ENGLISHMEN IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.* MR. ALGER has compiled this

book so carefully that we are unwilling to cavil at his contention that it " takes up un-

trodden ground." His design was to record succinctly the experiences of certain Englishmen who were voluntary or involuntary eye-witnesses of the French Revolution ; and he has carried out that design with a strictness which borders on severity. For his book, as he warns the reader, was not written to point a moral, and passes no judgment on the

Revolution. He regards, however, somewhat arbitrarily, that Revolution as extending from 1789 to 1814, and feels that he has neither to justify nor impeach the conduct of the English

Government towards France during that quarter of a century which was " undoubtedly the most thrilling period of French history." It rested, of course, entirely with himself, whether

he should deal or refuse to deal with controversial topics ; and it would have been idle indeed for him to have conjectured,

for instance, what might have happened if the English Govern- ment had met the first advances of Napoleon in a spirit of conciliation. But, apart from controversy, it may be said with confidence that England will never again play a part in European complications like that which she played during the above-mentioned quarter of a century. We have more to do, though, with the " moralising," which Mr. Alger thinks that his book will induce, than we have with his refusal to meddle with the lessons of "philosophy teaching by examples :" and we shall inspect his actors cursorily before we attempt to point, in the briefest way possible, the moral of their connection with the French Revolution. They are not a goodly company, as will be readily inferred from the following

passage, in which Mr. Alger names some of the most notable of his troupe:— "Grieve was. not only the admirer but in his way the imitator of Marat, as Arthur was of Robespierre, as Helen Williams was of Madame Roland, minus her ambition and impatience of social superiority. The two O'Bullivans realised the calumnious legend of Andre Chenier's betrayal by his brother, and the two Badgers are a parallel to Frenchmen who eagerly perished by mistake for fathers or brothers. Pigott, however, with his reforms in food and -costume, is perhaps sui generis. The Abbe Edgeworth, facing what he believed to be certain death, towers head and shoulders over his countrymen ; but Money was ready to risk his life for the King and his Swiss, though the King was not his Sovereign nor the Swiss his countrymen ; Helen Williams sheltered a proscript, and scorned to bow the knee to Napoleon ; even Paine, in voting against Louis's death, displayed a moral courage for which his antecedents would not have prepared us."

It is only fair to say that Mr. Alger is keenly alive to the fact that the Englishmen whom he has chosen " to single out on the crowded stage of the Revolution " were for the most part " commonplace people," and that only a few, and a very

few, of them played some minor, and very minor, parts on that stage. He trusts, we fear, so far as the sale of his book is concerned, too much to the fact that these insignificant persons "are more to us, not than actors of the first rank" like Mirabeau and Madame Roland, " but than secondary characters like Brissot and Vergniaud." The fact is un- deniable enough, yet obviously not so pregnant as Mr. Alger is fain to think that it is. His pages bristle with details which, it seems to us, are hardly worth mastering.

This, however, is a point on which we may be mistaken, and it is right in any case to say that these details

are, from -Mr. Alger's point of view, indispensable, and that they are laid before the reader undiluted by comments or reflections. It is right, also, to say that the task of col- lecting them was no easy task, and that Mr. Alger's book, when all is said, is far from bulky, and far from being unread- able. It consists of close upon three hundred small pages of

large clear print, and these pages are divided into thirteen short chapters, to each of which is prefixed a motto so aptly chosen, that it will retemper not unfrequently the energies even of a somewhat weary reader. If the chapter prove, in

• Englishmen in the French Revolution. By john G. Alger. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Riyington. 1899.

spite of the motto, rather disappointing—but we have harped upon that string long enough, and it is time that we should dwell upon some of the more interesting aspects of Mr. Alger's book.

We cannot assent to his view that the characters of the men whom he writes about are an interesting chapter in psychology." But the idiosyncrasies of some of them were so passing strange, that it would be churlish to assert that they are beneath consideration. The alteration of a single word in one of Virgil's noblest lines enables us to put our own view compendiously :- " Sant rims rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt."

Mr. John James Arthur, a friend and would-be imitator of Robespierre, so richly deserved to be guillotined, as he was two days after his friend and exemplar, that it seems wrong to link his name, even for a moment, with anything which may provoke a smile. But we quote the absurd remedy which he proposed for an imaginary evil, because it lends, to a certain extent, some strength to the compassionate theory that the leading Terrorists were practically demented by the enormity of their own atrocities. " He charged Pitt's agents," says Mr. Alger, " with a plot for slaughtering cows and sheep, so as to starve France, and suggested that every citizen should be obliged to keep a cow." Mr. Pigott was High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1774. He was an opulent country gentleman, but sold his estates and retired to the Continent because he had brought himself to believe that England was on the brink of ruin. He had "an antipathy to hate cocked or chimney- pot, as an invention of priests and despots," and as he was a vegetarian, or, as the term was then, a Pythagorean, Madame Roland may be forgiven for styling him a franc original. Such a term would not be applicable nowadays to a man who held Mr. Pigott's opinions concerning flesh-meat and head-gear; but the chimney-pot hat seems to invite a line of "moralising." It has braved wind and weather for more than a hundred years, and as a head-piece for the denizens of towns and cities, it has a fair claim to be regarded as a survival of the fittest. Mr. Alger tells a curious betting story about the "cap-headed man," as he quaintly but incorrectly styles Mr. Pigott. He " ran his father's life" against the life of Sir W. Codrington's father, for five hundred guineas. It happened that Mr. Pigott's father died some hours before the bet was made, and Mr. Pigott maintained that the bet was off. The case came before Lord Mansfield, and he held that the impossibility of a con- tingency did not preclude its being the subject of a wager, if both parties were at the time unaware of that impossibility. An amusing example of the insufficient reason meets us in the reply which the Earl of Mazareen and his fellow-debtors made to the Commandant of La Force when they forced their way but of that "Bastille of usury" in 1789. He threatened to fire upon them. " So much the better," they shouted ; " kill us, and then you will have to pay our creditors." The Com- mandant yielded. Was his logic much worse than was that of the Norwich Corporation, which voted Dr. Rigby a piece of plate because, " when he was a grandfather and sixty-six years of age, his second wife gave birth to four infants"?

Small as the part was which Thomas Paine played in the French Revolution, it was larger than that of any other Englishman. Mr. Alger has, so far as we can judge, shown that there is no 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 turnkey omitting Paine in the batch of victims." He has also recounted some curious instances of the vulgarity and vanity which were the main ingredients in Paine's character. But he has quoted the following sentence from Paine's speech at the trial of Louis XVI., which he generously says " goes far to redeem Paine's errors :"—" 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." Sir Sidney Smith's reputation was for a few years brighter than Paine's, but he cuts a very poor figure in this book : and it is curious that of the two English naval officers who won name and fame at Acre, each, to use James L's expres- sion, " went out in snuff." The Abbe Edgeworth, as is well known, attended Louis XVL on the scaffold. He had no

more recollection, though, of saying, " Fils de St. Louis, montez an del," than Wellington had of saying, "Up, Guards, and at them ! " There are several other places where Mr. Alger has rectified historical errors, and we mention this to show the care with which he has written. The chief moral which his book points is that " the red fool-fury of the Seine " must not blind us to the fact that the French, as a nation, are as kindly and hospitable as any in the world.

The most interesting paper in the appendix is a graphic letter from Sir William Codrington, which fully confirms all that Beugnot and other French prisoners have said about the noisomeness of the Conciergerie and the light-heartedness of its inmates. We shall quote a passage from this letter because it " induces moralising." Sir William had been four months in the " abode " which he rather euphemistically calls "awful." A fever broke out in it, and he was removed to a maison de sante :- " I had begun to droop the last few days," he writes, " but it was amazing the instantaneous effect that the change of air had upon me, like a fish that had been some time out of water and thrown into it again. In less than two hours I felt quite .a different person. I dined with some friend by the indulgence of my conductor, and ate with a very good appetite, which had quite failed me latterly. Awful as that abode was, you would scarcely believe, perhaps, that I have not been so cheerful since as I was there, nor have I since seen so many cheerful people. One would think that Nature had formed one's nerves according to the different situations that they may be exposed to. On se fait d tout, and one may accustom oneself to bad fortune as one does to good."