Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/517

 12 S. X.JUNE 3, NOTES AND QUERIES. 423 accomplishment of maitre de langues, already helpfully exercised at Bordeaux, and perhaps also at Edinburgh, Newcastle and elsewhere. But even here engagements are uncertain and earnings scant. How, then, was he to obtain the sheer necessaries of life, to stave off actual want ? On this point no direct evidence is available. Let us see, however, what light indirect sources may furnish. In the year 1813 a publication called The Monthly Repository printed a series of articles by the Rev. W. Turner, dealing with the history of Warrington Academy, at which Dr. Priestley, the famous scientist and philosopher, had j?een a tutor from September, 1761, to September, 1767, and the Rev. Turner himself a former student. In these articles it is stated, on the authority of the school records, that, in the year 1766, John Reinhold Forster was appointed pro- fessor of modern languages, but that he did not stay long, and that after his departure various attempts were made to secure a foreigner to teach modern languages at the Academy, the masters engaged including " a M. Fontain la Tour, aM. le Maitre, alias Mara, and a M. Louis Guery," but that none of these remained for any length of time, and that, finally, an Englishman was ap- pointed who had resided abroad and who remained until the closing of the Academy in 1783 (pp. 288, 578). The following note by the author of the articles is appended to the name of Mara : There is great reason to believe that this was the infamous Marat, the associate of Robespierre and the victim of Charlotte Corday. It is known that he was in England about this time and pub- lished in London a philosophical essay on the connexion between the body and the soul of man, and somewhere in the country had a principal hand in printing a work of considerable ability but of seditious tendency entitled ' The Chains of Slavery.' Mara, as his name is spelt in the minutes of the Academy, very soon left Warring- ton, whence he went to Oxford, robbed the Ash- molean Museum, escaped to Ireland, was appre- hended in Dublin, tried and convicted in Oxford under the name of Le Maitre, and sentenced to the hulks at Woolwich. Here one of his old pupils at Warrington, a native of Bristol, saw him. He was afterwards a bookseller in Bristol and failed, and was confined in the gaol of that city, but released by the society there for the relief of prisoners confined for small sums. One of that society, who had personally relieved him in Bristol gaol, afterwards saw him in the National Assembly in Paris in 1792 (p. 578 n.). One or two observations occur upon this note, (i.) It will be seen that the actual date of Le Mattre's engagement at Warring- ton is not given by the writer. From the fact, however, that none of the four masters appointed after 1766 is said to have " stayed for any length of time," it might be inferred that the sojourn of Le Maitre occurred within some two or three years at most from that date ; whereas had it roughly synchronized, as the writer implies, with the publication of the ' Essay on the Human Soul,' it would not have occurred until 1772, a date which is in fact corroborated by the letter of C. J. P. referred to towards the end of the present article. ' The Chains of Slavery,' it will also be recalled, was not published until 1774, nor did the Oxford robbery take place xintil 1776. (ii.) In 1858, some 45 years after the Rev. Turner's articles, a Mr. H. T. Bright contributed a short sketch of Warrington Academy to the Historical Society of Lancashire and Che- shire, in which, after stating that " a few years ago a parcel of papers belonging to the founder of the Academy was rescued from the hands of a Liverpool cheesemonger who- was using them for the ordinary purposes of his shop," he proceeded to dispute the sugges- tion that J. P. Marat had ever been at Warrington. Purporting to give the argu- ments pro and con, he remarks : Marat was certainly in England at or about this; time and had just published a philosophical essay on the connexion between the body and the soul of man. There is also the fact that a certain walk in Warrington still goes, so I am informed, by the name of " Marat's Walk." But I fear the testi- mony on the negative side is stronger. In the first place Mr. Turner is, I believe, in error about the name of Mara appearing on the minutes of the Academy. I have searched them, through, and employed the assistance of another for the same purpose, and the name of neither Marat nor Le Maitre could be found by us. In the eight pi- ten Academy reports before me I find a M. Fantin la Tour, but here, too, the name of Mara or Le Maitre is absent. Lastly, Miss Aiken (a descendant of a former tutor), to whom I applied, informs me that there was an alarm about Marat, but investi- gation set the matter at rest, they were certainly different men. ( Transactions, vol. xi., pp. 1-30.) Now, with many of the school documents^ lost and the name of one of the alleged tutors found in those that remained, it is idle to- suppose that the Rev. Turner, with the full records before him, could have invented the names of the other two. But Mr. Bright really confutes himself here, for Miss Aiken practically admits that there was a tutor of similar name to Marat, otherwise there would have been no occasion for alarm and investi- gation ; her contention merely is that they were different men. Ve shall see presently that the Rev. Turner is amply confirmed on