ing) was done by Whigs; but we may
certainly call it Anti-Jacobin. Now this fact, though political, is not
only relevant but essential to everything that concerned literature. The
upshot was that though England was full of the revolutionary ideas,
nevertheless there was no revolution. And the effect of this in turn was
that from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the
nineteenth the spirit of revolt in England took a wholly literary form.
In France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in England
it was what people wrote. It is a quaint comment on the notion that the
English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were
rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

It has been well and wittily said (as illustrating the mildness of
English and the violence of French developments) that the same Gospel of
Rousseau which in France produced the Terror, in England produced
_Sandford and Merton_. But people forget that in literature the English
were by no means restrained by Mr. Barlow; and that if we turn from
politics to art, we shall find the two parts peculiarly reversed. It
would be equally true to say that the same eighteenth-century
emancipation which in France produced the pictures of David, in England
produced the pictures of Blake. There never were, I think, men who gave
to the imagination so much of the sense of having broken out into the
very borderlands of being, as did the great English poets of the
romantic or revolutionary period; than Coleridge in the secret sunlight
of the Antarctic, where the waters were like witches' oils; than Keats
looking out of those extreme mysterious casements upon that ultimate
sea. The heroes and criminals of the great French crisis would have been
quite as incapable of such imaginative independence as Keats and
Coleridge would have been incapable of winning the battle of Wattignies.
In Paris the tree of liberty was a garden tree, clipped very correctly;
and Robespierre used the razor more regularly than the guillotine.
Danton, who knew and admired English literature, would have cursed
freely over _Kubla Khan_; and if the Committee of Public Safety had not
already executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly have
locked him up for a madman. Even Hebert (the one really vile
Revolutionist), had he been reproached by English poets with worshipping
the Goddess of Reason, might legitimately have retorted that it was
rather the Go