stability by 1689, only 15 years after Clarendon’s death; andnwith its grim recital of what civil war can do, the book helpednto decide the French king not to call out his own supportersnto liberate him. The English had got it wrong withnCromwell, in fact, and right with William of Orange: that isna view that would have commanded wide support innEngland, and enlightened Frenchmen also found it familiarnand persuasive.nThe quarrel in the English mind over the FrenchnRevolution, then, was not in the first instance an ideologicalnquarrel. It was a difference about the facts of the case. Thenaging Burke and the young Wordsworth might broadlynagree on the dii’ection France should go in, if not on thenpace at which she went there. They would not have agreednin the eariy 1790’s about whether France was going there ornnot. In The Prelude Wordsworth describes visiting thengallery of the House of Commons as a young man, and anlate addition to the poem suggests that he perfectly understoodnBurke’s case against the French Revolution, thoughnthat addition fails to mention that Wordsworth must havenlistened to it mutinously at the time:n… While he forewarns, denounces, launches forthnAgainst all systems built on abstract rightsnKeen ridicule; the majesty proclaimsnOf institutes and laws hallowed by time;nDeclares the vital power of social tiesnEndeared by custom; and with high disdainnExploding upstart theory, insistsnUpon the allegiance to which men are born . . .nBy the time Wordsworth wrote that addition to The Prelude,nprobably in 1820, he was already clear that Burke had got itnright. Theories that offer a new heaven and a new earth arenupstart, unmanageable, and dangerous. The ninth and tenthnbooks of the poem, especially in their account of his secondnvisit to France in 1792-3, are bitter with self-reproach. InnParis he heard in his darkening imagination Macbeth’s crynabout murdering sleep, and as France moved towards thenTerror his anxious mind became a prey to despair and doubt.n”I had approached,” he writes,nlike other youth, the shieldnOf human nature from the golden side.nAnd would have fought, even to the death, to attestnThe quality of metal which I saw.nBack in England, now at war, his mind fell into a turmoil ofnconflicting sentiments, a sort of mental civil war. RevolutionarynFrance was at once the hope of mankind and annagent of mass-murder:nI read her doom.nVexed inly somewhat, it is true, and sore,nBut not dismayed, not taking to the shamenOf a false prophet; but roused up, I stucknMore firmly to old tenets and, to provenTheir temper, strained them more; and thus, in heatnOf contest, did opinions every daynCrow into consequence, till round my mindnThey clung, as if they were the life of it.nMost terribly, he hints at a readiness to commit terrorism:n16/CHRONICLESnYet would I willingly have taken upnA service at this time for cause so great,nHowever dangerousnknowingnnnHow much the destiny of Man had stillnHung upon single persons.nI do not suppose that implies Wordsworth was at any time innhis life a political assassin. But he plainly suggests here thatnin the eariy 1790’s he stood ready to become one, if callednupon. His mood was murderous, in a high-minded way, andnbitterly antipatriotic: indeed in one famous passage henrepresents himself as silently dissenting from prayers fornvictory and longing for the defeat of his own nation in itsnwar with France.nWhy did British intellectual opinion divide so bitterlynover the French Revolution and its aftermath?nThe question is vital. Foreign revolutions seldom findnmuch echo in the national consciousness. The AmericannRevolution, as it has since come to be called, failed aftern1775 to divide British literary opinion in any such remarkablenway, and Americans were not even foreigners. ThenRussian revolution, in our own century, had a broadlynsimilar effect to the French—but not at the moment itnoccurred, since its literary fruits are largely limited to then1930’s, and its immediate effects after 1917 were modest.nNor did the English Revolution of 1689 divide literarynminds in any similar way, though there the analogy isnpotentially unequal: Jacobite literature, after all, was treasonablenand forbidden during the reign of William and Mary,nand for long after.nFor whatever reason, then, the French Revolution is thengreat revolutionary event of the English literary consciousness.nIn a letter to his publisher in February 1821, Byronnpromised to make his hero Don Juan end his days asnAnarchasis Cloots, an international agitator in the FrenchnRevolution, as if all roads in modern narrative naturally lednto Paris. That jocular letter was written more than 30 yearsnafter the fall of the Bastille. Some Englishmen, like WilliamnHazlitt, even contrived to believe in the French cause tontheir dying day. Edmund Burke, when he died in 1797 atnthe height of the French wars, was so obsessed with eventsnthat he directed the exact place of his burial should not benmarked, for fear it might be ravaged in vengeance byninvading French soldiery, and his memorial in Beaconsfieldnparish church to this day reads, “Near this place . . .”nCibbon, who died in the same year as Robespierre, 1794,nremarks with horror that when French revolutionary troopsnwere quartered near him on Lake Geneva, officers and mennencamped together on the ground without distinction,nhiggledy-piggledy, as if that democratic spectacle symbolizednthe whole demeaning horror of the affair. Wordsworthnafter 1800 reproached himself in the bitterest terms fornhaving given his youthful faith and trust to such a causenand—perhaps for this reason, among others — did notnallow The Prelude to see print in his own lifetime. Coleridgenprudendy understated his own early revolutionary commitmentnwhen he came to write the Biographic Literaria in thensummer of Waterloo; and he characteristically omits the onen