Teviot, the Trossachs, and the North. He was a member of the Edinburgh Angling Club and similar associations. The Illustrated News winds up his career thus:— “Mr. Arthur Perigal, R.S.A., a distinguished painter, especially of Highland scenery, and an enthusiastic angler, died on 5th June 1884, aged sixty-eight.” (See the Scotsman newspaper.)
Collette. — The Huguenot family of Collette took refuge in England after the Edict of Revocation. They had been for a long time naturalized British subjects, when they emigrated to the American colonies. There by industry they made a fortune, and became extensive proprietors of land. After the American war, the Republican Government confiscated their estates. The present representative is an English barrister, Charles Hastings Collette, Esq., who is one of the Directors of the French Hospital. Mr Collette is celebrated as a historical and polemic writer against Romanism. He has been very successful in exposing the pious frauds of the Right Rev. John Milner, Bishop of Castabala and Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District of England, also of Cardinal Wiseman and several other Popish ecclesiastics. Mr Collette’s books and pamphlets are numerous, and prove him to be an honourable disputant, an acute reasoner, and a learned Church historian. His most important works are (1) “The Novelties of Romanism,” 2d edition revised and enlarged, a collection of historical facts, exhibiting the antiquity o f Gospel faith and precepts, and the subsequent accumulation of Romish dogmata and idolatries. (2) “Henry VIII. — an Historical Sketch as affecting the Reformation in England” (there is a library edition, dated 1864, and a revised and cheap edition, dated 1868); the first draft was a lecture prepared in 1862, founded upon researches among our State Papers, and to some extent anticipating the conclusions promulgated by Mr Froude in his History of England. (3) A Reply to Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland. The late William Cobbett vilified the Reformers and apologised for the cruelties of their persecutors, and therefore his book is kept in constant circulation among the Roman Catholics in the English and Italian languages. Cobbett had been answered by older writers; but the peculiarity of Mr Collette’s work is, that it examines and criticises alleged facts in history only, and does not discourse upon the creeds of the Protestant and Popish parties. This seasonable Reply was published in 1869.
Note.
Among refugee literati, though not proved to have taken up his abode in Britain, the anonymous author of the following book may be recorded:— “A New Systeme of the Apocalypse, or Plain and Methodical Illustrations of the Visions in the Revelation of St. John. Written by a French minister in the year 1685, and finisht but two days before the Dragoons plunderd him of all except this Treatise. To which is added, this Author’s Defence of his Illustrations concerning the Non-effusion of the Vials, in answer to Mr Jurieu. Faithfully Englished. London, printed in the year 1688.”
Here I may quote a sentence regarding the Prophecies of Holy Scripture, contained in a letter from F. Abauzit to William Burnet, Governor of New York: “I have often been witness to the happy effects they have produced in the minds of sensible persons who, though once surrounded with all the felicities of their native soil, have in the indigence of a foreign refuge preserved great cheerfulness of soul. They acknowledged that they lived on the prophecies, so powerfully were hey supported by the soothing hope of a speedy re-establishment.” In his Discourse on the Apocalypse, he says: “The English find here the revolutions of Great Britain; the Lutherans, the troubles of Germany; and the French refugees, what happened to them in France. . . . . There is only the [Roman] Catholic Church which hath circumscribed it within the limits of the first three centuries, during which it maintains that everything was accomplished, as if it were afraid lest, descending lower, it should see Antichrist in the person of its Metropolitan.”
Firmin Abauzit was a refugee in Geneva (born at Usez, in Languedoc, 11th November 1679, died 20th March 1767). A brother died in London in 1717. Their father died in 1681. By the Edict of 12th July 1685 the children of a deceased Protestant father were to be removed from the charge of the widowed mother, and an Edict of January 1686 provided as to all children of Protestants, that at the age of five they were to be transferred to Romish tutelage. Madame Abauzit (whose maiden name was Ann De Ville) sent her children to Orange, thence to a village near Die. The elder brother was forcibly brought back to Usez, entered by the Romanists in the books of their college in that place; and it was ordered that he should be boarded
