Fragments of Two Centuries | Page 4

to carve their way through to the
coming light, and fought in the names of "liberty, equality and
fraternity," with apparent giants and demons in the mist who turned out
to be their brother men!
It would be a total misapprehension of the great throbbing thought of
better days to come which stirred the sluggish life of the expiring
century, to assume, as we often do, that that cry of "liberty, equality,
and fraternity," was merely the cry of the French, driven to desperation
by the gulf between the nobility and the people. In truth, almost the

whole Western world was eagerly looking on at the unfolding of a great
drama, and the infection of it penetrated almost into every corner of
England. No glimpses even of our local life at this period would be
satisfactory which did not give a passing notice to an event which
literally turned the heads of many of the most gifted young men in
England.
Upon no individual mind in these realms had that aspiration for a
universal brotherhood a more potent spell than upon a youthful genius
then at Cambridge, with whom some notable Royston men were
afterwards to come in contact. That glorious dream, in which the
French Revolution had its birth, had burnt itself into the very soul of
young Wordsworth who found indeed that--
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!
Oh! times In which the meagre, stale forbidding ways Of custom, law
and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance!
In the Autumn of 1789, young Wordsworth, and a fellow student left
Cambridge and crossed the Channel to witness that
Glorious opening, the unlooked for dawn, That promised everlasting
joy to France!
The gifted singer caught the blissful intoxication and has told us--
Meanwhile prophetic harps, In every grove were ringing, war shall
cease. * * * * * * Henceforth whate'er is wanting in yourselves In
others ye shall promptly find--and all Be rich by mutual and reflected
wealth!
{4} So the poet went out to stand by the cradle of liberty, only to come
back disenchanted, came back to find his republican dreams gradually
giving way to a settled conservatism, and the fruit of that disappointed
first-love of liberty received with unmeasured opposition from the old
school in literary criticism represented by Jeffrey and the Edinburgh
Review, with the result that those in high places for long refused to
listen to one who had the magical power of unlocking the sweet

ministries of Nature as no other poet of the century had.
Other ardent spirits had their dreams too, and for a short time at least
there was a sympathy with the French, among many of the English,
which left its traces in local centres like Royston--quite an intellectual
centre in those days--and was in striking contrast with that hatred of the
French which was so soon to settle over England under the Napoleonic
régime. But, if many of the English people, weary of the increasing
burdens which fell upon them, had their dreams of a good time coming,
they, instead of following the mere glimmer of the will-o'-the-wisp,
across the darkness of their lot, responded rather to signs of coming
activities. Through the darkness they saw perhaps nothing very striking,
but they felt occasionally the thrill of coming activities which were
struggling for birth in that pregnant mother-night which seemed to be
shrouding the sunset of the century--and they were saved from the
immediate horrors of a revolution. Feudalism and the Pope had left our
fathers obedience, en masse, and Luther had planted hope through the
reformation of the individual. So the great wave of aspiration after a
patent scheme of universal brotherhood passed over the people of these
realms with only a wetting of the spray. Here and there was a weak
reflection of the drama, in the calling of hard names, and the taunt of
"Jacobin," thrown in the teeth of those who might have sympathised
with the French in the earlier stages of the Revolution, was sometimes
heard in the streets of Royston for many years after the circumstances
which called it forth had passed away.
I have referred thus fully to what may seem a general rather than a local
question, because the town of Royston, then full of aspirations after
reform, was looked upon almost as a hot-bed of what were called
"dangerous principles" by those attached to the old order of things, and
because it may help us to understand something of the excitement
occasioned by the free expression of opinions in the public debates
which took place in Royston to be referred to hereafter.
But though the "era of hope," in the particular example of its
application in