Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/285

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NAPOLEON'S CAPTIVES.
265

Carnival of 1834 and 1835 he tried to introduce Italian customs by flinging comfits and coins.

Carnot, as President of the Institute, interceded for several scientists or scholars, and it was fortunate that Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, was not only in correspondence with him but was considered friendly to France. James Forbes, the Orientalist, Montalembert's grandfather, who had just become an F.R.S., thus obtained his liberty. Alexander Hamilton, though not an F.R.S. till 1808, was also released. He was regarded as the only man on the Continent acquainted with Sanscrit, into which he initiated Frederic Schlegel, who in 1802 was on a visit to Paris with his wife, daughter of Moses Mendelssohn. Hamilton catalogued the Sanscrit manuscripts in the Paris library, and to this service doubtless owed his liberation. It was perhaps also as F.R.S. that Lord Shaftesbury, the late philanthropist's uncle, was liberated, or this may have been due to his friendship with Fox, which had procured him permission to remain at Paris. Dr. Charles Maclean, who had gone to Paris to advocate an international institution at Constantinople for the study and treatment of the plague, was released after some demur on proving that he had been ten years out of England. He considered himself fortunate, for though the detention was ostensibly limited to males between sixteen and sixty years of age, passports were refused to women, and to boys