Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/96

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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

on the Revolution, mostly written in a gardener's solitary cottage at Neuilly, did not advance beyond a first volume, and this contains nothing that would be otherwise unknown. She does not relate her own experiences, and, writing for contemporaries more or less familiar with the facts, she moralises rather than narrates.

John Oswald, as a fellow-vegetarian, was probably acquainted with Pigott, and, like him, did not see the end of the Revolution, but his end was more tragical. The son of an Edinburgh coffee-house keeper, he was apprenticed to a jeweller, but a legacy enabled him to buy a commission in the 43rd Foot, which he accompanied to India. He left the army, possibly on account of his political opinions, and in 1785 returned to England. He had become a vegetarian, thinking it cruel to take an innocent animal's life, and filthy to feed upon a corpse. He had a passion for travelling, had lived among the Kurds and Turcomans, and was acquainted with Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Despising fashion, he dispensed with cravat and wig, wearing his hair à la Titus. In 1787 he published a volume of poems under the name of Sylvester Otway, a farce called the "Humours of John Bull" being inserted in it. He also started a magazine called the British Mercury, and issued some Radical pamphlets. The Revolution drew him to Paris, a dislike of creditors, according to some,