the world as a politician even more perhaps than as a poet.  And, indeed, if he had died at the age at which Byron died, his record in politics would have been as noble as his record in poetry.  Happily or unhappily, however, he lived on, a worse politician and a worse poet.  His record as both has never before been set forth with the same comprehensiveness as in Professor Harper’s important and, after one has ploughed through some heavy pages, fascinating volumes.

2.  HIS POLITICS

“Just for a handful of silver he left us.”  Browning was asked if he really meant the figure in The Lost Leader for Wordsworth, and he admitted that, though it was not a portrait, he had Wordsworth vaguely in his mind.  We do not nowadays believe that Wordsworth changed his political opinions in order to be made distributor of stamps for the county of Westmoreland, or even (as he afterwards became in addition) for the county of Cumberland.  Nor did Browning believe this.  He did believe, however, that Wordsworth was a turncoat, a renegade—­a poet who began as the champion of liberty and ended as its enemy.  This is the general view, and it seems to me to be unassailable.

Mr. A.V.  Dicey, in a recent book, The Statesmanship of Wordsworth, attempts to portray Wordsworth as a sort of early Mazzini—­one who “by many years anticipated, thought out, and announced the doctrine of Nationalism, which during at least fifty years of the nineteenth century (1820-70) governed or told upon the foreign policy of every European country.”  I think he exaggerates, but it cannot be denied that Wordsworth said many wise things about nationality, and that he showed a true liberal instinct in the French wars, siding with the French in the early days while they were fighting for liberty, and afterwards siding against them when they were fighting for Napoleonic Imperialism.  Wordsworth had not yet abandoned his ardour for liberty when, in 1809, he published his Tract on the Convention of Cintra. Those who accuse him of apostasy have in mind not his “Tract” and his sonnets of war-time, but the later lapse of faith which resulted in his opposing Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill, and in his sitting down seriously to write sonnets in favour in capital punishment.

He began with an imagination which emphasized the natural goodness of man:  he ended with an imagination which emphasized the natural evil of man.  He began with faith in liberty; he ended with faith in restraint.  Mr. Dicey admits much of the case against the later Wordsworth, but his very defence of the poet is in itself an accusation.  He contends, for instance, that “it was natural that a man, who had in his youth seen face to face the violence of the revolutionary struggle in France, should have felt the danger of the Reform Act becoming the commencement of anarchy and revolution in England.”  Natural it may have been, but none the less it was a right-about-turn of the spirit.  Wordsworth had ceased to believe in liberty.