as a necessary, tendency to
dishonour labour." Had he published this pamphlet when it was written,
in 1793, he might easily have found himself in prison, like many other
sympathizers with the French.

Wordsworth gives us an idea in _The Prelude_--how one wishes one had the
original and unamended version of the poem as it was finished in
1805!--of the extreme lengths to which his Republican idealism carried
him. When war was declared against France, he tells us, he prayed for
French victories, and--

Exulted in the triumph of my soul,
When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown,
Left without glory on the field, or driven,
Brave hearts! to shameful flight.

Two years later we, find him at Racedown planning satires against the
King, the Prince of Wales, and various public men, one of the couplets
on the King and the Duke of Norfolk running:--

Heavens! who sees majesty in George's face?
Or looks at Norfolk, and can dream of grace?

But these lines, he declared, were given to him by Southey.

By 1797 a Government spy seems to have been looking after him and his
friends: he was living at the time at Alfoxden, near Coleridge, who, in
the previous year, had brought out _The Watchman_ to proclaim, as the
prospectus said, "the state of the political atmosphere, and preserve
Freedom and her Friends from the attacks of Robbers and Assassins."
Wordsworth at a later period did not like the story of the spy, but it
is certain that about the time of the visit he got notice to quit
Alfoxden, obviously for political reasons, from the lady who owned the
estate.

Professor Harper's originality as a biographer, however, does not lie in
his narration of facts like these, but in the patience with which he
traces the continuance of French sympathies in Wordsworth on into the
opening years of the nineteenth century. He has altered the proportions
in the Wordsworth legend, and made the youth of the poet as long in the
telling as his age. This was all the more necessary because various
biographers have followed too closely the example of the official
_Life_, the materials for which Wordsworth entrusted to his nephew, the
Bishop, who naturally regarded Wordsworth, the pillar of Church and
State, as a more eminent and laudable figure than Wordsworth, the young
Revolutionary. Whether the Bishop deliberately hushed up the fact that,
during his early travels in France, Wordsworth fell in love with an
aristocratic Fr