virtue. Wordsworth compares him to Dion as the philosophic assailant of a tyrant.[1] M. Legouis has already given an account of Beaupuy,[2] and has now pointed out the nature of his influence upon his young English disciple.
Browning's Lost Leader represented a view of Wordsworth which seemed strange to most readers. The name of Wordsworth had come to suggest belief in the Thirty-nine Articles, capital punishment, and rotten boroughs. Some of us can still remember the venerable grey head bowed in the little church at Grasmere, and typifying complete acquiescence in orthodox tradition. This 'lost leader,' however, had once defended the principles of Paine's Rights of Man; had condemned the crusade against the Revolution as a great national crime; and, so far from being orthodox, had been described by his intimate friend, Coleridge, as a 'semi-atheist.' How was this brand snatched from the burning, or what, as others will say, led to this lamentable apostasy? There is, of course, no question of moral blame. As Browning observes, the real
- ↑ See Wordsworth's poem upon Dion, written 1816.
- ↑ Le General Michel Beaupuy. Par G. Buissieres et Émile Legouis. Paris, 1891.
