3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English
males in another. None of us men could have written the _Opera
Omnia_ of Mr. a Kempis; neither could any of our girls 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 among
men--worn a male military harness. That reason and that example
authorised 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 among 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 by war
offices and other absurd people.
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