Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/66

46 cap of liberty, the new Constitution, a civic crown, some ears of wheat, three miniature flags, and the national cockade. After a very effusive scene "le Député Wigh" spoke of his unpreparedness for such a reception, of his having sent home an account of a previous welcome, of a letter from his society to Pétion having miscarried, and so on. The heroics thus ended in platitudes. Carlyle aptly indexes this episode as "the Jacobin Club in its early days of moral sublime," for the club had not then the sinister reputation it eventually acquired.

Watt was not only the anonymous Constitutional Whig of December 1791, but figured with Cooper in the triumphal procession of April 15, 1792, when the forty mutinous soldiers of the Chateauvieux regiment marched through Paris. The two Manchester delegates carried the British flag, together with a bust of Algernon Sidney.

Burke, in the House of Commons nearly a year afterwards, vehemently denounced them as having thus applauded mutiny and murder, and as having exchanged embraces with Marat. The Jacobin Club, on April 13, 1792, had invited the two Manchester delegates to attend all its sittings as long as they remained in Paris. Watt's biographer, Muirhead, speaks of him as horrified by the storming of the Tuileries and the September massacres; but he was so far from reprobating the former, that on August 14 he waited on the Assembly, together