has absolutely _specified_ sixty in a separate dissertation, _soixante
traductions_, amongst those even that have not escaped the search. The
Italian translations are said to be thirty. As to mere _editions_, not
counting the early MSS. for half a century before printing was introduced,
those in Latin amount to two thousand, and those in French to one thousand.
Meantime, it is very clear to me that this astonishing popularity, so
entirely unparalleled in literature, could not have existed except in Roman
Catholic 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. à 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