ants, regarding them as the black sheep | estate in 1770, at the age of thirty-four. of the family, are unwilling or unable to The very day of his father's death, he supply any information oftener, per- and the disinherited son of Sir William haps, unable than unwilling, for the proba- Codrington, at Newmarket, "ran their bility is that these emigrants mostly broke fathers' lives one against the other" for off all intercourse with their kinsmen, five hundred guineas. The elder Pigott especially as after a certain date war ren- having already been dead a few hours at dered communication very uncertain and Chetwynd, though neither party knew of difficult. There are, indeed, sources of it, Pigott maintained that the bet was off; information in France, contemporary but Lord Mansfield gave judgment for newspapers and pamphlets, local and na- Codrington, holding that the impossibility tional archives, but even these are incom- of a contingency did not debar its being plete, and as regards manuscripts rarely the subject of a wager, if both parties catalogued. The Commune of 1871, more- were at the time unaware of that impossiover, created an irreparable gap, for in bility. Pigott had soon to serve, as his the burning of the Palais de Justice and grandfather had done before him, as high Hôtel de Ville the municipal records, the sheriff of the county; but he held eccentric registers of deaths, and many of the prison views. He shared the belief of croakers. lists were consumed. We have, however, that England's fall was imminent; sold all in researches on the principal Englishmen his estates (said, including the manor of who figured in the Revolution, profited by Chesterton, Hunts, to be worth 9,000l. a every still available source of information. year), and went to live at Geneva. We We have skimmed a multitude of journals know nothing, however, of how long he and tracts, rummaged musty documents, stayed or what acquaintances he made; made inquiries of relatives which have Voltaire must have been of the number. not always proved fruitless, and, although We next hear of him in London, where such researches would a generation ago Brissot was introduced to him. Pigott have doubtless been more productive, we had become a vegetarian, or, as it was have collected data which from the fading then called, a Pythagorean. To this he away of traditions and from material or had probably been converted by a Dr. political accidents might not at a future Graham, brother to the well-known Mrs. period have been obtainable. Macaulay's young second husband, the Although Paine, as a member of the notorious charlatan with whose mud baths Convention, might seem entitled to pre- and electric beds the future Lady Hamilcedence, we prefer to begin with men of ton was associated. Brissot, when calling higher status and wider culture, who, even on Pigott, frequently found Graham with if eventually brought into political asso- him. Pigott was thus evidently just the ciation with him, must have loathed his man to be kindled into enthusiasm by the vulgarity and coarseness. Robert Pigott, Revolution. He had, moreover, an anfor instance, who, as Clootz's biographer, tipathy to cocked or other hats, as the M. Avenel, has ascertained, represented invention of priests and despots, and wore England in the deputation of June 19, a cap which at the Feast of Pikes made 1790, had been an opulent country gentle him the observed of all observers. When man. The Pigotts claimed descent from royalist deputies, suspecting the genuinea Norman family named Picot, and had ness of Clootz's deputation, sent an usher for eleven generations owned an estate at who spoke English - probably Rose, a Chetwynd, Shropshire. They had been man of Scotch extraction to test the strongly attached to the Stuarts, and two English representative, he was answered heirlooms are still preserved in the family by Pigott in "good Miltonic English," a ring, one of four presented by Charles and retired in confusion. We may imI. on the eve of his execution; and a por-agine Pigott receiving from Clootz a certrait on ivory of the Pretender presented tificate of his presence at the Feast of by himself to Robert Pigott's father at Pikes, couched, with a simple alteration Rome in 1720. Robert succeeded to the of name and nationality, in these terms,

and entitling the bearer to a federal rib-|publicanism that the president pocketed bon and diploma: —

his cap, all present following suit, it canCapital of the globe, February 5, year 2. not be supposed that they went home bareI certify and make known to all the free men headed. These red caps must have been of the earth that Joseph Cajadaer Chammas, confined to indoor use. Pigott, however, member of the oppressed sovereign [the peo- was clearly the introducer of the bonnet ple] of Mesopotamia, had the honor of attend-rouge, for the Château-Vieux mutineers, ing the Federation of July 14, by virtue of a to whom it is usually attributed, did not decree emanating from the august French Sen-enter Paris till three months after caps ate, June 19, year I. ANACHARSIS CLOOTZ, orator of the human race in the French Na tional Assembly.*

What a contrast between the high sheriff of Salop paying the honors 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 Sieyes's 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 a freedom.

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, 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. He is said also to have had a son who predeceased him.

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 James Watt, junior, son of the great by various shapes and colors of all sorts inventor, represented his country, like of embellishments. He condemned the Pigott, in a cosmopolitan procession. He hat as gloomy and morose, denounced the had become intimate at Manchester with uncovering of the head as a servile and an ardent politician, Thomas Cooper,* a ridiculous salutation, and appealed to chemist; and the Constitutional Society Greek, Roman, and Gaulish usage, as also of that town deputed both of them, toto the example of Voltaire and Rousseau. wards the end of 1791, to carry an address The effect of the appeal was electrical. of congratulation to the Jacobin Club. For a few weeks caps were the rage, Young Watt was in all probability the though it is not clear how far the republi- anonymous "constitutional Whig" who cans, any more than Voltaire and Rous- figured in the "moral-sublime scene seau, wore them outdoors. When on quoted by Carlyle in his essays. The poet March 19, 1792, Pétion wrote to the Wordsworth arrived in Paris a little later, Jacobin Club so strong and sensible a made Watt's acquaintance, likewise atremonstrance against external signs of re-tended the assembly of the Jacobins, and Cooper eventually emigrated to America, and died in 1829.

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

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.

on continuing his journey to Orleans took | ever, left unmolested, went back after a away a fragment of the Bastille as a relic. time to Birmingham, succeeded to his Watt may have introduced the future father's business, and in 1817 was the 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 Château-Vieux 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 the former that on August 14 he waited on the Assembly, together with Gamble and Raymont Didot, the paper-maker, had married a Miss Gamble, and this was probably her brother to present thirteen hundred and fifteen 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 honor to dine with two of the "acquitted felons" of the 1794 trials. He was, how

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 fifty thousand 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 militia, and who, with the exception of a few detained by patrol duty, headed the attack on the fortress. It is significant, but scarcely excusable, that in his "History of Jacobinism" he makes light of the capture of the Bastille, and does not hint that he was concerned in it. Indeed, the only reference to his having been in Paris at all is the remark, "I do not consider virtue to consist in the simple manners and republican phrases of a Brissot, and I have told him so to his face." A French pamphlet of 1790 on paper money is attributed to him. It was he (not Pé tion, as Carlyle represents) who courageously rescued D'Espréménil, an old acquaintance, when half killed by a mob in the Palais Royal in February, 1791. Pétion simply visited and condoled with the poor man after the rescue, in which Play. fair was assisted by a brave National Guardsman, a horse-dealer, who afterwards pawned his uniform to give Playfair a dinner, and was with difficulty persuaded to accept a few louis.* On Playfair speaking out too plainly on the excesses of the Revolution, Barrère is said to have procured an order for his arrest, but he escaped to Holland and thence to England.

By 1793 he was back in London, publishing pamphlets which advocated a

France as it Is, not Lady Morgan's, by W. Playfair, 1819.

wholesale manufacture of forged assignats London. He induced his uncle to embark as the surest and most merciful method of in speculations which ultimately proved crushing the Revolution. He urged that ruinous. There is a tradition in the fam this would save many lives, that American ily that he assisted at the capture of the notes were forged in General Howe's Bastille, but there is no positive evidence camp without its being deemed dishonor- of his being in Paris till three years later. able, and that there could be no fear of In October, 1790, he presided at a dinner retaliation, seeing that Bank of England given by the Society of Friends of the notes were payable at sight. Names, says Revolution (of 1688) to a deputation from the old song, go by contraries. Only on Nantes. They wrote home that he was the lucus a non principle can we explain thoroughly acquainted with all the Eurothe sanguinary temper of a Rossignol or pean languages and literatures, and that a Saint Just and the forged assignat pro- on dining at his house they met the leadposal of a Playfair. Unfortunately his ing men of letters. Samuel Rogers may suggestion did not fall on deaf ears. The have been one of the number, for he knew British government is alleged to have Stone well, and twelve months later, dinconnived at the manufacture by the émi- ing with him, met Fox, Sheridan, Talleygrés of forged assignats at Howden, near rand, Madame de Genlis, and Pamela, Hexham. The local tradition is that this "quite radiant with beauty." In Novempaper-mill on the Tyne never prospered ber, 1792, Stone was in Paris, and wrote afterwards. Some of the exiled bishops to dissuade Sheridan from_accepting and clergy reprobated the act, but the French citizenship, which the Convention Bourbon princes apparently reconciled intended conferring on him and Fox. themselves to it on the casuistical plea "Obscure and vulgar men, and scounthat the counterfeit notes had a secret drels does he include Paine?-having mark by which, in the event of the resto- already received the distinction, he had ration of the monarchy, they could be persuaded Brissot to defer the proposal, distinguished and cashed. One ill deed especially as it would be made a handle of begets another, and though the royalist by the Tories. In the same month he issue had long ceased, Napoleon in 1803 presided at a dinner of British residents organized a forgery of English, Austrian, in Paris to celebrate French victories. and Russian notes, the plates of which Paine was present, as also Lord Edward were claimed by and given up to the Fitzgerald, whom Stone introduced to the respective ambassadors on his fall. Play- fascinating Pamela. Stone was well acfair, who is more honorably known as an quainted with Madame de Genlis, Pameeditor of Adam Smith's works, was con- la's adoptive (or real) mother, and on havstantly unsuccessful, despite his inventive ing to quit Paris she entrusted her manugenius. He returned to Paris after Water- scripts to him. He handed them over to Too to edit Galignani's Messenger, but in Helen Maria Williams, who, on the eve 1818 an account of a duel brought on him of a threatened domiciliary visit, burnt a sentence of three months' imprisonment, them. The "scribbling trollop," as Horto escape which he fled to London, where ace Walpole styles her, never forgave him he died five years afterwards, at the age for this holocaust, yet he is said to have of sixty-four. His brother, the professor, advanced fifteen thousand francs with a remained a staunch Whig; and a Dundee view to procuring her husband's escape minister, James Playfair, who in 1790 from prison. signed an address of congratulation to the French Assembly, was probably a cousin.

John Hurford Stone resembled Playfair only in enterprise and eventual poverty. He was born at Tiverton in 1763, lost his father in childhood, and was sent up to London with his brother William to assist in the business of their uncle William Hurford, the son of a Tiverton sergemaker, who had become a coal merchant. Stone, according to information furnished us by a kinsman, was very clever and cultured, and had completely thrown off the Unitarian docrines of his family. He was one of Dr. Price's congregation in

Sympathy with the Revolution ensured no immunity from the wholesale arrest of British subjects as hostages for Toulon. Stone was apprehended and consigned to the Luxembourg on October 13, 1793, but released on the 30th. He was again arrested, together with his wife, in April, 1794, but liberated next day on condition of leaving_France. He could not safely return to England, for his brother was in Newgate on a charge of treason, and he himself was described in the indictment as the principal. He went to Switzerland, probably joining Helen Williams there, but he must have been back in June, for he then obtained a divorce from his wife

Rachel Coope. This is the presumptive which must have made him acquainted date of his liaison or secret marriage with with Humboldt, ruined him, and in 1813 Miss Williams. Their friend Bishop Gré- he had to hand it over to Smith, likewise goire perhaps married them; but it is not apparently an Englishman. He was nateasy to understand why they were not pub-uralized in 1817, simultaneously with licly and legally united. Helen Williams, and died in the following William Stone was tried at the Old year. His tombstone in Père Lachaise, Bailey, after nearly two years' incarcera-"the last tribute of a long friendship," tion, on January 28 and 29, 1796, for describes him as an enlightened champion treacherously conspiring with his broth- of religion and liberty. A now fallen er, John Hurford Stone, now in France, to stone alongside seemingly marks the spot destroy the life of the king and to raise a where Helen Williams was interred nine rebellion in his realms." The truth was, years later. however, that he had urged his brother, The prosecution of William Stone "that seditious and wicked traitor," as caused the flight of Benjamin Vaughan, Sir John Scott (afterwards Lord Eldon) M.P. for Calne, and uncle by marriage of styled him, to dissuade the French from Cardinal Manning. Vaughan was the son invading England, inasmuch as they of Samuel Vaughan, a London merchant would find none of the sympathy they trading with America, by the daughter of expected, but were doomed to failure. a Boston (U.S.) merchant, was born in Scott argued, indeed, that by warning the Jamaica in 1751, and was educated at French against a hopeless enterprise Cambridge, but being a Unitarian could William Stone had acted as their friend not graduate. Private secretary to Lord and as the king's enemy; but Erskine Shelburne, he fell in love with Miss and Adair, his counsel, urged that if pro- Manning, but her father withheld his conmoting an invasion was treason, warding sent to the marriage on the ground that it off must be the reverse. The prisoner, Vaughan had no profession. Thereupon indeed, had sheltered his brother's emis- Vaughan went and studied medicine at sary, the Irish Presbyterian minister Edinburgh, married on his return, and beJackson, had corresponded with Jackson came partner with Manning & Son, merin Ireland, signing his name backwards chants in Billiter Square. He acted as (Enots), and had forwarded to the govern- confidential messenger in peace negotiament garbled extracts from his brother's tions with America, edited a London ediletters; but Lord Lauderdale, Sheridan, tion of Franklin's works, and wrote a and William Smith, M.P., testified that pamphlet on international trade, which he was merely a weak enthusiast, anxious was translated into French in 1789. He to give himself airs, but sincerely desirous was returned for Calne at a bye election of a peace with France. Rogers, called in February, 1792, Lord Shelburne having as a witness for the prosecution, and asked evidently effected the vacancy for him. as to the prisoner's loyalty to his king and In February, 1794, he made a speech adregard for his country, evasively answered vocating precautions against negro risings that he had always thought him a well- in the West Indies, on account of the meaning man. He was acquitted, and emancipation of slaves in the French coloafter a fortnight's detention for debt re-nies; but although this speech argued tired to France.

little sympathy with the Jacobins, a letter J. H. Stone, in a published letter to Dr. from him found on Wm. Stone, seemingly Priestley, made some caustic comments addressed to or intended for J. H. Stone, on this prosecution, and incidentally ex- and dissuading the French from an inva pressed admiration of Charlotte Corday,sion, led him to take refuge in France. though her act had done more harm than good. He also extolled the Girondins, and declared his dissent from Paine's religious views and his belief in an enlightened Christianity. He had by this time started afresh in business, and while still an ardent politician, and in the confidence of the Directory, became one of the chief printers in Paris. In 1805 he brought out an edition of the Geneva Bible. He published several English reprints, and he undertook a costly edition of "Humboldt's Travels." This work,

To avoid arrest as an Englishman, he assumed the name of Jean Martin, and lived in retirement at Passy, his identity being known to only five or six persons. One of these was Bishop Grégoire, who states that the English government supposed him to have gone to America, or would otherwise have outlawed him. Another was Robespierre, to whom he paid secret visits. In June the Committee of Public Safety detected his incognito and arrested him, but after a month's detention at the Carmelite monastery he was banished.