to be:

ess dar

remaining in France, did nevertheless remain, enduring a certain amount of official molestation from time to to time and in some instances imprisonment, but in other esa instances enjoying a good deal of freedom. Omitting references to many English persons earlier in the year, sway I will mention the petition presented to the Convention on Oct. 10, 1793, by Sir Robert Smyth or Smith, ive James Hartley, Edward Slater, and Thomas Marshall, ldprotesting against a decree of internment. On Oct. 16, of the Convention ordered that with certain exceptions all foreigners who were subjects of governments at war ng with the Republic should be confined till peace was ate declared.* But as a similar order had been issued earlier in the month, it appears that these decrees were not strictly enforced. Many instances of English people residing in France and moving about from place to place are given in a curious book, published in London in 1797, A Residence in France during the years 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795; described in a Series of Letters from an English Lady,' though I suspect that it was in large part composed by its editor, John Gifford, a notorious anti-revolutionary hack writer. The poetess, Helen Maria Williams, was in France before, during, and after the Terror, being well known as a sympathiser with the Revolution. When Wordsworth crossed to France in November 1791, he carried a letter of introduction to her, and the belief that she was still at Orleans, whence, however, she had just removed, was no doubt one of his reasons for going there. Her friend, John Hurford Stone, went from France to England in February 1793, but returned to Paris in the following May. From a little manuscript book by Mrs John Davy, a sister-inlaw of Sir Humphry Davy, entitled 'Memories of William Wordsworth,' I once copied out a conversation between the poet and Mrs Davy's mother, in which he seems again to have been taken off his guard, as he was in his talk with Carlyle, for he discoursed about Helen Maria Williams and indulged in reminiscences of the French Revolution.

In 'The Prelude' there is, of course, no admission that he returned to France in 1793. Indeed, so far as

* See Ernest Hamel, 'Précis de l'histoire de la Révolution française,' p. 393.

external facts are concerned, 'The Prelude' is not a safe guide even for the year 1792, for the poet deliberately and carefully blends Orleans with Blois and avoids exact statements of time. But in regard to his own emotional life The Prelude' is extraordinarily minute and trustworthy. There are two passages in the tenth book which are pertinent to the subject of this paper. The first, lines 62 to 93, obviously refers to his brief sojourn in Paris on his way home from Orleans to England at the close of 1792. But the emotions described, the distrust of the fickle city, the fear of massacre, the sense of lonely helplessness, were not such as he would have been likely to feel at that time; they were, on the other hand, precisely what he would have felt seven or eight months later. In an attic room of a hotel the young man kept watch at night, with a burning candle, trying to read, but haunted with dread, until

'The place, all hushed and silent as it was,
Appeared unfit for the repose of night,
Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam.'

All careful students of Wordsworth, especially if they have examined Prof. de Sélincourt's edition of The Prelude,' know that he frequently transferred the record of an emotional state to some other time or place than those which had originally called it forth. However, I attach less importance to the above-mentioned passage than to another which begins at line 397 of Book X and continues to line 415:

'Most melancholy at that time, O Friend!

Were my day-thoughts,-my nights were miserable;
Through months, through years, long after the last beat
Of those atrocities, the hour of sleep

To me came rarely charged with natural gifts,
Such ghastly visions had I of despair

And tyranny, and implements of death;
And innocent victims sinking under fear,
And momentary hope, and worn-out prayer,
Each in his separate cell, or penned in crowds
For sacrifice, and struggling with fond mirth
And levity in dungeons, where the dust

Was laid with tears. Then suddenly the scene
Changed, and the unbroken dream entangled me

E

In long orations, which I strove to plead

Before unjust tribunals,—with a voice
Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,
Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt

In the last place of refuge-my own soul.'

TE A variant reading given on page 580 of de Sélincourt's edition contains phrases which are surely more applicable to the dispersed Girondists than to the prisoners of September:

'such hauntings of distress

And anguish fugitive in woods, in caves

Concealed.'

The massacres in the prisons in September 1792 were enough to have occasioned these revulsions in a sensitive mind, but strangely enough Wordsworth, who was at - Orleans when they took place, accepted these horrible events as if they were the inevitable, though of course regrettable, by-products of the Revolution, which was in the main so glorious and so beneficial that they might be overlooked. This description of his dreams must refer to a later stage, the Reign of Terror in the strict sense, when his fellow-idealists, his heroes and former associates, were being dragged from their dungeons to the guillotine. He probably had no personal acquaintances among the victims of September 1792, while among those of October 1793, were men whose lot he had recently thought of sharing.

These five elements of evidence, only one of which is both positive and documentary, but all of which are congruous with one another, build up a probability that Wordsworth, anxious to marry Annette and bring her to England or live with her in France, left his own country in September 1793, landed on the coast of Normandy at some point where his friends the Girondists were in force, made his way through the lines of the Jacobin army to Paris, witnessed there the execution of Gorsas on Oct. 7, realised from that event the irresistible power of Robespierre, and was unable to proceed to Blois where the Vallon family lived. Annette Vallon, her two sisters, and her rascally brother Paul, who was a royalist spy, were themselves in great danger, for they were engaged in assisting nobles and royalist priests to

escape into Brittany. If the brave young Englishman had reached Blois he would only have added to the complications and perils of Annette's life. The complete victory of Robespierre's party, the extermination of the Girondist leaders, the rout of their followers, and the triumph of the Republican armies over the foreign foes of France, must have made it impossible for him to escape had he delayed longer, and he certainly could not have brought Annette and Caroline with him.

There is one other mention of Wordsworth's being in France at this time. It contains an inaccuracy, which may easily be accounted for, but appears otherwise trustworthy. Alaric Watts, who was the editor of an Annual Anthology and thus acquainted with most of the literary figures in England between 1825 and 1850, mentions an old Republican named Bailey who 'had met Wordsworth in Paris, and having warned him that his connexion with the Mountain rendered his situation there at that time perilous, the poet, he said, decamped with great precipitation.' The inaccuracy of course is in the mention of the Mountain, which was a name for the Jacobin faction, or in the substitution of 'connexion with' for 'opposition to.'

GEORGE MCLEAN HARPER.

Art. 4.-SOME IDEALS OF RECONSTRUCTION.

An Inquiry into the Causes of the Growth and Decay of Civilisation. By Thomas Lloyd. The 'Statist' Office, 1926.

To rearrange the world, to set the times right, has been the desire, and sometimes the endeavour, of all manners of men, angry, pitiful, quixotic or ambitious, since long before the Flood; and as the above work, a portentous volume, suggests, the provision of would-be reformers, as of pessimists and prophets, is far more certain than TO the future supply of coal. In this book the late Mr Thomas Lloyd has set himself an impossible task. His intentions were excellent-intentions generally are excellent-but it needs more than the equipment of an economist, even although it is fortified with hard reading in ancient history and a sincere desire to improve and to secure the conditions of human brotherhood, to fulfil the brave intention of this work, which is at once unwieldy and scrappy. After an interesting and suggestive account of prehistoric times and possibilities, beginning with the Piltdown man, Mr Lloyd inquires into the truth and certainties of the Ice Age, with its effect on such civilisations as had been established and lost during some hundred thousand years; and then, with a surprising flight and transformation, he comes to a close study of modern Banking systems, and incidentally pours scornful and not well-justified criticism on the Victorian teachers of Political Economy.

It is a pity that his work was not better co-ordinated, more carefully revised, and to some extent abridged before publication, by a considerate hand; for there are frequent repetitions. References are made to Ireland as if an Irish Free State had not been established, and to the 'last census' of 1911; while the hope is expressed that in the post-War settlement the Turks will be swept away.' These remarks show that the book was written some few years ago; since when, there have been many upheavals in a world of electrical and changeful political conditions, with very rapid progress, or retrogression, here and there. Bulky as Mr. Lloyd's work is, it is merely one brick in the edifice to be reared if his