He did not receive order and left the college a week after the Storming of the Bastille (14 July 1789)[1] in which fellow Irish student James Bartholomew Blackwell is known to have participated.
Tone, who was also in Paris, regarded him as a spy, and complained that he forestalled him by submitting to the French government several memorandums on the state of Ireland, that he constantly crossed his path in the ministerial antechamber, tried to force his conversation on him, and by addressing him in English betrayed his incognito.
Du Rozoir, one of his pupils, and himself a literary man, speaks in high terms of his classical attainments, his wonderful memory, and the interest which he imparted to lessons on Shakespeare and Milton by felicitous comparisons with the ancients.
Between 1816 and 1821 he published odes on Princess Charlotte's death, Greek and South American independence, etc., productions evidently confined to a small circle in Paris.
“He was an Irishman made skeptical by Voltaire, subtle by the ruses of survival in the Revolution, sharp by the daily duel of French intellects.