LECTURE XI.

IN speaking last Sunday afternoon of the three great lines of thought on which Wordsworth's interest ran, when in France he was brought into contact with the Revolution, I omitted the last, for which there was no time. It was the moral aspect of the Revolution as the avenger of oppression, and the general hatred of the oppression of nations by tyrannous rule. It was a hatred which he learnt from what he saw in France, and it lasted almost his whole life, though it changed its form. And it was accompanied—though he had put aside theories of liberty and the rights of Man-by a steady ardour for liberty, which diminished but never altogether died. These are the points on which I shall enlarge in this lecture.

The Revolution which began in a dream of the Golden Age ended in the Reign of Terror. Arising as the saviour, it became the inveterate destroyer. And this was the reason of the change-that the theories which the literary class had conceived the ignorant and brutalized lower classes carried out, and the natural result was the fury and blood of the Terror. The lower classes were ignorant and slaves; at every point of daily life they were met by the greed of the nobles, and by the

It seized on proAll the land was by right

irresponsible action of the law; tax after tax wrung from them the fruits of all their labour; and the taxes, being exacted not so much by government as by the class of the noblesse, fixed their hatred on a class with whom they had now neither political nor social ties. The government itself educated them for the revolutionary work they did in the Reign of Terror. perty at its own arbitrary will. the king's, and whenever the State wished to make a road, it drove it right through one small property after another, generally without paying a penny. Every poor proprietor, so damaged, learnt the doctrine that private property must give way, without any claim, to public interests. It was a root idea of the Revolution. Again, in the case of crimes against the State, there were exceptional tribunals; the villages were visited by night, men were carried off without a warrant and never seen again, their condemnation was done in half an hour under a mere form of trial. No man's liberty was safe from the caprice of those who had power or interest with those in power.

In this way, a taste for this sort of work was actually taught to the people-they were educated for the revolutionary tribunals. The forms of these things were given by the old régime; the Revolution added to them, says De Tocqueville, the atrocities of its genius.

With all this and its results Wordsworth was brought into contact. He touches on all the points I have mentioned in the "Prelude;" he and his friend discussed them with fiery indignation, till at last, "hatred of absolute rule where the will of one is the law of all," and where the nobles were on the side of absolute

dominion as against the people, seized on them, mingled with pity and with love for the miserable multitude. They met a hunger-bitten girl, driving her heifer through the lane in despairing solitude-""Tis against that that we are fighting," said Beaupuis in agitation; they heard a dreadful and pathetic story of two lovers, Vaudracour and Julia, where, by the monstrous law that enabled a father's tyranny to imprison a son, the man was driven to fatal crime, and both man and woman to hopeless misery. Seeing these things the two friends were thrown into passionate opposition, and into as passionate hopes that at least the time was come when—

Captivity by mandate without law

Should cease; and open accusation lead
To sentence in the hearing of the world,

And open punishment, if not the air

Be free to breathe in, and the heart of man
Dread nothing.

More even than this negative hope they dreamed

I with him believed

That a benignant spirit was abroad

Which might not be withstood, that poverty
Abject as this would in a little time

Be found no more, that we should see the earth
Unthwarted in her wish to recompense
The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil:
All institutes for ever blotted out
That legalised exclusion, empty pomp
Abolished, sensual state and cruel power,
Whether by edict of the one or few;
And finally, as sum and crown of all,

Should see the people having a strong hand

In framing their own laws; whence better days

To all mankind.

When Beaupuis left him and afterwards "perished in

supreme command" in the war against La Vendée, Wordsworth went to Paris at the end of 1792. The September massacres were just over, the King in prison, and the quarrel between the Girondists and the Mountain in full swing. It was a time well calculated to excite to a higher level the mind of Wordsworth, and the passage in which he describes the intensity with which he felt the passion of the whole city is one of the finest in the "Prelude.”

But that night

I felt most deeply in what world I was,
What ground I trod on, and what air I breathed.
High was my room and lonely, near the roof
Of a large mansion or hotel, a lodge

That would have pleased me in more quiet times;
Nor was it wholly without pleasure then.
With unextinguished taper I kept watch,
Reading at intervals; the fear gone by
Pressed on me almost like a fear to come.
I thought of those September massacres,
Divided from me by one little month,
Saw them and touched: the rest was conjured up
From tragic fictions or true history,
Remembrances and dim admonishments.

The horse is taught his manage, and no star

Of wildest course but treads back his own steps;
For the spent hurricane the air provides

As fierce a successor; the tide retreats

But to return out of its hiding-place

In the great deep; all things have second birth;
The earthquake is not satisfied at once;
And in this way I wrought upon myself,
Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried,
To the whole city, "Sleep no more."
Fled with the voice to which it had given birth;
But vainly comments of a calmer mind

The trance

Promised soft peace and sweet forgetfulness.
The place, all hushed and silent as it was,
Appeared unfit for the repose of night,
Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam.

His very inmost soul was agitated, but not for a moment against the principles of the Revolution. He took the side against Robespierre, but felt that Robespierre was the strongest; and a hundred hopes and desires went rushing through his mind, as he thought how the earlier form of the movement might be preserved. Would not all nations come and help France to carry out her first great resolutions? Will not some one man, trusting in ideas and strong in such trust, self-restrained, nobly trained for rule, arise and dominate the struggle, even though he met with death? Would not death be nothing to such a man, for he would gladly obey the Sovereign Law that calls for sacrifice? For one thing was only to be sought for the overthrow of Tyrants. One thing was surefor he had no doubt of the end-freedom must win the day as against oppression. He threw himself into the party of the Brissotins, and it was only "by the gracious providence of Heaven," or as it seemed then to him, dragged by a chain of harsh necessity," that, compelled to leave France, he escaped the fate of his friends. From thence he watched the growth of the Reign of Terror in France, but though he hated its excesses, he was not shocked by it into any retreat from his opinions. He saw in it all, though he confessed its enormity, the necessary work of vengeance-the vengeance of God Himself upon the guilty. However done, these long cruelties had to be expiated, and the abuses which caused them crushed, and if there were men who still supported them, so much the worse for the men. They must die-who innocently or guiltily subserve oppression; nor should war be avoided with those who from without hindered the march.

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