holic times, nor subsequently have lingered in any Protestant land. It
was the denial of Scripture fountains to thirsty lands which made this
slender rill of Scripture truth so passionately welcome.]

3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English
males in another. None of us lads could have written the _Opera Omnia_ of
Mr. a Kempis; neither could any of our lasses have assumed male attire like
_La Pucelle_. But why? Because, says Michelet, English girls and German
think so much of an indecorum. Well, that is a good fault, generally
speaking. But M. Michelet ought to have remembered a fact in the
martyrologies which justifies both parties,--the French heroine for doing,
and the general choir of English girls for _not_ doing. A female saint,
specially renowned in France, had, for a reason as weighty as Joanna's,
viz., expressly to shield her modesty amongst men, wore a male military
harness. That reason and that example authorized _La Pucelle_; but our
English girls, as a body, have seldom any such reason, and certainly no
such saintly example, to plead. This excuses _them_. Yet, still, if it is
indispensable to the national character that our young women should now and
then trespass over the frontier of decorum, it then becomes a patriotic
duty in me to assure M. Michelet that we have such ardent females amongst
us, and in a long series--some detected in naval hospitals, when too sick
to remember their disguise; some on fields of battle; multitudes never
detected at all; some only suspected; and others discharged without noise
by war offices and other absurd people. In our navy, both royal and
commercial, and generally from deep remembrances of slighted love, women
have sometimes served in disguise for many years, taking contentedly their
daily allowance of burgoo, biscuit, or cannon balls--anything, in short,
digestible or indigestible, that it might please Providence to send. One
thing, at least, is to their credit: never any of these poor masks, with
their deep silent remembrances, have been detected through murmuring, or
what is nautically understood by "skulking." So, for once, M. Michelet has
an _erratum_ to enter upon the fly-leaf of his book in presentation copies.

4. But the last of these ebullitions is the most lively. We English, at
Orleans, and after Orleans (which is not quite so extraordinary, if all
were told,) fled before the Maid of Arc. Yes, says M. Michelet, you _did_:
deny it,