After quitting the regiment, this remarkable man (whose father was the keeper of John's coffee-house at Edinburgh) had made himself perfect master of the Greek, Latin, and Arabic languages; and he became a vegetarian, in imitation of the Brahmins, some of whose opinions he had imbibed during service in India. He became a violent political pamphleteer, and on the outbreak of the French Revolution repaired at once to Paris, where his furious writings procured him immediate admission into the Jacobin club, in all the transactions of which he took a leading part, and was appointed to the command of a regiment of infantry, which was raised from the refuse, the savage and infamous population of the purlieus of Paris; and they marched sans breeches, shoes, and often sans shirts, with their hair loose, and their arms, faces, and breasts smeared with red paint, blood, and gunpowder. At the head of this rabble, on the evening of the 14th of July, Oswald appeared with other leaders before the walls of the terrible Bastille; and bearing in his hand a white flag of truce, summoned the governor, the Marquis de Launay, "to surrender in the name of the sovereign people;" but that noble proudly and recklessly despised this motley rout of armed citizens, and opened a fire upon them. The cannon taken from the Hotel des Invalides soon effected a breach, and a private of the French Guards, with John Oswald, the _ci-devant_ lieutenant of the Black Watch, were the two first men who entered the place. The poor garrison were all slaughtered or taken prisoners; among the latter were De Launay, his master-gunner, and two veteran soldiers, who were dragged to the Place de la Grêve and ignominiously beheaded. The terrible Bastille, for centuries the scene of so many horrors, and the receptacle of broken hearts, was demolished, sacked, and ruined! The most active in that demolition was the author of "Euphrosyne," and the "Cry of Nature"--the wild enthusiast, John Oswald. Intent on releasing the suffering captives who were believed to be immured there, he hurried, sword in hand, from tower to tower, from cell to cell, and vault to vault; through staircases and corridors, dark, damp, and horrible, where for ages the bloated spider had spun her web, and the swollen rat squattered in the damp and slime that distilled from the massive walls to make a hideous puddle on the floors of clay, amid which the bones of many a hapless wretch, forgotten and nameless now, lay steeping with their rusted chains.