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 Pétion, 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 Playfair was assisted by a brave National Guardsman, a horsedealer, 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 wholesale manufacture of forged assignats as the surest and most merciful method of crushing the Revolution. He urged that this would save many lives, that American notes were forged in General Howe's camp without its being deemed dishonourable, and that there could be no fear of retaliation, seeing that Bank of England notes were payable at sight. Names, says the old song, go by contraries. Only on the lucus à non principle can we explain the sanguinary temper of a Rossignol or a Saint Just and the forged assignat proposal of a Playfair. Unfortunately his suggestion did not fall on deaf ears. The British Government is alleged to have connived at the manufacture by the émigrés of forged assignats at Howden, near Hexham. The local tradition is that this paper-mill on the Tyne never prospered afterwards. Some of the exiled bishops and clergy reprobated the act, but the Bourbon princes apparently reconciled themselves to it on the casuistical plea that the counterfeit notes had a secret mark by which, in the event of the restoration of the monarchy, they could be distinguished and cashed. One ill deed begets another, and though the royalist issue had long ceased, Napoleon in 1803

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

6

organised a forgery of English, Austrian, and Russian notes, the plates of which were claimed by and given up to the respective ambassadors on his fall. Playfair, who is more honourably known as an editor of Adam Smith's works, was constantly unsuccessful, despite his inventive genius. He returned to Paris after Waterloo to edit Galignani's Messenger,' but in 1818 an account of a duel brought on him a sentence of three months' imprisonment, to escape which he fled to London, where he died five years afterwards, at the age of sixty-four. His brother, the professor, remained a staunch Whig; and a Dundee minister, James Playfair, who in 1790 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 serge-maker, 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 doctrines of his family. He was one of Dr. Price's congregation in London. He induced his uncle to embark in speculations which ultimately proved ruinous. There is a tradition in the family that he assisted at the capture of the Bastille, but there is no positive evidence of his being in Paris till three years later. In October 1790 he presided at a dinner given by the Society of Friends of the Revolution (of 1688) to a deputation from Nantes. They wrote home that he was thoroughly acquainted with all the European languages and literatures, and that on dining at his house they met the leading men of letters. Samuel Rogers may have been one of the number, for he knew Stone well, and twelve months later, dining with him, met Fox, Sheridan, Talleyrand, Madame de Genlis, and Pamela, 'quite radiant with beauty.' In November 1792, Stone was in Paris, and wrote to dissuade Sheridan from accepting French citizenship, which the Convention intended conferring on him and Fox. 'Obscure and vulgar men, and scoundrels '— does he include Paine ?-having already received the distinction, he had persuaded Brissot to defer the proposal, especially as it would be made a handle of by the Tories. In the same month he presided at a dinner of British residents in Paris to celebrate French victories. Paine was present, as also Lord Edward Fitzgerald, whom Stone intro

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duced to the fascinating Pamela. Stone was well acquainted with Madame de Genlis, Pamela's adoptive (or real) mother, and on having to quit Paris she entrusted her manuscripts to him. He handed them over to Helen Maria Williams, who, on the eve of a threatened domiciliary visit, burnt them. The scribbling trollop,' as Horace Walpole styles her, never forgave him for this holocaust, yet he is said to have advanced 15,000 francs with a view to procuring her husband's escape from prison.

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 date of his liaison or secret marriage with Miss Williams. Their friend Bishop Grégoire perhaps married them; but it is not easy to understand why they were not publicly and legally united.

William Stone was tried at the Old Bailey, after nearly two years' incarceration, on January 28 and 29, 1796, for treacherously conspiring with his brother, John Hurford Stone, now in France, to destroy the life of the king and to raise a rebellion in his realms.' The truth was, however, that he had urged his brother, that seditious and wicked traitor,' as Sir John Scott (afterwards Lord Eldon) styled him, to dissuade the French from invading England, inasmuch as they would find none of the sympathy they expected, but were doomed to failure. Scott argued, indeed, that by warning the French against a hopeless enterprise William Stone had acted as their friend and as the king's enemy; but Erskine and Adair, his counsel, urged that if promoting an invasion was treason, warding it off must be the reverse. The prisoner, indeed, had sheltered his brother's emissary, the Irish Presbyterian minister Jackson, had corresponded with Jackson in Ireland, signing his name backwards (Enots), and had forwarded to the Government garbled extracts from his brother's letters; but Lord Lauderdale, Sheridan, and William Smith, M.P., testified

that he was merely a weak enthusiast, anxious to give himself airs, but sincerely desirous of a peace with France. Rogers, called as a witness for the prosecution, and asked as to the prisoner's loyalty to his king and regard for his country, evasively answered that he had always thought him a well-meaning man. He was acquitted, and after a fortnight's detention for debt retired to France.

He

J. H. Stone, in a published letter to Dr. Priestley, made some caustic comments on this prosecution, and incidentally expressed admiration of Charlotte Corday, 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. 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, which must have made him acquainted with Humboldt, ruined him, and in 1813 he had to hand it over to Smith, likewise apparently an Englishman. He was naturalised in 1817, simultaneously with Helen Williams, and died in the following year. His tombstone in Père Lachaise, the last tribute of a long 'friendship,' describes him as an enlightened champion of religion and liberty. A now fallen stone alongside seemingly marks the spot where Helen Williams was interred nine years

later.

The prosecution of William Stone caused the flight of Benjamin Vaughan, M.P. for Calne, and uncle by marriage of Cardinal Manning. Vaughan was the son of Samuel Vaughan, a London merchant trading with America, by the daughter of a Boston (U.S.) merchant, was born in Jamaica in 1751, and was educated at Cambridge, but being a Unitarian could not graduate. Private secretary to Lord Shelburne, he fell in love with Miss Manning, but her father withheld his consent to the marriage on the ground that Vaughan had no profession. Thereupon Vaughan went and studied medicine at Edinburgh, married on his return, and became partner with Manning & Son, merchants in Billiter Square. He acted as confidential messenger in peace negotiations with America, edited a London edition of Franklin's works, and wrote a pamphlet on international trade, which was translated into French in 1789. He was returned for Calne at a bye election in February, 1792, Lord Shelburne

having evidently effected the vacancy for him. In February, 1794, he made a speech advocating precautions against negro risings in the West Indies, on account of the emancipation of slaves in the French colonies; but although this speech argued little sympathy with the Jacobins, a letter from him found on Wm. Stone, seemingly addressed to or intended for J. H. Stone, and dissuading the French from an invasion, led him to take refuge in France. 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. According to Garat he was mobbed in the street as one of Pitt's spies, and narrowly escaped immediate trial and execution; but even if his apprehension really took place in this way the danger could not have been so imminent as Garat represents.

Vaughan repaired to Geneva, and had no sooner arrived than he despatched a long letter to Robespierre, written in a tone bespeaking intimacy, and an intention of keeping up a correspondence. He advised Robespierre to contract France to her former limits, and to convert her conquests into a fringe of free and allied States. By the irony of fate this letter, written as if to an autocrat, reached Paris on the night of the 9th Thermidor, when Robespierre, arrested but released, was making his last throw for life and power at the Hôtel de Ville. It was opened by the Committee of Public Safety, perhaps at the very moment when the fallen tribune was writhing in agony.

In 1796, probably before his return to Paris, Vaughan published at Strasburg a pamphlet entitled 'De l'état politique et économique de la France sous sa Constitution de l'an 3.' It professed to be a translation from the German, made by a foreigner who craved excuse for inaccuracies of idiom. It is an unqualified panegyric of the Directory, a system of government to be envied, according to Vaughan, even by America, much more by England, Switzerland, and Holland. There is an incidental reference to the Reign of Terror as a political inquisition whose rigour equalled that of the Spanish tribunal, and there is a very just remark