Biographical Essays

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tral glories, it was mere lunacy to recast the circumstances at the bidding of antiquarian research, so as entirely to disturb these glories. Besides that, to Shakspeare's age no such spirit of research had blossomed. VVriting for the stage, a man would have risked lapidation by uttering a whisper in that direction. And, even if not, what sense could there have been in openly running counter to the very motive that had originally prompted that particular class of chronicle plays ? Thirdly, if one Englishman had, in a memorable situation, adopted the popular view of Joan's conduct, (popular as much in France as in England ;) on the other hand, fifty years before M. Michelet was writing this flagrant injustice, another Englishman (viz., Southey) had, in an epic poem, reversed this mis-judgment, and invested the shepherd girl with a glory nowhere else accorded to her, unless indeed by Schiller. Fourthly, we are not entitled to view as an attack upon Joanna, what, in the worst construction, is hut an unexamining adoption of the contemporary historical accounts. A poet or a dramatist is not responsible for the accuracy of chronicles. But what /.-- an attack upon Joan, being briefly the foulest and obscenest attempt ever made to stifle tbe grandeur of a great human struggle, viz., the French burlesque poem of La, Pucclle ? what memorable man was it that wrote that? Was he a Frenchman, or was he not? That M. Michelet should pretend to have forgotten this vilest of pasquinades, is more shocking to the general sense of justice than any special untruth as to Shakspeare can be to the particular nationality of an Englishman. Note 4. Page 216. The story which furnishes a basis to the fine ballad in Percy's Reliques, and to the Canterbury Tale of Chaucer's Cady Abbess. GOETHE. John ...