were strangely unlike the language and tone of contemporary France, the spirit of a disillusioned era found a scarcely less significant interpretation. The defection of such representative men as Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, first of all from the French cause itself, and afterwards from the abstract ideas for which that cause had stood, furnished a familiar illustration of the change that had come over some of the most generous and catholic English minds in the few tempestuous years which separated the downfall of the old despotism in the person of Louis XVI., from the final establishment of the new despotism in the person of Napoleon. Southey, who had heralded the gospel of liberty in his crude but vigorous Wat Tyler (1794), by-and-by sought refuge in extreme conservatism, became poet laureate, and chanted the praises of George III. Coleridge, relinquishing his early visions of pantisocracy and human regeneration, and bidding farewell almost entirely to the muse, devoted such energy as he could rescue from ill-health and opium, first to literary criticism, and later to theology and metaphysics. In the meantime Wordsworth, in many respects in the present connection the most important of the great brotherhood, after gathering from Europe's wreckage of hope the mighty life-lessons of The Prelude, not only, like his two friends, sank gradually into the narrow insular

conceptions of political freedom then current in England, but also became so far recreant to some of the wisest principles of English social reform as to be taken by Robert Browning as "a sort of painter's model" for his Lost Leader. "I did not," writes Southey of his own change of mental outlook and of sympathy, "fall into the error of those who having been friends of France when they imagined that the cause of liberty was implicated in her success, transferred their attachment from the republic to the military tyranny in which it ended, and regarded with complacency the cause of oppression because France was the oppressor. They had turned their faces towards the East in the morning to worship the rising sun, and in the evening they were still looking eastward, obstinately affirming that still the sun was there. I, on the contrary, altered my position as the world went round." Thus, as Hazlitt caustically said of him, he "missed his way in Utopia," and presently "found it in Old Sarum." "Before 1793," Coleridge declares, "I clearly saw and often stated in public, the horrid delusion, the vile mockery of the whole affair. . . . I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little world described the path of the revolution in an orbit of its own."

1 See Browning's letter to Dr. Grosart, reprinted in G. W. Cooke's Guide-Book to Browning.

2 Quoted in Dowden's Southey, p. 146.

The sublime ode to France, published originally under the significant title of The Recantation, contains a well-known commentary on the above words. As for Wordsworth, he has traced for us in detail in his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, the direct influence exerted upon his thought and feeling by the rapid rush of events in France, as that country, upon which the eyes of all Europe were then anxiously fixed, ran through its cycle of action and reaction, and at length, in the pontifical benediction of the emperor, took "a lesson from the dog returning to his vomit."" But these statements describe what was after all in each case only a transitional stage of mental change; for loss of faith in France, for Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth alike, paved the way for a general abnegation of their early republican principles and aspirations. Meanwhile the titanic genius of Byron may be taken

1 The Prelude, Book xi. Concerning the change of front of Wordsworth and Southey, see the pungent criticism of Thomas Love Peacock in his Crochet Castle (Chapter v.):"He has two dear friends, Mr. Wilful Wontsee [William Wordsworth], and Mr. Rumblesack Shantsee [Robert Southey], poets of some note, who used to see visions of Utopia, and pure republics beyond the western deep; but finding that these El Dorados brought them no revenue, they turned their vision-seeing faculty into the more profitable channel of espying all sorts of virtues in the high and the mighty, who were able and willing to pay for the discovery." Compare Byron's Don Juan, Canto iii., Stanza 90, and the Vision of Judg ment.

to represent the epoch's spirit of unrest, despair, cynicism, revolt. Masquerading in a dozen different disguises-as Conrad, Manfred, Cain, Lara, Childe Harold, Don Juan-he bore through Europe "the pageant of his bleeding heart"; and became a continental influence largely because, amidst all his colossal egoism, and all his real and affected flippancy and misanthropy, he expressed with such magnificent and persistent power men's sense of the ruin of their best hopes, and the consequent void in existence which neither passion nor poetry, the delights of the eye nor the pride of life, could ever wholly fill.

Yet the literature of this epoch, though mainly the expression in different forms of moral prostration, listlessness, and vacuity, had one splendid note of continued revolutionary ardor and faith. One supreme English poet of the time refused to believe that the French crisis had indeed ended in total failure, that republicanism had collapsed along with the republic, or that the reaction which had followed would prove a permanent backwater in the strong current of human progression. Endowed with keener glance and more audacious vision than his fellows, inspired with larger enthusiasms and intenser prophetic fire, intrepid in his allegiance to the truth as he had learned it, and too little of the earth earthy to appreciate, as others did, the dead weight of mundane affairs,

Shelley made it his mission to fan the low faint flame of dying hope, and to reawaken the world to the inner meaning of the baptism of blood through which it had lately passed.' Realizing the terrible "revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of demagogues, and the re-establishment of successive tyrannies in France," he none the less clung tenaciously to the belief that the panic of fear and horror following upon those atrocities, would gradually "give place to sanity." "Many of the most ardent and tender-hearted of the worshippers or public good," he wrote in 1817, "have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events. they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy dissolution of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics and inquiries into moral and political science have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus, calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a

The parallel between Shelley and the Swedish poet, Tegnér, in this connection, is instructive. See, e.g., Boyesen's Essays on Scandinavian Literature, pp. 250-51.