ution. After ages
of injustice a chance had come for the oppressed, and the oppressed had
seized their chance and misused it, as the long oppressed always misuse
sudden power. Rebellious Paris marched upon Versailles, camped outside
the King's palace; broke in the night time into the King's palace,
slaying and seeking to slay. The Royal Family were rescued, if rescue it
can be called, by the interposition of Lafayette. They were carried in
triumph to Paris. Still nominally sovereign, they were practically
prisoners in their palace of the Tuileries. Europe looked on in
astonishment at the unexpected outbreak. In England at first the leaders
of liberal opinion applauded what they believed to be the dawn of a new
and glorious era of political freedom. Fox hailed in a rapture of
exultation the fall of the Bastille. The Duke of Dorset, the English
ambassador to France, saluted the accomplishment of the greatest
revolution recorded by history. Eager young men, nameless then but yet
to be famous, apostrophised the dawn of liberty. "Bliss was it in that
dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven," Wordsworth wrote,
with a wistful regret, fifteen years after the Bastille had fallen,
recalling with a kind of tragic irony the emotions of that hour and
contrasting them with his thoughts on the events that had followed
through half a generation. All over England strenuous politicians,
catching the contagion of excitement from excited France, formulated
their sympathy with the Revolution in ardent, eloquent addresses, formed
themselves into clubs to propagate the principles that were making France
free and illustrious, and sent delegates speeding across the Channel to
convey to a confident, constitution-making National Assembly the {296}
assurance that the best hearts and the wisest brains in England pulsed
and moved in unison with their desires.

[Sidenote: 1790--Burke and the French Revolution]

Such assurances were inaccurate and misleading. There was one man in
England the goodness of whose heart, the wisdom of whose brain could
scarcely be questioned, whose censure in England, and not in England
alone, was more serious than the applause of a whole theatre of others.
At a moment when all who represented liberal thought in politics, all who
some ten years earlier had sympathized with the American colonists, were
showing a like sympathy for the insurgent people of France, Edmund Burke
made himself conspicuous b