Miscellaneous Essays by Thomas De Quincey
page 77 of 204 (37%)
page 77 of 204 (37%)
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by sea-water.
La Pucelle, before she could be allowed to practise as a warrior, was put through her manual and platoon exercise, as a juvenile pupil in divinity, before six eminent men in wigs. According to Southey (v. 393, Book III., in the original edition of his "Joan of Arc") she "appall'd the doctors." It's not easy to do _that_: but they had some reason to feel bothered, as that surgeon would assuredly feel bothered, who, upon proceeding to dissect a subject, should find the subject retaliating as a dissector upon himself, especially if Joanna ever made the speech to them which occupies v. 354-391, B. III. It is a double impossibility; 1st, because a piracy from Tindal's _Christianity as Old as the Creation:_ now a piracy _à parte post_ is common enough; but a piracy _à parte ante_, and by three centuries, would (according to our old English phrase[5]) drive a coach-and-six through any copyright act that man born of woman could frame. 2dly, it is quite contrary to the evidence on Joanna's trial; for Southey's "Joan" of A. Dom. 1796 (Cottle, Bristol), tells the doctors, amongst other secrets, that she never in her life attended--1st, Mass; nor 2d, the Sacramental table; nor 3d, Confession. Here's a precious windfall for the doctors; they, by snaky tortuosities, had hoped, through the aid of a corkscrew, (which every D. D. or S.T.P. is said to carry in his pocket,) for the happiness of ultimately extracting from Joanna a few grains of heretical powder or small shot, which might have justified their singeing her a little. And just at such a crisis, expressly to justify their burning her to a cinder, up gallops Joanna with a brigade of guns, unlimbers, and serves them out with heretical grape and deistical round-shot enough to lay a kingdom under interdict. Any miracles, to which Joanna might treat the grim D. Ds. after _that_, would go to the wrong side of her little account in the clerical books. Joanna would be created a _Dr_. herself, but not of Divinity. For in the Joanna page of the ledger the entry would be--"Miss |
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