and sunk all your fleet.’
And the French royalists imagined the song to be complimentary.[80]
Anglicanism was also represented by Stephen Weston, grandson of a bishop, who had been to Paris in 1791, and published rather flippant accounts of both trips. Then there was John Glasse, rector of Hanwell, a good classical scholar, whose sermon in 1793 on behalf of the French émigré priests made light of the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. Hanwell is associated with lunacy, and Glasse in 1810, in a fit of mental derangement, hung himself at the Bull and Mouth Inn, London. John Sanford was a witness of the scene between Napoleon and Lord Whitworth on the 13th March 1803, and in Notes and Queries of the 3rd April 1852, as the only surviving witness—for the Duchess of Gordon, her daughters, and Mrs. Greatheed were then dead—he gave an account of it. W. Hughes, landing at Dieppe in June 1802, visited Rouen, Caen, Blois, and other provincial towns before proceeding to Paris. Of John Maude, fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, we shall hear hereafter, as also of Churchill.
The Church of Scotland may be credited with John Paterson, for he was probably the future missionary to Russia and Scandinavia. Alexander and Joseph Paterson may have been his brothers.
Nonconformity was represented by William Shepherd of Gatacre, Lancashire, an intimate friend of Brougham, author of a life of Poggio, and also of a history of the American Revolution. The latter work Lord John Russell read in manuscript before publication. Shepherd had educated one of Roscoe’s sons, and was now escorting members of the Roscoe family. He took with him a letter of introduction to Miss Williams, at whose house he met Carnot and Kosciusko, spending a most agreeable evening. On repeating his visit in 1814, however, he apparently, judging by the silence of his Paris in 1802 and 1814, neglected to renew the lady’s acquaintance.
Turning to philosophers, scholars, and scientists, priority is due to Jeremy Bentham and Malthus. Bentham exercised the French citizenship conferred on him in 1792 by voting for Bonaparte’s life-consulate, an act not very consistent with his radical doctrines.[81] His father had taken him over to France in 1764. Malthus, who, though a clergyman, should be classed as a philosopher or economist, little imagined how Frenchmen, mostly without having heard of him, would practise his principle. He revisited the Continent in 1825. Richard Chenevix, the mineralogist, who had witnessed and been imprisoned during the Revolution, had taken Brussels and Jena on his way to Paris.
The Institute had in December 1801 elected as foreign associates Banks, Priestley, Herschel, Neville Maskelyne, James Rennell, the geographer, and Henry Cavendish in the class of physics and mathematics; Fox in that of history and classics, and Sir Benjamin West in that of art. There had apparently been an idea of also electing Arthur Young, Horne Tooke, Sheridan, Watt, and Sir John Sinclair. Herschel, Fox, and West were the only three of the eight nominees who acknowledged the compliment in person. Herschel had the more reason for doing so as he had in 1790 been elected an associate of the old Academy of Sciences before it was swept away by the Revolution. Sir Charles Blagden, Secretary of the Royal Society, whose name is attached to the law of congelation, was presented to Napoleon, who told him that Banks was much esteemed in France, and indeed Banks had repeatedly obtained the restitution of consignments to the Jardin des Plantes captured at sea by the English.[82] Blagden seems, though a scientist, to have had a mission from the English Government, for Andreossi, the French Ambassador at London, writing to Regnier on the 8th April 1803, reported a statement of General Miranda, who was intimate with Blagden: ‘He is in the pay of the Government; they were not at first satisfied with his reports, but he has changed his tone, and they are now better pleased.’ Andreossi added: ‘I am certain that he has spread it about here (in London) that I was in treaty on behalf of the Minister of the Interior for the purchase of a machine for “dividing” mathematical instruments, an object of great advantage to French industry, and requiring some precautions in order to be carried out.’ Blagden doubtless renewed his acquaintance with Desgenettes, the army doctor, who since his visit as a young man to London in 1784 had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, and was destined to accompany him to Moscow. Blagden, pronounced by Dr. Johnson ‘a delightful fellow,’ was also acquainted with Count Rumford, for whose daughter’s hand he was an unsuccessful suitor.[83] After Waterloo he spent half the year in France and died there. Bonnycastle, Professor of Mathematics at Woolwich Academy, described by Leigh Hunt as rather vain of his acquirements, but a good fellow, fond of quoting Shakespeare and of telling stories, was another visitor, probably in the company of his friend Fuseli. Dr. John Fleming, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen, published in 1842 a History of British Animals. Osborn, an F.R.S., was living in 1806 at Weimar, where he explained to Goethe the battle of Trafalgar. Edward Pigott, the discoverer of the variable star in Sobieski’s belt or sword, had observed the transit of Venus at Caen in 1769, and that of Mercury at Louvain in 1786. He dated an astronomical paper from Fontainebleau in 1803, and in 1807 he observed the great comet, but the date and place of his death are uncertain.[84]
Perhaps the most eminent man of this category, scarcely less eminent than Herschel (though the latter discovered the planet now named after him, but originally styled by him the Georgium Sidus and by Frenchmen, Napoleon), was Thomas Young. He was the author of the undulatory theory of light, ridiculed at the time in the Edinburgh Review by that shallow scientist Brougham, yet now almost universally accepted, and he was the first to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. His uncle, Richard Brocklesby, the physician and friend of Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and Wilkes, bequeathed him £10,000, besides his house, library, and pictures. In 1801 Young, originally tutor to Hudson Gurney—both being then Quakers, but both destined to renounce Quakerism—and a medical practitioner, had found his true vocation as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution and editor of the Nautical Almanac. He has a nephew, a rent-collector at Bristol, who, however tells me that he was not born till after his illustrious uncle’s death.
It is difficult to draw an exact line between scholars, connoisseurs, and savants. Charles Towneley was famous, like Elgin, for his marbles, the fruits of his Italian travels from 1765 to 1772, and purchased after his death in 1805 by the British Museum. Turberville Needham, the scientist, had been his tutor in Paris in 1752, when his uncle John, translator of Hudibras into French verse, seems to have looked after him. Sir Abraham Hume, who has been already mentioned, was a famous collector of minerals and precious stones, and had purchased pictures by the old masters at Vienna and Bologna. He was one of the founders of the Geological Society, and lived to be at eighty-eight the senior F.R.S. Joseph Ritson, the antiquary, had been in Paris in 1791, when he was enthusiastic for the Revolution, and he actually adopted the Jacobin calendar. A strict vegetarian and an avowed materialist, he was latterly insane. Stephen Martin-Leake, herald and numismatist, sent over three of his sons, William, Stephen, and John, the two last likewise heralds. William Taylor, the friend of Southey, son of a Norwich manufacturer, and educated by Mrs. Barbauld, at Palgrave, Suffolk, had been sent on the Continent by his father in 1779, went again in 1788, and now repeated his visit. He was one of the first to introduce German literature to English readers. He met Paine at a dinner given by Holcroft, and had an introduction to Lafayette from his uncle Dyson, a Norfolk man whose son had taught Lafayette farming.[85] Taylor went back an anti-Bonapartist. Paine had probably opened his eyes to Napoleon’s tyranny. Alexander Hamilton, a future F.R.S., had been in the East India Company’s service in Bengal, and on returning to England, after accompanying Lord Elgin to Constantinople, had continued his Sanscrit studies. He took with him his Creole wife and a promising son. Few as were then the students of Sanscrit, fewer still were the students of Chinese. Thomas Manning was one of them. Son of the rector of Diss, Norfolk, in whose church Wesley preached a few weeks before his death, though all other church pulpits had long been closed to him, Manning was also at Holcroft’s dinner, and we may imagine his being questioned about Diss by Paine, who had been a journeyman staymaker there. In his letters to his father—all beginning ‘Honoured sir,’ and subscribed ‘your dutiful son’—he mentions the Abbé Sicard, the teacher of the deaf and dumb, Carnot, Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand, and Laharpe. Manning, who suggested to Charles Lamb his roast pig essay, and was also intimate with Coleridge, is buried, like Malthus, in Bath Abbey.
Artists flocked to Paris to see the spoils from Italy collected at the Louvre. There was West (not yet Sir Benjamin West), with his son Raphael, who was expected to prove himself worthy of his Christian name, but failed to do so. It was this visit, perhaps, which left West no time to send a new picture to the Royal Academy exhibition in 1803; but he should not have attempted to palm off as new a ‘Hagar and Ishmael’ which he had exhibited in 1776. President though he was, the Academy insisted on its withdrawal. Opie was there with his wife, Amelia Alderson, who years afterwards gave an account of her visit in Tait’s Magazine. Seated on the boulevards, the future Quakeress sang ‘Fall, tyrants, fall,’ a pæan on the Revolution singularly out of place under the iron rule of Napoleon; but she had not yet discovered him to be a tyrant. Opie was so dazzled the first day by the white glare of Paris houses that he talked of leaving at once to avoid blindness, but the alarm soon passed off. Bertie Greatheed, the dramatist, was accompanied by his son, who copied assiduously at the Louvre, besides sketching a capital likeness of Napoleon. His copies were said to be so good that Napoleon refused at first to let them leave France, but relented on the young man’s death.[86] Erskine also induced Napoleon to sit for his portrait to Philips, R.A., who finished it through the courtesy of Josephine while her husband was at supper. The portrait was sold at Erskine’s death and was apparently purchased by Lord Howden. Howden, who latterly lived at Bayonne, bequeathed it to the sub-prefecture of that town, where it still hangs, but not in a prominent place, so that it escaped notice till 1895, when, in a controversy on the colour of Napoleon’s eyes, attention was called to it.[87] Richard Cosway, the miniaturist, and his wife, the musician and historical painter, repeated their visit of 1786, when Richard was trying to sell to Louis XVI. some Raphael cartoons which he had bought of Bonfield. André Chénier, the poet destined to the guillotine, was then passionately in love with Mrs. Cosway. He addressed verses to her, some in her name in full, others inscribed ‘d. r.,’ a contraction for d’Arno, on the banks of which river she was born. A Polish poet, Niemcewics, likewise enamoured of her, went to see her in London in 1787. She now studied at the Louvre, next went to Lyons, and then to Lodi.[88] She subsequently started a school in Paris, which did not succeed, went again to Lyons, and eventually became head of a convent near that city. Daughter of an English hotelkeeper at Leghorn, she thus played many parts. Another female artist, Mrs. Damer, had been captured by a French privateer in 1779, but gallantly allowed to proceed to Jersey, where her father, Field-Marshal Conway, was governor. Josephine, whom she had known before her marriage, introduced her to Napoleon, who, as previously stated, bespoke a bust of Fox. Strawberry Hill House had been bequeathed to her by Horace Walpole. John Claude Nattes, one of the earliest of water-colourists and a topographical draftsman, took views of Paris, Versailles, and St. Denis. For unaccountably exhibiting drawings not his own, he was in 1807 expelled from the Water Colour Society, but he then resumed sending to the Royal Academy. Masquerier, of whom we have already heard, was again in Paris. Let it suffice to name Sir Martin Shee, President of the Royal Academy; Fuseli; Flaxman, who with his wife accompanied West; Duppa, who had witnessed French spoliation at Rome in 1798; Farrington, who accompanied Rogers; Bowyer, the fashionable portrait painter and illustrator of Hume’s History; Edward Hayes, the miniaturist, and his father, the more distinguished painter, Michael Angelo Hayes; George Bryant, engaged by the sportsman Thornton; William Dickinson, with his son, of whom we shall hear later on; Boddington; Hoppner, the naturalised German;[89] Thomas Daniell; William Turner; Andrew Wilson; John Wright; Robert Flin; William Sherlock, who forty years before had studied in Paris, the illustrator of Smollett’s History, B. D. Wyatt, the architect; Abraham Raimbach, the engraver; Charles and James Heath and Jervis, also engravers; and Thomas Richard Underwood. Likewise an artist in her way was Mary Linwood, who in 1798 had opened an exhibition of art needlework, viz. copies of a hundred pictures of old masters and modern painters, and who went on working till the age of seventy-five, when eyesight failed her. Her Napoleon in woolwork is now in the South Kensington Museum.