even to Englishmen a welcome asylum, but who found the best judges in Paris full of misgivings.[1] Rogers conversed, indeed, with the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Condorcet, and other leading men, but obtained no knowledge of the real state of the country.
How, indeed, could young men just of age be expected to foresee the total eclipse of law and order? Wordsworth, who made the acquaintance of Watt in Paris in November 1791, accompanied him to the Assembly and the Jacobin Club—
"In both her clamorous halls, |
and took away with him a fragment of the Bastille as a relic.
"The senselessness of joy was then sublime." |
When, however, he returned to Paris from Orleans and Blois, just after the September massacres, he was horrified on visiting the scenes of carnage, and for years, it is said, would dream that he was pleading for his own life or that of friends before
- ↑ Lafayette had an English aide-de-camp, John Hely (afterwards Lord) Hutchinson, younger son of the Irish Secretary of State, whose rapacity made Lord North remark, "If he had England and Ireland given him, he would ask for the Isle of Man as a potato garden." Young Hutchinson was with Lafayette from 1789 till his flight in August 1792, succeeded Abercromby in Egypt, became Earl of Donoughmore in 1825, and died, aged seventy-five, in 1832.
