been ill-treated and made a slave of by a brutal step-fatherthe man whose last desire she had sinned to strive to satisfy. A worn-out, battered creature, who had never had any youth, who had never been taught, who had been driven on all her life by the instincts and necessities of the present moment.Charles Dickens, All the Year Round.

131. PUBLIC DINNERS.

The pious gatherings of Exeter Hall and St. James's Hall are not the worst of the exercises prescribed for the publicspirited citizen during the months of May and June. There are other and severer assemblies where, under the pretence of advancing a cause, propagating a principle, founding or furthering an association, men endure boredom of the most grievous and desperate kind. In the order of public dinners the antecedent conditions are pretty nearly uniform, and they are all devised in such a way as absolutely to preclude comfort. Their great characteristic is a monstrous excess. There are far too many people, the proceedings are far too long, the speeches, above all, are collectively too many and individually too never-ending. Is it possible that, without the operation of a downright miracle and a breach of all the laws of things, there could be anything but infinite weariness from such a collection of conditions as this?

Yet for a tranquil observer, curious about the ways of his kind, even these flashy mimicries of social pleasure may not be wholly without interest or instruction. The reflections which may arise as he surveys the varied expressions of face, or still more significantly as he listens to the various effusions of oratory, would pain a philanthropist and delight a cynic, but they only amuse a plain and rational man. The most striking impression that one carries away is that public dinners must exist in order that the most prominent persons present may receive before all men an amount of gross flattery which they would be ashamed to tolerate before one or two private friends. An attentive listener to the after-dinner speeches on these occasions would have made himself a master of the whole art of flattery. Everybody who proposed a toast, and nearly everybody who returned thanks, would furnish him with a

distinct example and variety of this eminently useful, if not eminently elevated, kind of activity. No limits are imposed by those motives of self-respect and reserve which in private life are so strong. A man who in private is reserved in his praises almost to stiffness and moroseness no sooner finds himself set down as the proposer of a toast than he straightway forgets what manner of man he was, and plunges into a profuseness of adulation for which it is hard to find an admissible name. It is usually the man who is most stiff habitually who, when he does loosen the bonds, perpetrates the wildest panegyrics, and offends most unblushingly against the laws of decent taste. This is the kind of person who without stint or thought literally ladles out masses of hot, greasy, steaming adulation, with which he anoints his smirking victim. Greasy adulation is perhaps the most offensive of all to the impartial bystander, yet it is very popular with people who are fond of being praised to their faces. It has the advantage of being unmistakable. If a man is praised up hill and down dale, first for one virtue and then for another, for victories over all competitors and all weaknesses, for being entirely faultless in genius and character and actual achievement, why he cannot have any doubt that the orator really means to speak well of him. Praise undeserved, it is true, is censure in disguise; but, as a rule, with at least ninety-nine men out of a hundred, their natural self-love will deter them from making too many attempts to penetrate the disguise. The majority of us are perfectly willing to consider any praise which we may be lucky enough to get as very far from undeserved. Now and then one may see at a public dinner that the object of a thoroughgoing piece of flattery is not smirking, but is really annoyed at the folly and impudence of his eulogist. The more a man appreciates his own services to science, or adventure, or letters, or anything else, the less likely he is to endure with patience the clumsy and misplaced praises of the man who knows nothing of the subject except what he has learnt by hastily looking out his victim's name in 'Men of the Time.'

Nothing, however, can be had in this world without being paid for, and profuse flattery is no exception to the rule. The hero of the public dinner is bepraised on the tacit understanding that he in turn shall bepraise his next-door neighbour, and so

the greasy torch is handed on from one to the other, ever burning, until the toast-list and the endurance of the company have been thoroughly exhausted. The eminent historian vows that he thinks fiction the noblest of all the branches of literature, and that the writer whose name it is his privilege to connect with the toast is the greatest of all novelists that are, that have been, that ever will or can be. The novelist, in returning thanks, cursorily remarks that the historian is greater than the writer of fiction, and that the historian present is the most magnificent historian that the human mind can well conceive; and then he goes on to pour out the regulation dose of unqualified panegyric upon the divine or the philosopher, to whose writings he professes himself indebted for some of the happiest hours and most improving thoughts that he can recall. This sort of thing goes on for hours-never less than three, and sometimes four. There is no cessation, and no variety. Just, however, as it is unreasonable to blame the curate for preaching although he has nothing to say, so it is unreasonable to be too angry with the man who makes a speech at a public dinner about somebody or some subject that is out of his own proper beat, and who therefore talks nonsense. To use an unfortunately familiar phrase, it is not the man, but the system, that is in fault. Still, farcical as the system is, it involves no absolute necessity that every speech should be a long speech and an elaborate speech. When everybody in the room would be sincerely grateful to him for half-a-dozen neat and simple sentences, why should the orator think it incumbent upon him to deliver himself of a lengthy and ambitious composition which would be perfectly appropriate, both in form and matter, at a distribution of school prizes or at an essay club, but which under the given circumstances is an absurdity and a nuisance? This is a sheer piece of individual perversity, and it would not go unpunished but for the existence of a similar perversity in most of the people present. Each man endures the longwinded inflictions of all the rest because he hopes that one day his own turn will come. This only makes the insincerity of the whole proceedings more dire and naked. I endure a wearisome and ill-spoken essay on Science or Art or Literature or the Church, because I hope that later on in the evening I may have silence craved in a voice of thunder by the toastmaster for me too,

and may in my turn deliver a similar sort of essay upon National Education, or our Parliamentary Institutions, or the Lord Mayor. What form of vanity can be more deplorable or more thoroughly unsocial?

There is a last device which is incredibly successful as an attempt to heighten the purgatorial character of the proceedings. A long and minute list of the subscriptions is read out item by item, until at last one's head grows dizzy with the repetition of 'guineas.' This, again, like the making of speeches, springs from a conviction of the general vanity of mankind. A man who would scorn to give his five guineas quietly and anonymously will subscribe them instantly rather than that men around him should notice the absence of his name from the list when it is read aloud in a garish manner before a crowded room. An acute and experienced secretary would tell you that a departure from the custom of reading out a detailed list of subscriptions would reduce the total most fatally. This is a cheerful and elevating reflection upon the character of the people around one-perhaps upon one's own character too, for that matter. The general result is to send one home with an arrested digestion, a lowered moral sense, and a conviction that, of all the crimes perpetrated in the name of charity or of good-fellowship, big dinners with big speeches are the most extraordinary and the most unforgivable.-Saturday Review.

PART III.

132. THE MAID OF ORLEANS.

Joan of Arc, surnamed the 'Maid of Orleans,' from her heroic defence of that city, was born about the year 1410 or 1411, in the little hamlet of Domremy, near the Meuse, and about three leagues south of Vaucouleurs, on the borders of Champagne. Her parents were humble and honest peasants. The district was remarkable for the devout simplicity of its inhabitants, as well as for those romantic superstitions which in a rude age are so often allied with religion. It appears from the copious depositions of witnesses from the neighbourhood of Domremy, examined at Joan's trial, that she was unremitting in her prayers, and other religious exercises, and was strongly imbued, at a very early age, with the prevailing superstitions of her native place.

During that period of anarchy in France, when the supreme power which had fallen from the hands of a monarch deprived of his reason was disputed for by the rival houses of Orleans and Burgundy, the contending parties carried on war more by murder and massacre than by regular battles. When an army was wanted, both had recourse to the English, and these conquering strangers made the unfortunate French feel still deeper the horrors and ravages of war. At first, the popular feeling was undecided; but when, on the death of Charles VI., the crown fell to a young prince who adopted the Armagnac side whilst the house of Burgundy had sworn allegiance to a foreigner (Henry V.) as king of France, then, indeed, the wishes and interests of all the French were in favour of the Armagnacs, or the truly patriotic party. Remote as was the village of Domremy, it was still interested in the issue of the struggle. It