We now come to two lady writers. One was Frances Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Francis Bernard, Governor of Massachusetts, and wife of the Rev. Richard King, a Cambridgeshire clergyman. She was intimate with Hannah More, and founded district visiting societies and schools. She published a Tour in France in which she mentions that Boulogne was full of English who had remained there during the Revolution, and that you could scarcely enter a shop there without being addressed in English. She spent seven months in Paris. The other was Anne Plumptree, novelist and translator, daughter of a Huntingdonshire clergyman, and granddaughter of a Cambridge don. She accompanied the Opies. Though a democrat, she admired Napoleon and actually wished him to invade England. Her Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France (1810) relates chiefly to provincial life, which is an agreeable change after so many books on Paris. I have already mentioned Francis William Blagdon, a prolific author, who, having previously visited France in 1784, published Paris as it was and as it is. I may also mention William Thomas Williams, author in 1807 of The State of France; David Morrice, a schoolmaster, with his View of Modern France and Practical Guide from London to Paris; Stewarton who wrote anonymously or otherwise against Napoleon and Talleyrand; and Israel Worsley, with his State of France (1806). Worsley went back to Dunkirk after Waterloo to re-open a school. In 1828 he undertook to prove the descent of the American Indians from the lost tribes. George Tappen, who was interested in painting and architecture, published a Tour through France and Italy.
John Dean Paul, a banker and future baronet, went over in August 1802 as one of a party of five, accompanied by two servants and a courier. He tells us in his anonymous book, Journal of a Party of Pleasure to Paris, that a young friend of his in the uniform of the Wiltshire Militia was tapped on the shoulder in the Louvre and asked to what regiment he belonged. The inquirer was Bonaparte, who frequently thus accosted British officers. Paul’s son and heir, then an infant, became unpleasantly notorious fifty years later. His daughter married in 1827 Edward Fox Fitzgerald, son of Lord Edward. She lived till 1891. William Beckford, the author of Vathek, had paid several visits to Paris. In October 1782 he passed through it on his way home from Naples. ‘A little impertinent, purse-proud puppy,’ Samuel Meek styled him in his diary, for though staying at the same hotel he had refused to answer an inquiry respecting a nephew of Meek at Naples. He was again in Paris from April 1791 to June 1792, when he ordered a tapestry for his London house, and went on to Lausanne, where he purchased Gibbon’s library. He paid a third visit in February 1793, and left in May with a passport from the municipality viséd by Lebrun, the Foreign Minister; but the Calais authorities detained him until the Convention had been consulted. He left behind him his two riding-horses, which were seized for military baggage trains. The General Safety Committee, declaring them unfit for such work, ordered them to be restored,[104] on the ground that Beckford had offered to present two cart-horses which would be much more serviceable, and that from love of liberty he had lived much in France. We hear no particulars of his visit of May 1802.
As for authors on non-French subjects, their name is legion. Let us begin with poets. Wordsworth, it is true, did not go further than Calais, but I have already named Rogers, who had also seen Paris during the Revolution, and now paid it a second visit. He described Napoleon as having a very strong profile, a sallow but not disagreeable complexion, light grey eyes, and scarcely perceptible eyebrows. Fox commissioned Rogers to buy andirons for him in the Palais Royal Arcades. Then there was Walter Savage Landor, who started with admiration for Napoleon, but found ‘not an atom of liberty left.’ He witnessed the festival in the Tuileries gardens in honour of the life-consulate, and he wrote to his brother: ‘I expected that the sky would have been rent with acclamations. On the contrary, he (Bonaparte) experienced such a reception as was given to Richard III. He was sensibly mortified. All bowed, but he waved to and fro, and often wiped his face with his handkerchief. He retired in about ten minutes.’ On returning home and reprinting his Gebir, Landor appended a qualifying note to his line:
‘A mortal man above all mortal praise.’
He called on Paine, and in his Imaginary Conversations (fifth series, XI.) introduced a minute description of him. He represents him as uncombed, unshaven, and unwashed, and as solacing his misfortunes by brandy, yet he makes him foresee Napoleon’s inordinate ambition and fall. Landor revisited Paris in 1814 and 1840. Paine, by the way, was escorted to Havre at the end of August 1802 on his way to America by Thomas, or ‘Clio,’ Rickman, a versifier if not exactly a poet, who named his six sons Paine, Washington, Franklin, Rousseau, Petrarch, and Volney. They were surely to be pitied. Another versifier was William Parsons, who in 1785 had published a magazine at Florence and had associated there with Madame Piozzi, Robert Merry, and Bertie Greatheed. Greatheed, as we have seen, was also now in Paris.
Amongst other writers of works of imagination were Thomas Hope, the author of Anastasia, art connoisseur, and father of Beresford Hope;[105] William Combe, who had married Mrs. Cosway’s sister, author of Dr. Syntax, a book widely read in its day; and Edgeworth, who was arrested and but for Whitworth’s remonstrance would have been expelled. He fancied that he had been taken for a brother of the Abbé Edgeworth, Louis XVI.’s confessor, a distant kinsman whom he had never even seen; but the police register[106] states that he had indulged in ‘indiscreet talk.’ His eldest son Lovell, as we shall find, did not come off so lightly. Edgeworth was accompanied by his fourth wife, his distinguished daughter Maria, and her younger half-sister Charlotte. He had intended to stay two years, but happily left in time. Maria revisited Paris in 1820.
More matter-of-fact writers included Anthony Aufrere, an art connoisseur, a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine, a translator from the German and Italian, and editor of Lockhart’s Letters. Hazlitt, the critic and essayist, who was introduced to Prosper Merimée’s father, the artist, copied at the Louvre, and paid a second visit in 1824. Filon fancifully suggests that the unborn Prosper was influenced by his mother’s impression of Hazlitt. There was also John Allen, the Edinburgh Reviewer, a ‘man of vast information and great conversational powers,’ says Macaulay, but who, living with Lord Holland from 1801 till his death in 1843, wrote little. John Gifford, the Tory pamphleteer, editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review, a continuation of the famous Anti-Jacobin, had been the author, concocter, or arranger of Letters from France in 1792. His visits to France did not lessen his insular prejudices. In contrast to him there was David Williams, Nonconformist minister and schoolmaster, but now best known as founder and secretary of the Royal Literary Fund. He had been in Paris in the winter of 1792, but seemingly did not attend the British dinner at which an address to the Convention was adopted. Madame Roland regretted that he had not been elected a member of that body in lieu of Paine, but he had reason to congratulate himself on this. Lebrun, Minister of Foreign Affairs, entrusted him with a letter to Grenville regretting the imminence of hostilities and suggesting that, as in the previous war, a few packets might continue to ply between Dover and Calais;[107] but the letter received no answer. James Anderson, whose extensive view ranged from chimneys to cattle-breeding and political economy, had corresponded with Washington on ‘moral philosophy and agricultural topics.’ Last, but far from least, was Henry Hallam, as yet a young man of twenty-five.
We now come to four men who made France their home. Quintin Craufurd, a nabob from Manila, acting on his maxim, ‘Make your fortune where you like, but enjoy it at Paris,’ settled there in 1780. He provided the carriage in which the royal family in 1791 attempted to escape. He himself had gone to Brussels, perhaps expecting to meet them, and not venturing to return, his furniture was confiscated. He was now able to resume life in Paris, and frequently played whist with Talleyrand, for cards were his passion. Herbert Croft, nominally a clergyman as well as a baronet, though he had little of the reverend about him, and was dependent on a Government pension of £200, had been the friend of Johnson, whom he furnished with a life of Chatterton. He, like Boswell, was duped by the Ireland forgeries. Just too late to succour Chatterton, he was also just too late to succour a French poet, Grainville, a cousin of Bernardin de St. Pierre; but he happily did not foresee a more direct connection with a third suicide, that of his brother and successor in the title, Princess Charlotte’s surgeon. He wrote in the Argus in 1805 in favour of peace. Becoming the companion of Lady Mary Hamilton, daughter of Lord Leven, another state pensioner (but only to the amount of £80), Croft in 1809 engaged Charles Nodier as his secretary, and Nodier for two years turned into French his and the lady’s productions. Both these amateur authors died in 1816.
The third Anglo-Frenchman was John Fraser Frisell, a Glasgow student who in 1792, at the age of sixteen, went to France to complete his education. Enthusiastic for the Revolution, he was imprisoned for fifteen months at Dijon during the Terror. That imprisonment, however, procured him the lifelong friendship of fellow-captives, Guitant and his wife, who offered him a home from 1794 to 1802, and he thus became intimate with Chateaubriand and Joubert. Chateaubriand styled him the Greek Englishman. Marrying a Frenchwoman, he indulged his passion for Greek authors, for the chase, and for travelling. On the death of a daughter in 1832, Chateaubriand, then himself a political prisoner, wrote an elegy on her. Frisell published in French a treatise on the British constitution, and presented a copy of it to Louis Napoleon in Switzerland, who promised him in return his own sketch of a French constitution. Frisell also contributed to the Journal des Débats.[108] He turned Catholic just before his death, which took place at Torquay in 1846.
The fourth Anglo-Frenchman was Henry Grey MacNab, a scion of a Scotch-Irish family who had studied under Reid at Glasgow University. When detained in 1803 he went to Montpellier for eleven years, there studying medicine, political economy, and pedagogy. Before quitting England he had published a pamphlet against a proposed tax on coal, and in Paris in 1808 he wrote on education, on Robert Owen, of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer, and on the state of the world at the beginning of the 19th century. He was honorary physician to the Duke of Kent, to whom he dedicated his book on Owen and whose portrait he prefixed to the French translation. He died in Paris in 1823, leaving an unfinished work on premature burial.