fully, but unruffled with tears and anxieties, in a calm and pleasing melancholy. . . . I do not exhort you, my dear sister, to dismiss all sad reflections, but rather to turn them to another object. . . . In the midst of our affliction, and under the hard lot which has befallen us, we will find out serious, nay melancholy pleasures, which might be envied by those who seem more the favourites of fortune." Soon afterwards Romilly set out to bring his sister to London. He had a letter of introduction to Benjamin Franklin, then residing at Passy. The latter had been sent by his country to Paris in 1776 to secure foreign assistance for the war, and his mission was crowned with success in September 1783, when England recognised the independence of the United States. Romilly met and conversed with the eminent American, and his impression is thus described: "Of all the celebrated persons whom, in my life, I have chanced to see, Dr. Franklin, both from his appearance and his conversation, seemed to me the most remarkable. His venerable patriarchal appearance, the simplicity of his manner and language, and the novelty of his observations, at least the novelty of them at that time to me, impressed me with an opinion of him as one of the most extraordinary men that ever existed." At Lausanne he also met the Abbé Raynal, who disappointed him as not coming up to expectations aroused by the Abbé's writings. Early next year he joined the Midland circuit, but found the society there not much to his mind. No doubt the lightheartedness, the gaiety, the occasional flippancy of members clashed with his reserve, seriousness, and determined industry. In the summer his father died. A little later he met Mirabeau, and continued friendly relationships with him till the count's death in 1791. As Sir William Collins observes, "the influence he had on Romilly was profound, and the admiration this 'cloudcompeller,' this profligate who knew every villainy yet knew not the word impossible, evoked in our Huguenot Puritan was as striking as it was strange." Romilly undertook the translation of Mirabeau's tract directed against the American Order of the Cincinnati; and this pamphlet was the cause of a quarrel between Mirabeau and Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, and also with John Wilkes, fresh from his parliamentary triumph. Romilly was at pains to refute the reports made against Mirabeau's character, and "made excuses for the excesses, 1 Memoirs, vol. i, pp. 283, 284, 286, 287. • Ibid., p. 69. 2 Op. cit., P. 12. aberrations and vain eccentricities"1 of his friend, who believed that "petty moralities are the enemies of great morals." Romilly observes that Mirabeau possessed the "singular faculty of bringing forward and availing himself of the talents of others. He was a great plagiarist; but it was from avarice, not poverty, that he appropriated to himself the views and the eloquence of others.” But he had "the good of mankind for his object." "He was vain, and he was inordinately ambitious; but his ambition was to act a noble part, and to establish the liberty of his country on the most solid foundations. He was very unjustly accused of having varied in his politics, and of having gone over to the court." As to his receiving bribes from the king, he would not have acted otherwise had he been unbribed. Romilly was more than once reproached by him for "damnable timidity and amiable modesty; for a powerful mind (said he) ought to have the consciousness of its own powers; shyness is not modesty, nor is timidity prudence." On one occasion Romilly met at dinner Mirabeau and John Wilkes. "The conversation," he relates, "turned upon the English criminal law, its severity, and the frequency of public executions. Wilkes defended the system with much wit and good-humour, but with very bad arguments. He thought the happiest results followed from the severity of our penal law. It accustomed men to a contempt of death, though it never held out to them any very cruel spectacle; and he thought that much of the courage of Englishmen, and of their humanity too, might be traced to the nature of our capital punishments, and to their being so often exhibited to the people." (If there really was any seriousness in this argument—and it seems there was, seeing that Mirabeau vehemently opposed it— it reminds us of the efforts of some of our present retailers of paradoxes, who are prepared to "prove" anything at any time.) Through Mirabeau, Romilly now made the acquaintance of Lord Lansdowne who, like a veritable Mæcenas, was ever ready to extend patronage and hospitality at Bowood to thinkers and reformers; and also gained his high opinion, as well as that of Bentham, with whom he now became intimate, by reason of his pamphlet (arising out of the case of the Dean of St. Asaph), A Fragment on the constitutional power and duty of Juries upon Trials for Libels (1784). This paper had been sent anonymously 'Sir W. Collins, op. cit., p. 12. Memoirs, vol. i, p. 109. 'Memoirs, vol. i, p. 84. to the "Constitutional Society," which gladly accepted it and had many copies printed and distributed. The following year Lord Lansdowne offered Romilly a seat in parliament, which, however, was refused by him. It is obvious that the admission of Romilly, a young man just beginning his career, to such a circle as Lansdowne's, is a testimony to his character and worth. It is likewise a proof of Lansdowne's liberal-mindedness to have shown interest in and esteem for an unknown youth, the son of a tradesman, without social position to recommend him, and without public school or university credentials to support him. In 1785 appeared a publication entitled Thoughts on Executive Justice, with respect to our Criminal Laws. ... By a sincere wellwisher to the public. The author of this tract was Martin Madan,1 whose production, devoid as it was of intrinsic worth, would long ago have been forgotten, had it not been for the part it played in the criminal law controversies of the time, and its baneful influence on the practice of contemporary judges. Romilly observes that "by a mistaken application of the maxim 'that the certainty of punishment is more efficacious than its severity for the prevention of crimes,' he [the author] absurdly insisted on the expediency of rigidly enforcing, in every instance, our penal code, sanguinary and barbarous as it is: the certainty of punishment he strongly recommended, but intimated no wish to see any part of its severity relaxed. The work was, in truth, a strong and vehement censure upon the judges and the ministers for their mode of administering the law, and for the frequency of the pardons which they granted. It was very much read, and certainly was followed by the sacrifice of many lives, by the useless sacrifice of them; for though some of the judges, and the government, for a time adopted his reasoning, it was but for a short time that they adopted it; and, indeed, a long perseverance in such a sanguinary system was impossible. Lord Ellenborough, who seems to consider himself as bound to defend the conduct of all judges, whether living or dead, has lately in the House of 1Martin Madan (1726-1790), a first cousin of Cowper; educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford; called to the bar, 1748; having abandoned gay companions, he adopted Calvinistic Methodist views, obtained ordination, aroused curiosity as the " lawyer turned divine"; was in correspondence with John Wesley; became chaplain to the Lock Hospital, near Hyde Park Corner. Published (1780) Thelyphthora, or a Treatise on Female Ruin, 2 vols., in which he advocated polygamy, on the basis of the Mosaic law; it naturally called forth many bitter attacks. Issued numerous pamphlets, besides translations of Juvenal and Persius. He appears to have been a gentle, studious, zealous man. Lords, in his usual way of unqualified and vehement assertion, declared that it was false that this book had any effect whatever upon either judges or ministers."1 Romilly combated this statement by producing facts and figures which showed the rapid multiplication of executions, no doubt due to the sinister arguments set forth in the tract. Lord Lansdowne having suggested to Romilly to write something on the subject, the latter, on looking into Madan's production, was so "shocked at the folly and inhumanity of it," that he wrote an anonymous refutation instead, viz., Observations on a late publication intituled Thoughts on Executive Justice." The substance of this cogent reply will be dealt with later; 2 for the present it will suffice to say that Lord Lansdowne, among other discerning spirits, must have been deeply impressed by it. In a letter to the author, December 25, 1785, he remarked: ... Your arguments, and the authorities to which you refer, incline me to think that a revision of our penal law is not only desirable, but necessary, for the purpose of making it agreeable to the spirit of the times, and such as can be executed." During the summer vacation of 1788 Romilly, together with Dumont, visited Paris and met, among the leading personages of the day, Rochefoucauld, Lafayette, Condorcet, Mallet du Pan, Jefferson (the American ambassador), Mirabeau, and the ill-fated Malesherbes. Of the last-mentioned he says: "Amongst all the eminent persons we saw at Paris, there was none who impressed me with so much respect and attachment as the good and virtuous Malesherbes." Romilly paid a visit to Bicêtre, and was shocked at what he saw both in the hospital and in the prison; he mentioned it to Mirabeau, who asked him to put his impressions in writing. Romilly did so; and soon afterwards Mirabeau translated the account into French, and published it as Lettre d'un voyageur anglais sur la Maison de Force de Bicêtre, to which he added some observations on criminal law, which were almost a translation from the reply to Madan. The publication, however, was suppressed by the police of Paris. After Romilly's return to London, the letter on Bicêtre was issued in a periodical, The Repository, as being a translation from Mirabeau, whereas it was in fact the original. At this time Romilly's sympathies were with the French revolutionary party; and on the assembling See infra, chap. ii. • Ibid., p. 97. 1 Memoirs, vol. i, p. 89. Memoirs, vol. i, p. 328. of the States-General he drew up for their use, at the request of Count de Sarsfield, a statement of the procedure of the House of Commons, which was translated into French and published by Mirabeau (1789). But it was disregarded. "The leading members," says Romilly, "were little disposed to borrow anything from England. They did not adopt these rules, and they hardly observed any others." 1 The following summer he again visited Paris, met Necker, the Abbé Sieyès, Pétion de Villeneuve, and other distinguished persons. In 1790 Romilly published anonymously a pamphlet of great power, Thoughts on the probable influence of the French Revolution on Great Britain. He expresses his belief that the revolution "must be attended with effects so beneficial. . that it may justly claim the admiration of all mankind." "It will secure the liberties of England for ever"; it will do much to prevent war that may be contemplated in the ambitious projects of a prince or the criminal designs of a minister; it will have a "very beneficial influence on our domestic happiness, and on our own national institutions." He also persuaded his friend James Scarlett (afterwards Lord Abinger) to finish a translation, begun by himself, of a series of letters by Dumont describing the fateful events of 1789; and to these he added a few letters of his own, which embodied a trenchant indictment of English legal and political institutions, and purported to be translated from the critical work of a German observer named Groenvelt. Further, in a letter (May 15, 1792) to Madame G. he reiterates his enthusiastic opinion of the French Revolution: "Even the conduct of the present Assembly has not been able to shake my conviction that it is the most glorious, and the happiest for mankind, that has ever taken place since human affairs have been recorded; and though I lament sincerely the miseries which have happened, and which still are to happen, I console myself with thinking that the evils of the revolution are transitory and the good of it is permanent." • But the disastrous course of events soon modified his views; and no doubt the influence of Bentham also operated in the same direction. Romilly therefore had the unsold copies of the above-mentioned letters destroyed. About this time too he became convinced of the untenability of Rousseauism. 1 Ibid., p. 103. • Ibid., p. 8. 2 Thoughts, etc. (1790), p. 1. ⚫ Ibid., p. 6. • Memoirs, vol. ii, pp. 1, 2. |
