Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 45.djvu/423

 day formed themselves into a militia, and most of them joined in the attack (, Prise de la Bastille). In February 1791 he rescued from the mob in the Palais Royal Gardens the well-known ex-judge Duval d'Esprémesnil, who had been a subscriber to the Scioto company. Whether on account of alleged mismanagement in the company's agency, or, as he himself says, of his plain-speaking against the revolutionists, Playfair quitted France, and while at Frankfort, about 1793, he heard from a French émigré an account of the semaphore telegraph. So thoroughly did he understand the apparatus that next day he made models of it, which he sent to the Duke of York. He henceforth claimed to have introduced the semaphore into England, but the credit, both for its invention and adoption in the United Kingdom properly belongs to Richard Lovell Edgeworth [q. v.] On returning to London Playfair opened a so-called security bank, intended to facilitate small loans by subdividing large securities, but this soon collapsed. In 1795 Playfair, henceforth living by his pen, began writing vehemently against the French revolution, advocating the issue of forged assignats as a legitimate and effective weapon. He claimed credit for having given the British government some months' warning of Napoleon's intended escape from Elba. After Waterloo he returned to Paris as editor of ‘Galignani's Messenger,’ but in 1818 some comments on a duel between Colonel Duffay and Comte de St. Morys led to a prosecution by the widow and daughter of the latter, and Playfair, aggravating his offence by a plea of justification, was sentenced to three months' imprisonment with three hundred francs fine and one thousand francs damages. To avoid incarceration he left France, and spent the rest of his life in London, earning a precarious livelihood by pamphlets and translations. He died on 11 Feb. 1823, leaving a widow and four children.

A list of forty of his works appears in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ 1823 (pt. i. p. 564), the ‘Edinburgh Annual Register,’ 1823, and the ‘Annual Biography,’ 1824; and it is added that pamphlets would swell the number to at least a hundred. His chief productions are the ‘Statistical Breviary and Atlas,’ 1786; ‘History of Jacobinism,’ 1793; ‘Inquiry into the Decline and Fall of Nations,’ 1805; an annotated edition of Smith's ‘Wealth of Nations,’ 1806; ‘A Statistical Account of the United States of America,’ 1807; ‘Political Portraits in this New Æra,’ 2 vols. 1814; and ‘France as it is,’ 1819, which was translated into French in the following year.

[Short Biography in the three books above mentioned; Playfair's France as it is, not Lady Morgan's, 1819; Louis Blanc's Révolution Française; Moniteur, 1818 (indexed as ‘Pleffer’); Alger's Englishmen in French Revolution; Mag. of American History, 1889; Rev. Charles Rogers's Four Perthshire Families, 1887.] 

PLAYFAIR, WILLIAM HENRY (1789–1857), architect, born in Russell Square, London, in July 1789, was son of James Playfair, an architect of some repute in London, who in 1783 published ‘A Method of constructing Vapor Baths,’ and nephew of Professor John Playfair [q. v.] In 1794 Playfair came to reside with his uncle, the professor, in Edinburgh, and followed his father's profession of an architect, studying under William Starke (d. 1813) [q. v.] of Glasgow. He gained some considerable private practice in Edinburgh and the neighbourhood, but his first public employment was the laying out in 1815 of part of the new town in Edinburgh; in 1820 he designed the Royal and Regent Terraces in the same part; and in 1819 a new gateway and lodge for Heriot's Hospital. From 1817 to 1824 Playfair was engaged in rebuilding and enlarging the university buildings, leaving, however, the front as designed by Robert and James Adam. Other important buildings designed by Playfair at Edinburgh were the Observatory, the Advocates' Library, the Royal Institution, the College of Surgeons, St. Stephen's Church, and the Free Church College. From 1842–8 he was engaged in constructing Donaldson's Hospital in the Tudor style, a building which is reckoned as his most successful work. He designed the monument to his uncle, Professor Playfair, and that to Dugald Stewart on the Calton Hill, the latter being modelled on the monument of Lysicrates at Athens. Some of his most important works in Edinburgh were executed in the purely classical style, among them being the National Gallery of Scotland, the first stone of which was laid by the prince consort on 30 Aug. 1850, and the unfinished national monument on the Calton Hill, for which the original design was supplied by Charles Robert Cockerell, R.A. [q. v.] Playfair's classical buildings are predominant objects in any view of modern Edinburgh, and have gained for it the sobriquet of the ‘Modern Athens.’ It may be doubted, however, whether the classical style is thoroughly suited to the naturally picturesque and romantic aspect of the northern capital.

Playfair had also a very extensive private practice, and built many country houses and mansions in the classical or Tudor styles, to which he nearly always adhered. He