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their husbands; young damsels in the presence of their parents and relatives; holy nuns, gentlewomen of all ranks, of whom there were many in the town; all, or the greater part, were violated against their wills by divers nobles and others, who, after having satiated their own brutal passions, delivered them over without mercy to their servants: and there is no remembrance of such disorder and havoc being done by christians, considering the many persons of high rank that were present, and who made no efforts to check them. There were also many gentlemen in the king's army who had relations in the town, as well secular as churchmen; but the disorder was not the less on that account.".

Vol. iv. p. 31.

What a national contrast is there between the manner in which the English and French have conducted their civil wars! Even in the wars of the Fronde, when all parties were alike thoroughly unprincipled, cruelties were committed on both sides which it might have been thought nothing but the strong feelings of a perverted religious principle could have given birth to.

Page 24.-Yet hangs and pulls for food.

Holinshed says, speaking of the siege of Roan, " If I should rehearse how deerelie dogs, rats, mise and cats were sold within the towne, and how greedilie they were by the poore people eaten and devoured, and how the people dailie died for fault of food, and young infants laie sucking in the streets on their mothers breasts,

being dead starved for hunger, the reader might lament their extreme miseries." P. 566.

Page 24.

The sceptre of the wicked?

Do not the tears run down the widow's cheek? and is not her cry against him that causeth them to fall? The Lord will not be slack till he have smitten in sunder the loins of the unmerciful, till he have taken away the multitude of the proud, and broken the sceptre of the unrighteous.

Ecclesiasticus.

Page 27. The fountain of the Fairies.

In the Journal of Paris in the reigns of Charles VI. and VII. it is asserted that the Maid of Orleans, in answer to an interrogatory of the doctors, whether she had ever assisted at the assemblies held at the Fountain of the Fairies near Domprein, round which the evil spirits dance, confessed that she had often repaired to a beautiful fountain in the country of Lorraine, which she named the good Fountain of the Fairies of our Lord.

From the notes to the English version of Le Grande
Fablaux.

Page 27. They love to lie and rock upon its leaves.

Being asked whether she had ever seen any fairies, she answered no: but that one of her god-mothers pre

tended to have seen some at the Fairy-tree, near the

village of Dompre.

Rapin.

Page 29.-Memory, thought, were gone.

"In this representation which I made to place myself near to Christ, (says St. Teresa,) there would come suddenly upon me, without either expectation or any preparation on my part, such an evident feeling of the presence of God, as that I could by no means doubt, but that either he was within me, or else I all engulfed in him. This was not in the manner of a vision, but I think they call it Mistical Theology; and it suspends the soul in such sort, that she seems to be wholly out of herself. The Will is in act of loving, the Memory seems to be in a manner lost, the Understanding, in my opinion, discourses not; and although it be not lost, yet it works not as I was saying, but remains as it were amazed to consider how much it understands."

Life of St. Teresa written by herself.

Teresa was well acquainted with the feelings of enthusiasm. I had, however, described the sensations of the Maid of Orleans before I had met with the life of the saint.

Page 30.

and they shall perish who oppress.

Raise up indignation, and pour out wrath, and let them perish who oppress the people!

Ecclesiasticus, 36.

Page 31.—Sung shrill and ceaseless.

The epithets shrill and hoarse will not appear incongruous to one who has attended to the grasshopper's chirp. Gazæus has characterised the sound by a word certainly accurate, in his tale of a grasshopper who perched upon St. Francis's finger, and sung the praise of God and the wonders of his own body in his vernacular tongue, St. Francis and all the grasshoppers listening with equal edification:

Cicada

Canebat (ut sic efferam) cicadicè.

Pia Hilaria Angelini Gazei.

St. Francis seems to have laboured much in the conversion of animals. In the fine series of pictures representing his life, lately painted for the new Franciscan convent at Madrid, I recollect seeing him preach to a congregation of birds. Gazæus has a poem upon his instructing a ewe. His advice to her is somewhat curious:

Vide ne arietes, neve in obvios ruas:
Cave devovendos flosculos altaribus
Vel ore laceres, vel bifurcato pede,

Male feriatæ felis instar, proteras.

There is another upon his converting two lambs, whose prayers were more acceptable to God, Marot! says he, than your psalms. If the nun, who took care of them in his absence, was inclined to lie a-bed

Frater Agnus hanc beê beê suo

Devotus excitabat.

O agne jam non agne sed doctor bone!

Page 34.-The memory of his prison'd years.—

The Maid declared upon her trial, that God loved the duke of Orleans, and that she had received more revelations concerning him, than any person living, except the king.

Rapin.

Orleans, during his long captivity, "had learnt to court the fair ladies of England in their native strains :" among the Harleian MSS. is a collection of "love poems, roundels and songs," composed by the French prince during his confinement.

Page 35.- The prisoners of that sham:ful day outsumm'd

Their conquerors!

According to Holinshed the English army consisted of only 15,000 men, harassed with a tedious march of a month, in very bad weather, through an enemy's country, and for the most part sick of a flux. He states the number of the French at 60,000, of whom 10,000 were slain, and 1500 of the higher order taken prisoners. Some historians make the disproportion in numbers still greater. Goodwin says, that among the slain there were one archbishop, three dukes, six earls, ninety barons, fifteen hundred knights, and seven thousand esquires or gentlemen.

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