after his return from France, and was perhaps due in
part to the influence of Burke.

While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of institutes and laws hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
... Could a youth, and one
In ancient story versed, whose breast had heaved
Under the weight of classic eloquence,
Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?[45]

[45] _Prelude_, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring
to a still earlier date.

He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly busy in tearing up
whatever had roots in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of
tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly
to piece together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce
artificially that sense of permanence and continuity which is the main
safeguard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. He became a Tory
through intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a
certain radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that
in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, 'Wordsworth may
perhaps walk in; if he do, I caution you both against his terrific
democratic notions'; and it must have been many years later that
Wordsworth himself told Crabb Robinson, 'I have no respect whatever
for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me'. In 1802,
during his tour in Scotland, he travelled on Sundays as on the other
days of the week. He afterwards became a theoretical churchgoer.
'Wordsworth defended earnestly the Church establishment. He even said
he would shed his blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh
raised against him on account of his having confessed that he knew not
when he had been in a church in his own country. "All our ministers
are so vile," said he. The mischief of allowing the clergy to depend
on the caprice of the multitude he thought more than outweighed all
the evils of an establishment.'

In December 1792 Wordsworth had returned to England, and in the
following year published _Descriptive Sketches_ and the _Evening
Walk_. He did this, as he says in one of his letters, to show that,
although he had gained no honours at the University