Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/98

78 the promoters were to meet. Maxwell slipped away unobserved, and Horne Tooke took the arrivals to his own house, where a considerable sum was raised, and an order for arms sent to Birmingham.

Another Scotchman, Thomas Christie of Montrose, paid three visits to France. He was of a Unitarian family, and was an old pupil of Dr. Price, who in the winter of 1789 gave him introductions to Mirabeau and Necker. Enraptured with the Revolution, he counted on the regeneration of mankind. As he remained six months, he probably joined Cloots's deputation. In May 1791 he went over again, became intimate with Danton, and on his return wrote an answer to Burke. In 1792 he was once more in Paris, and when the Assembly resolved on translating the Constitution into the eight principal European languages, Christie undertook the English version, which and the Italian were the only ones executed. He knew Mackintosh and Paine. He probably left just before the September massacres, for on the 9th of that month he married in London, and became a partner in his wife's grandfather's carpet-factory. In the spring of 1793 he was again in Paris, with his wife and unmarried sister. George Forster, the German naturalist who had accompanied Cook in his voyage round the world,