ddess of Unreason that they set up to be worshipped.
Verbally considered, Carlyle's _French Revolution_ was more
revolutionary than the real French Revolution: and if Carrier, in an
exaggerative phrase, empurpled the Loire with carnage, Turner almost
literally set the Thames on fire.

This trend of the English Romantics to carry out the revolutionary idea
not savagely in works, but very wildly indeed in words, had several
results; the most important of which was this. It started English
literature after the Revolution with a sort of bent towards independence
and eccentricity, which in the brighter wits became individuality, and
in the duller ones, Individualism. English Romantics, English Liberals,
were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision.
The lonelier version of liberty was a sort of aristocratic anarchism in
Byron and Shelley; but though in Victorian times it faded into much
milder prejudices and much more _bourgeois_ crotchets, England retained
from that twist a certain odd separation and privacy. England became
much more of an island than she had ever been before. There fell from
her about this time, not only the understanding of France or Germany,
but to her own long and yet lingering disaster, the understanding of
Ireland. She had not joined in the attempt to create European democracy;
nor did she, save in the first glow of Waterloo, join in the
counter-attempt to destroy it. The life in her literature was still, to
a large extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau, the free and humane
truisms that had refreshed the other nations, the return to Nature and
to natural rights. But that which in Rousseau was a creed, became in
Hazlitt a taste and in Lamb little more than a whim. These latter and
their like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth century of
those we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round Coleridge and his
decaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and Godwin;
Lamb with his bibliomania and creed of pure caprice, the most unique of
all geniuses; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian impecuniosity; Landor with
his tempestuous temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt with his
bitterness and his low love affair; even that healthier and happier
Bohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at least, goes De Quincey.
He was, unlike most of these embers of the revolutionary age in letters,
a Tory; and was attached to the political army which is best repres