"Long-favoured England! be not thou misled
By monstrous theories of alien growth,
Lest alien frenzy seize thee, waxing wroth,
Self-smitten till thy garments reek dyed red
With thy own blood, which tears in torrents shed
Fail to wash out, tears flowing ere thy troth
Be plighted, not to case but sullen sloth,
Or wan despair- the ghost of false hope fled
Into a shameful grave. Among thy youth,
My Country! if such warning be held dear,
Then shall a Veteran's heart be thrilled with joy,
One who would gather from eternal truth,
For time and season, rules that work to cheer
Not scourge, to save the People - not destroy."

These warnings will come with more force from one who was through life one of the most devoted friends of true liberty, and in his earlier days was beguiled by what is sometimes called liberty, but is licentiousness, and therefore tends, not to emancipate, but enslave mankind, as he himself says:

"He saw upon the soil of France

Rash Polity begin her maniac dance,
Foundations broken up, the deeps run wild,
Nor grieved to see (himself not unbeguiled) —
Woke from the dream, the dreamer to upbraid,
And learn how sanguine expectations fade
When novel trusts by folly are betrayed,
To see Presumption, turning pale, refrain
From further havoc, but repent in vain,-
Good aims lie down, and perish in the road
Where guilt had urged them on with ceaseless goad,

1 Vol. iv. p. 259, 260.

Proofs thickening round her that on public ends Domestic virtue vitally depends,

That civic strife can turn the happiest hearth Into a grievous sore of self-tormenting earth.”1

But we must return to our narrative.

1 The Warning, vol. iv. p. 239.

CHAPTER X.

RACEDOWN.

In the autumn of 1795, William Wordsworth and his sister were settled at Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. The house in which they lived belonged to Mr. Pinney, of Bristol, a friend of Mr. Basil Montagu. "The country," says his sister, in one of her letters, "is delightful; we have charming walks, a good garden, a pleasant house," which was pretty well stocked with books. Here they employed themselves industriously in reading, "if reading can ever deserve the name of industry," says Wordsworth in a letter to his friend Mathews1, writing, and gardening. "My brother," she says, "handles the spade with great dexterity." "She herself," he says, "had gone through half of Davila, and yesterday we began Ariosto." The place was very retired, with little or no society, and a post only once a week. Writing afterwards to a friend in 1799, she says, "I think Racedown is the place dearest to my recollections upon the whole surface of the island; it was the first home I had." She speaks with raptures of the "lovely meadows above the tops of the combs, and the scenery on Pilsden, Lewisden, and Blackdown-hill, and the view of the sea from Lambert's Castle."

1 Dated Racedown, March 21. [1796.]

In a letter to his friend Wrangham, on the 20th November of this year, he sends him certain poetical Imitations of JUVENAL, in which he was then occupied ; and it appears that he and his correspondent had undertaken to compose and publish conjointly a volume of such imitations. These specimens exhibit poetical vigour, combined with no little asperity and rancour against the abuses of the time, and the vices. of the ruling powers, and the fashionable corruptions of aristocratical society. He appears to have been engaged in this paraphrase of the Roman satirist till the following spring. But his labours were not brought to a close; and, ere many years had passed, he regretted the time spent upon the work. Application being then made to him for permission to publish what he had written of these imitations, he replied as follows:

"Nov. 7. 1806.

"I have long since come to a fixed resolution to steer clear of personal satire; in fact, I never will have any thing to do with it as far as concerns the private vices of individuals on any account. With respect to public delinquents or offenders, I will not say the same; though I should be slow to meddle even with these. This is a rule which I have laid down for myself, and shall rigidly adhere to; though I do not in all cases blame those who think and act differently.

"It will therefore follow, that I cannot lend any assistance to your proposed publication. The verses which you have of mine, I should wish to be destroyed; I have no copy of them myself, at least none that I can find. I would most willingly give them

up to you, fame, profit, and everything, if I thought either true fame or profit could arise out of them."

His next poetical employment was of a very dif ferent nature. He had completed his "Salisbury Plain," or "Guilt and Sorrow," and on October 24th, 1796, his sister describes him as "now ardent in the composition of a tragedy," the "BORDERERS." The subject of this play had been probably suggested to him in his residence at Penrith and on the Scottish border, where are so many castles and other monuments connected with the age to which this drama belongs the time of Henry III.

Though written in 1795-6, it did not see the light til near fifty years afterwards. It was first published in 1842. In the year 1843, he made the following observations in speaking with respect to it':

"The Borderers; a Tragedy.—Of this dramatic work I have little to say in addition to the short printed note which will be found attached to it. It was composed at Racedown in Dorsetshire, during the latter part of the year 1795, and in the course of the following year. Had it been the work of a later period of life, it would have been different in some respects from what it is now. The plot would have been something more complete, and a greater variety of characters introduced, to relieve the mind from the pressure of incidents so mournful; the manners also would have been more attended to. My care was almost exclusively given to the passions and the characters, and the positions in which the persons in the 1 From MSS. I. F.