was signed without qualification, “By a Republican.”  He refused to join in “the idle Cry of modish lamentation” over the execution of the French King, and defended the other executions in France as necessary.  He condemned the hereditary principle, whether in the Monarchy or the House of Lords.  The existence of a nobility, he held, “has 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 French lady who bore him an illegitimate child, I do not know.  Professor Harper, taking a more ruthless view of the