scene which it represents. To vary the metaphor, or rather to state a fact, they work up the materials collected by French authors; they do not go in search of materials for themselves. Not a single English book on the Revolution tells us who represented our own country in Clootz's deputation of the human race, gives us an accurate account of Paine's experiences, or specifies the number, much less the names, of the British victims to the guillotine. Nor can private inquiry do very much to remedy this deficiency. The men in question, as a rule, left no issue, and their collateral descendants, regarding them as the black sheep of the family, are unwilling or unable to supply any information-oftener, perhaps, unable than unwilling, for the probability is that these emigrants mostly broke off all intercourse with their kinsmen, especially as after a certain date war rendered communication very uncertain and difficult. There are, indeed, sources of information in France, contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, local and national archives, but even these are incomplete, and as regards manuscripts rarely catalogued. The Commune of 1871, moreover, created an irreparable gap, for in the burning of the Palais de Justice and Hôtel de Ville the municipal records, the registers of deaths, and many of the prison lists were consumed. We have, however, in researches on the principal Englishmen who figured in the Revolution, profited by every still available source of information. We have skimmed a multitude of journals and tracts, rummaged musty documents, made inquiries of relatives which have not always proved fruitless, and, although such researches would a generation ago have doubtless been more productive, we have collected data which from the fading away of traditions and from material or political accidents might not at a future period have been obtainable.

Although Paine, as a member of the Convention, might seem entitled to precedence, we prefer to begin with men of higher status and wider culture, who, even if eventually brought into political association with him, must have loathed his vulgarity and coarseness. Robert Pigott, for instance, who, as Clootz's biographer, M. Avenel, has ascertained, represented England in the deputation of June 19, 1790, had been an opulent country gentleman. The Pigotts claimed descent from a Norman family named Picot, and had for eleven generations owned an estate at Chetwynd, Shropshire. They had been strongly attached to the Stuarts, and two heirlooms are still preserved in the family—a ring,

one of four presented by Charles I. on the eve of his execution; and a portrait on ivory of the Pretender, presented by himself to Robert Pigott's father at Rome in 1720. Robert succeeded to the estate in 1770, at the age of thirty-four. The very day of his father's death, he and the disinherited son of Sir William Codrington, at Newmarket, ran their 'fathers' lives one against the other' for 500 guiueas. The elder Pigott having already been dead a few hours at Chetwynd, though neither party knew of it, Pigott maintained that the bet was off; but Lord Mansfield gave judgement for Codrington, holding that the impossibility of a contingency did not debar its being the subject of a wager, if both parties were at the time unaware of that impossibility. Pigott had soon to serve, as his grandfather had done before him, as high sheriff of the county; but he held eccentric views. He shared the belief of croakers that England's fall was imminent; sold all his estates (said, including the Manor of Chesterton, Hunts, to be worth 9,000l. a year), and went to live at Geneva. We know nothing, however, of how long he stayed or what acquaintances he made: Voltaire must have been of the number. We next hear of him in London, where Brissot was introduced to him. Pigott had become a vegetarian, or, as it was then called, a Pythagorean. To this he had probably been converted by a Dr. Graham, brother to the well-known Mrs. Macaulay's young second husband, the notorious charlatan with whose mud baths and electric beds the future Lady Hamilton was associated. Brissot, when calling on Pigott, frequently found Graham with him. Pigott was thus evidently just the man to be kindled into enthusiasm by the Revolution. He had, moreover, an antipathy to cocked or other hats, as the invention of priests and despots, and wore a cap which at the Feast of Pikes made him the observed of all observers. When royalist deputies, suspecting the genuineness of Clootz's deputation, sent an usher who spoke English-probably Rose, a man of Scotch extraction-to test the English representative, he was answered by Pigott in good Miltonic English,' and retired in confusion. We may imagine Pigott receiving from Clootz a certificate of his presence at the Feast of Pikes, couched, with a simple alteration of name and nationality, in these terms, and entitling the bearer to a federal ribbon and diploma :

Capital of the globe, February 5, year 2. I certify and make known to all the free men of the earth that Joseph Cajadaer Chammas, member of the oppressed sovereign [the people] of Mesopotamia, had

the honour of attending the Federation of July 14, by virtue of a decree emanating from the august French Senate, June 19, year 1. ANACHARSIS CLOOTZ, orator of the human race in the French National Assembly.'*

What a contrast between the high sheriff of Salop paying the honours to the judges of assize and the cap-headed man at the bar of the National Assembly! Pigott is described in one place as a journalist, but perhaps merely because he had sent an address to the Assembly on Sieyès' press bill of 1790. He spoke in this address of loving France as warmly as if he had been a native, and of his having hastened over with a multitude of foreigners to enjoy the rights of man in all their purity. He dissuaded the Assembly from taking English legislation as a model, for the shameful war with America had shown how people could be misled by a press which the Government could oppress or coerce. England, he said, was not really free, but had only a semblance of freedom.

At the beginning of 1792, Pigott, in a pamphlet which we have been unable to find, but passages from which appeared in Brissot's paper, the Patriote Français, advocated the use of caps, as allowing the face to be well seen, and as susceptible by various shapes and colours of all sorts of embellishments. He condemned the hat as gloomy and morose, denounced the uncovering of the head as a servile and ridiculous salutation, and appealed to Greek, Roman, and Gaulish usage, as also to the example of Voltaire and Rousseau. The effect of the appeal was electrical. For a few weeks caps were the rage, though it is not clear how far the republicans, any more than Voltaire and Rousseau, wore them outdoors. When on March 19, 1792, Pétion wrote to the Jacobin Club so strong and sensible a remonstrance against external signs of republicanism that the president pocketed his cap, all present following suit, it cannot be supposed that they went home bareheaded. These red caps must have been confined to indoor use. Pigott, however, was clearly the introducer of the bonnet rouge, for the Château-Vieux mutineers, to whom it is usually attributed, did not enter Paris till three months after caps had come in and gone out. The cap of liberty had been a symbol, indeed, employed from the outset of the Revolution, but it was Pigott who made it an article of dress. He had apparently quitted Paris by the summer, when it was revived,

*Lettre du Prussien Clootz au Prussien Hertzberg. Paris: 1791.

and this time undoubtedly worn outdoors, sometimes placed on the back of the head, like that of a Zouave of the present day, sometimes covering the top of the head, with the end slightly lapping over in front.

Pigott's next two years are a blank for us. He must have left Paris before November 1792, or he would have figured in the British club which then made itself conspicuous. We thought, indeed, at one time to have traced him under the guise of Picotte or Pigatte in the Paris prison rolls, in which case he might have met his old friend Codrington as a fellow prisoner, but the dates do not agree. He died at Toulouse on July 7, 1794, three weeks before Robespierre's fall, leaving a widow, Antoinette Bontan, possibly the Mrs. Pigott who was living at Geneva in 1807-9. also to have had a son who predeceased him.

He is said

James Watt, junior, son of the great inventor, represented his country, like Pigott, in a cosmopolitan procession. He had become intimate at Manchester with an ardent politician, Thomas Cooper,* a chemist; and the Constitutional Society of that town deputed both of them, towards the end of 1791, to carry an address of congratulation to the Jacobin Club. Young Watt was in all probability the anonymous consti'tutional Whig' who figured in the moral-sublime' scene quoted by Carlyle in his essays. The poet Wordsworth arrived in Paris a little later, made Watt's acquaintance, likewise attended the Assembly of the Jacobins, and on continuing his journey to Orleans took away a fragment of the Bastille as a relic. Watt may have introduced the future laureate, then a heated democrat, ultimately an extreme Tory, to Robespierre and Danton, for he knew them well, was Danton's second when they had quarrelled, and on the ground effected a reconciliation by urging the loss to the cause of liberty if either of them fell. When, on April 15, 1792, the forty mutinous soldiers of the ChâteauVieux regiment, released from the galleys of Brest, had a triumphal procession through Paris, Cooper and Watt were in it, bearing the British flag, with the bust of Algernon Sydney. Burke, in the House of Commons nearly a year afterwards, vehemently denounced them as having thus applauded mutiny and murder, and as having exchanged embraces with Marat. Watt's biographer, Muirhead, speaks of him as horrified by the storming of the Tuileries and the September massacres, but he was so far from reprobating

**

Cooper eventually emigrated to America, and died in 1829.

the former that on August 14 he waited on the Assembly, together with Gamble and Raymont-Didot, the papermaker, had married a Miss Gamble, and this was probably her brother to present 1,315 francs for the families of the combatants. The September massacres, however, certainly horrified Watt, and so little did he make a secret of it that Robespierre denounced the two Manchester delegates to the Jacobins as Pitt's emissaries. Watt, whom three years' schooling at Geneva had made fluent in French, was equal to the occasion. Springing on the platform, he pushed Robespierre aside, and in a short but vehement speech completely silenced his formidable antagonist, carrying with him the feelings of the rest of the audience, who expressed their sense of his honest British spirit in a loud burst of applause.' On going back to his lodgings, however, Watt had a warning that his life was not safe, and we know that the incorruptible Robespierre was also the unforgiving Robespierre. He immediately left Paris without a passport, and with some difficulty made his way to Italy. On his return to England in 1794 his father had serious apprehensions lest he should be prosecuted, and contemplated shipping him to Northern Europe or America; for though young Watt (by this time twenty-five years of age) had broken off correspondence with France he was still a radical, and deemed it an honour to dine with two of the acquitted felons' of the 1794 trials. He was, however, left unmolested, went back after a time to Birmingham, succeeded to his father's business, and in 1817 was the first to cross the Channel and ascend the Rhine to Coblentz by steam. He lived till June 1848, thus hearing of the proclamation of the second Republic, after having witnessed the virtual establishment of the first.

William Playfair, more actively engaged in the Revolution than Watt, had also to flee for his life, but unlike Watt he ended by cursing what he originally blessed. Brother of John Playfair, the Edinburgh mathematician and geologist, he was a civil engineer, and had settled in Paris. He had patented a new rolling machine, and in 1789 joined Joel Barlow in launching the Scioto Company, which in two months disposed of 50,000 acres in Ohio to two convoys of French emigrants. When Barlow was called back to America, Playfair acted as sole agent. He assisted, in all probability, in the capture of the Bastille, for he was one of the eleven or twelve hundred inhabitants of the St. Antoine quarter who on the previous day had formed themselves into a