attributing the atrocities of the Revolution in part to the despotism and superstition under which its leaders had been trained. Vaughan likewise observes that the mob generally respected private property, frequently yielded to the voice of reason, and were rarely intoxicated, which '--an evident fling at the London and Birmingham rioters- cannot be 'said of mobs everywhere.' It is surprising, however, to find him not merely extolling the cumbrous and corrupt system of the Directory, but confidently predicting its durability and an era of peace and prosperity. He was manifestly wanting in political sagacity. He was also smitten with the craze of the Revolution being a fulfilment of the book of Daniel, and wrote a treatise on the subject, but had the good sense to suppress it, the printer saving one copy for Grégoire. A Unitarian should have escaped the prophecy interpretation mania, but the Revolution upheaval turned merchants into fanatics and rationalists into mystics.

Stone's acquittal ought to have rendered Vaughan's return to England perfectly safe, and his brother-in-law William Manning, M.P. for Plympton and a staunch Tory, was assured by Pitt that as a harmless enthusiast he might resume his parliamentary duties; but Vaughan suspected a trap. This was of course absurd, but it shows the atmosphere of distrust which then prevailed. He consequently never again trod English soil; but after living some time with Skipwith, the American consul in Paris, he rejoined his family at Halliwell, Maine. We do not hear that he took any part in American politics, but he doctored his neighbours gratuitously, was honoured and respected, and died in 1835, bequeathing part of a fine library to Bowdoin College. Of all the English exiles in Paris he seems to have had the peacefullest old age.

George Grieve, who hunted Madame du Barry to death, is in every way a contrast to him. Grieve's grandfather, Ralph, was a scrivener at Alnwick, who, on the election of an incumbent in 1694, headed the minority and was expelled from the common council. His father, Richard, a few weeks before George's birth in 1748, was the leader of an election mob which stormed the town hall, thus frustrating the attempt of his fellow-councillors to procure an unfair return. With such a lineage George Grieve could scarcely fail to be an ardent politician; yet his elder brother, Davidson Richard, was a quiet country gentleman, high sheriff of Northumberland in 1788. George, in 1774, headed the opposition to the Duke of Northumberland's attempt to fill up both seats,

in lieu of being content with one, and the opposition secured a narrow majority of sixteen, Alnwick itself pronouncing for the duke. Four years later Grieve led a mob which levelled the fences of part of the moor wrongfully presented by the corporation to the duke's agent. He was of course a fervent admirer of Wilkes, and a zealous advocate of parliamentary reform. His affairs, however, became involved, and like Pigott he fancied England to be on the brink of ruin. Accordingly about 1780 he sold his patrimony, crossed the Atlantic, made acquaintance with Washington and Paine, and is said to have partly supported himself by his pen. He appears to have been sent on a mission to Holland, and then, about 1783, settled in Paris.

That such a man would throw himself into the revolutionary movement is evident; but although he knew Mirabeau there is no trace of Grieve's activity till 1792, when he took up his quarters at an inn at Louveciennes, the hamlet inhabited by Madame du Barry. Here he formed a club, which, the lady being in England in quest of her stolen jewels, audaciously met in her drawing-room. Her Hindoo servant Zamore, whom she had brought up, had stood sponsor to, and had named after one of Voltaire's tragedies, proved unfaithful. She had loaded him with kindness, and as a boy he used, dressed like Cupid, to hold a parasol over her as she went to meet Louis XV. in the garden; but Grieve wormed all her secrets out of him, got an order for seals to be placed on her property, and placed her name at the head of a list of persons to be arrested. The power of the municipality to make arrests was, however, questioned, and for seven months Madame du Barry remained free, though in perpetual anxiety. On July 1, 1793, Grieve escorted the municipality to the bar of the Convention, vehemently denounced her, and obtained authority to apprehend her, but a petition from the villagers, who had profited by her residence, procured her release. Thereupon Grieve issued a pamphlet describing her luxurious life, and holding her up to odium as a conspirator. He signed himself Man of letters, "officious" (this is surely a case for translating officieux, officious), defender of the brave sansculottes of Louveciennes, friend of Franklin and Marat,* 'factious (factieux) and anarchist of the first water, and disorganiser of despotism for twenty years in both hemi

Marat perhaps made his acquaintance at Newcastle, or while teaching French at Edinburgh in 1772.

spheres.' Madame du Barry, who had already dismissed one treacherous servant, now dismissed Zamore also. In September Grieve secured a fresh warrant against her, and singularly enough rode part of the way to Paris in the hackney carriage with her. What passed between them is a mystery. Was he enamoured of her, and repelled with horror, or did he offer life and liberty if she disgorged? In any case it is strange that Madame du Barry, whose last lover but one had been an Englishman-Henry Seymour, nephew of the Duke of Somerset, the Sunday evening dancing in whose park at Prunay was remembered by old women still living in 1870-should have been hunted to death by another Englishman. The inhabitants again petitioned for her liberation, but this time in vain. Grieve superintended the search for jewels concealed in dungheaps, and got up the case against her. His manuscripts, still preserved at the National Archives, are in irreproachable French. Not merely did he collect evidence, but he was himself a witness, and had it not been for his relentless persecution it seems likely that she would have been left unmolested.

Grieve was to have dined with Marat the very day of his assassination, and he unwarrantably denounced the Jacobin ex-priest Roux as Charlotte Corday's accomplice, on the ground of having met him at Marat's house and seen him look furious;' but this denunciation had no effect. He is said, however, to have boasted that he had brought seventeen persons to the guillotine. If the vaunt was true, it can only be hoped that his reason was temporarily impaired. Five months after Robespierre's fall he was arrested at Amiens and taken to Versailles, where twenty-two depositions were given against him, but on unknown grounds the prosecution was stopped. In 1796 he was back in America, where he published a translation of the Marquis de Châtellux's Travels,' unaware perhaps that John Kent, likewise an eyewitness of and pamphleteer on the Revolution, had brought out a translation in London nine years earlier. He eventually settled in Brussels, and died there in 1809. His tool and confederate Zamore, also arrested after Robespierre's fall, but said to have been released on Grieve's representations, lived, morose, miserable, and a vilifier of his benefactress, till 1820.

We now come to Thomas Paine-the original spelling seems to have been Pain, and the French orthography was Payne who had twice visited Paris prior to the Revolution,

but whose previous career need not be related. He paid a third visit in 1790, and a fourth in 1791, when four Frenchmen joined him in constituting themselves a Republican 'Society.' On the king's flight to Varennes, Paine drew up a Republican manifesto, which Duchatelet translated, signed, and placarded on the doors of the Assembly. Still clinging to royalty, that body was much scandalised, and threatened a prosecution. Paine likewise challenged Sieyès to a written. controversy on republicanism. He returned to London in company with Lord Daer, son of the Earl of Selkirk, a young Scotchman, enraptured with the Revolution, destined to die of consumption at Madeira, and with Étienne Dumont, Mirabeau's secretary. The latter was thoroughly disgusted by Paine's claiming the chief credit for American independence, and by his avowed desire to burn every book in existence and start society afresh with his Rights of Man.'

Almost the last act of the Constituent Assembly was to confer French citizenship on eighteen foreigners, that they might help to settle the destinies of France, and perhaps ' of mankind.' Paine was elected by Girondin influence in four departments, one of them styling him Penne,' and as Priestley wisely declined to sit, he and Clootz were the only foreigners in the Convention. Madame Roland, repelled doubtless by his vulgarity, regretted that her friends had not nominated David Williams in his stead. To avoid being mobbed, Paine had to make a detour by Sandwich and Deal to Dover, where the custom house is said to have rummaged all his effects, and even opened his letters; but at Calais he was greeted with military honours, cheered by the crowd, and harangued by the mayor. Paine, unable even to the last to open his mouth in French, could reply only by putting his hand to his heart. His portrait found its way even into village inns, and an English lady archly wrote home:

At the very moment you are sentencing him to instalment in the pillory we may be awarding him a triumph. Perhaps we are both right. He deserves the pillory from you for having endeavoured to destroy a good constitution; and the French may with equal reason grant him a triumph, as their constitution is likely to be so bad that even Mr. Thomas Paine's writings may make it better.'

Major Monro, with more seriousness and severity, exclaimed in a despatch to the English Foreign Office, What ' must a nation come to that has so little discernment in the ' election of their representatives as to elect such a fellow?'

* Residence in France, 1792-5. Edited by John Gifford.

,

Safe out of reach, Paine sent a defiant letter to the English Government, thanking them for extending the popularity of his book by prosecuting it, and sneering at Mr. Guelph and his debauchee sons as incapable of governing a nation.' When this letter was read at the trial, Erskine, reprobating its tone, could only suggest that it might be a forgery, and urge that in any case it was irrelevant.

6

When the king's trial came on, Paine voted for his detention during the war, to be followed by banishment. His reasons, a French translation of which was read by Bancal while he stood mute at the tribune, evinced humanity and sagacity. He contrasted the success of the English 1688 with the failure of 1649, excused Louis as the victim of bad training, and warned France of the impolicy of losing her sole ally, America, where universal grief would be caused by the death of a king regarded as its best friend. In a sentence which goes far to redeem Paine's errors he said :

'I know that the public mind in France has been heated and irritated by the dangers to which the country has been exposed; but if we look beyond, to the time when these dangers and the irritation produced by them shall have been forgotten, we shall see that what now appears to us an act of justice will then appear only an act of vengeance.'

Marat twice interrupted, first alleging that Paine was a Quaker, and as an objector to capital punishment disentitled to vote, and then pretending that his speech had been mistranslated.

On the fall of the Girondins, Paine discontinued attending the Convention, quietly awaited the impending arrest, and amused himself in the garden and poultry-yard of his house with marbles, battledore, and hopscotch. On Christmas Day, 1793, he was expelled from the Convention as a foreigner, and on New Year's eve was arrested simultaneously with Clootz. An American deputation vainly pleaded for his release, and on his asking for the good offices of the Cordeliers Club, its only reply was to send him a copy of his speech against the king's execution. Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador, advised him as the safest course to remain quiet, and Paine appears to have acted on the advice. Morris, however, was mistaken in thinking that he would then have nothing to fear. Not that there is any truth in Carlyle's story of Paine's cell door flying open, of the turnkey making the fatal chalk mark on the inside, of the door swinging back with the mark inside, and of another