y doubt whether Sir William Jones ever felt the smallest
inclination to satisfy the thirst of his blade, but there was provision
enough for more commonplace appetites. Two years before, Hardy's worthy
mechanics had supped on porter and cheese and talked of the hardness of
the times. Their movement had been captured by a group of eager,
sophisticated, literary persons, who went much farther than
Parliamentary Reform, and with the aid of claret and the subtler French
intoxicants, "turned indignant" as another Ode puts it:

From Kings who seek in Gothic night
To hide the blaze of moral light.
Fill high the animating glass
And let the electric ruby pass.

It was a cheerful indignation, a festive rage.

That dinner must have marked the height of the revolutionary tide in
England. The reaction was already rampant and vindictive, and before the
year 1794 was out it had crushed the progressive movement and postponed
for thirty-eight years the triumph of Parliamentary Reform. It requires
a strenuous exercise of the imagination to conceive the panic which
swept over England as the news of the French Terror circulated. It
fastened impartially on every class of the community, and destroyed the
emotional balance no less of Pitt and his colleagues than of the working
men who formed the Church and King mobs. Proclamations were issued to
quell insurrections which never had been planned, and the militia called
out when not a hand had been raised against the King throughout Great
Britain. So great was the fear, so deep the moral indignation that "even
respectable and honest men," (the phrase is Holcroft's) "turned spies
and informers on their friends from a sense of public duty." A mob
burned Dr. Priestley's house near Birmingham for no better reason than
because he was supposed to have attended a Reform dinner, which in fact,
he did not attend. Hardy's bookshop in Piccadilly was rushed by a mob,
and his wife, about to be confined, was injured in her efforts to
escape, and died a few hours afterwards. A hunt went on all over the
kingdom for booksellers and printers to prosecute, and when Thomas Paine
was prosecuted in his absence for publishing _The Rights of Man_, the
jury was so determined to find him guilty that they would not trouble to
hear the case for the Crown.

Twenty years before, the French philosopher Helvetius, after an
experience of Jesuit persecution and Court disfavour in France, made a
quaint proposal for