Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/11

 French readers, moreover, while anxious for the minutest details on, or Madame Roland, or Danton, and while familiar at least with the names of the principal Girondins and Montagnards, do not care to hear about a foreigner who here and there sat in the Assemblies, commanded on battlefields, or fell a victim to the guillotine. Yet for us, surely, our fellow-countrymen have an especial interest. We would fain single them out on the crowded stage of the Revolution. They are more to us, not than the actors of the first rank, but than secondary characters like Brissot or Vergniaud. Here, however, English writers will not help us. If they have not surveyed the field with French eyes, they have at least used French spectacles. French artists have painted the panorama; English connoisseurs give us their opinion of the panorama, but not of the actual scene which it represents. To vary the metaphor, or rather to state a fact, they work up the materials collected by French authors; they do not go in search of materials for themselves. Not a single English book on the Revolution tells us who represented our own country in Cloots's deputation of the human race, explains who was the hero of the Jacobin Club in December 1791, gives an accurate account of Paine's experiences, or states the number, much less the names, of the British victims to the guillotine.

If we turn from actors in the Revolution to mere spectators of it, their name is legion. There were old residents in Paris who stayed till it was too late to flee, either because they sympathised with the movement or because they took it for a mere passing