THE " UNDYING SIN " AT ROUEN.
[To TEE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Can any of your readers tell me whether there is authority for Shakespeare's ascription of Joan of Arc's execution to York ? ' Hume attributes the main responsibility to Bedford, whose conduct be describes as " barbarous and dishonourable." It is well known that in Shakespeare's time the sympathies of the Court were Lancastrian ; but is this the dramatist's only excuse ? If so, it is hard to deny that such bearing false witness against a remarkable man is, if not a grave breach of the Decalogue, at any rate a stretch of dramatic licence. In fairness to Shakespeare, I will remind my reader& that some critics have, on internal grounds, questioned the Shakespearean authorship of the three plays about Henry VI. Indeed, Canon Ainger told me, perhaps with colloquial exaggeration, that in the second of those plays the only line worthy of Shakespeare seemed to him to be, "Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just." Relying on what Matthew Arnold said about the "short memories " of English readers, I will here re-quote what Charles Austin told me on the authority of his brother, the jurist. John Austin, having expressed to a distinguished Frenchman his indignation at Voltaire's " La Pucelle," received the thoroughly French reply : " Mais, mon cher, c'est un chef-d'ceuvre." This has always seemed to me an excellent illustration of Hamerton's paradox on the contrast between the English and the French ideals of conduct. The ideal of the French be pronounced to be mainly artistic; that of the English to be moral.—I am,
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