entreaties of Montgomery, and dooms
him to death without pity.

The war still continues fatal to th