biography, speaks of Harry Priestley, a lad of sixteen, bursting into her parents' drawing-room at Manchester and exclaiming, "France is free! the Bastille is taken! William was there, and helping. I have just got a letter from him. He has put up a pictorial of the Bastille and two stones from its ruins for you." Two years later William found mob-law a two-edged weapon, for he witnessed—had he been recognised he would have been in peril—the sacking of his father's house and chapel.
Dr. Priestley, who himself had the good sense to decline a seat in the Convention, offered him by two departments, bade his son William, in June 1792, "go and live among that brave and hospitable people, and learn from them to detest tyranny and love liberty." He accordingly waited on the Assembly to apply for naturalisation, and was received with plaudits. His voice being weak, his speech, which declared French citizenship a higher honour than the crown of any arbitrary state, was read for him by the President, François of Nantes. The reply of the latter compared Burke's attacks on Dr. Priestley to those of Aristophanes on Socrates, and suggested that the Birmingham rioters were the descendants of Danish pirates. The youth's gravity must have been sorely tried by this burlesque oration; but did not M. de Lesseps, in the French Academy of Sciences, once gravely hint that the English promoters of a rival Suez Canal were the descendants
