Note 1. So headed by the author. England had then made its short-lived peace with France under the Consulate; but why Mr. Wordsworth should call upon the spirit of the great regicide to object to it, in behalf of the ordinary policy of George III., is not easy to see. It was not uncommon for our church and state poet to make use of Milton and his friends in this manner, whenever it suited him. He appears to have assumed as a matter of course, that Milton, being at once a great poet and a moralist, must of necessity have been the property of him and his party, however widely the Republicans and they may have differed in other respects. A strange poetical license surely! [back]
