There is very little evidence, indeed, that in his later years Wordsworth remained interested in liberty at all.  The most important evidence of the kind is that of Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, author of The Purgatory of Suicides, who visited him in 1846 after serving a term in prison on a charge of sedition.  Wordsworth received him and said to him:  “You Chartists are right:  you have a right to votes, only you take the wrong way to obtain them.  You must avoid physical violence.”  Referring to the conversation, Mr. Dicey comments:—­

At the age of seventy-six the spirit of the old revolutionist and of the friend of the Girondins was still alive.  He might not think much of the Whigs, but within four years of his death Wordsworth was certainly no Tory.

There is no reason, however, why we should trouble our heads over the question whether at the age of seventy-six Wordsworth was a Tory or not.  It is only by the grace of God that any man escapes being a Tory long before that.  What is of interest to us is his attitude in the days of his vitality, not of his senility.  In regard to this, I agree that it would be grossly unfair to accuse him of apostasy, simply because he at first hailed the French Revolution as the return of the Golden Age—­

    Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to be young was very heaven!

—­and ten or fifteen years later was to be found gloomily prophesying against a premature peace with Napoleon.  One cannot be sure that, if one had been living in those days oneself, one’s faith in the Revolution would have survived the September massacres and Napoleon undiminished.  Those who had at first believed that the reign of righteousness had suddenly come down from Heaven must have been shocked to find that human nature was still red in tooth and claw in the new era.  Not that the massacres immediately alienated Wordsworth.  In the year following them he wrote in defence of the French Revolution, and incidentally apologized for the execution of King Louis.  “If you had attended,” he wrote in his unpublished Apology for the French Revolution in 1793, “to the history of the French Revolution as minutely as its importance demands, so far from stopping to bewail his death, you would rather have regretted that the blind fondness of his people had placed a human being in that monstrous situation which rendered him unaccountable before a human tribunal.”  In The Prelude, too (which, it will be remembered, though it was written early, Wordsworth left to be published after his death), we are given a perfect answer to those who would condemn the French Revolution, or any similar uprising, on account of its incidental horrors:—­

                    When a taunt
    Was taken up by scoffers in their pride,
    Saying, “Behold the harvest that we reap
    From popular government and equality,”
    I clearly saw that neither