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 effervescence of sentiment in the first period of the French Revolution. Extremes meet: and the most furious anarchists have since become the most barefaced apostates. Among the foremost of these I might mention the present poet-laureate and some of his friends. The prose-writers on that side of the question, Mr. Godwin, Mr. Bentham, &c. have not turned round in this extraordinary manner: they seem to have felt their ground (however mistaken in some points), and have in general adhered to their first principles. But “poets (as it has been said) have such seething brains, that they are disposed to meddle with everything, and mar all. They make bad philosophers and worse politicians. They live, for the most part, in an ideal world of their own; and it would perhaps be as well