lakes and mountains, it might seem, for their own sakes, not for the local heroes whose fame was accidentally connected with them. But he had not the less imbibed the spirit of his own district; and loved the Pillar or Scawfell, if not as the scene of any particular events, yet as the natural guardian of the social order from which he sprang. This, again, had predisposed him to a kind of old-fashioned republicanism. At this period, indeed, he was still unconscious of the true nature of his own feelings. He thought, he says, at this time of nature, not of man. But he tells us, too, how when he went to France he was a republican already, because he had been brought up in a homely district where .he had never seen a man of rank or wealth, and how, even at Cambridge, with all its faults, he had found a community in which men were respected for their own character and abilities, and all 'scholars and gentlemen' regarded as equals. At Cambridge, it is true, Wordsworth seems to have been amused rather than edified by the dons of his time, the queer old humorists and port wine drinking bachelors, who ought to have been described by Charles Lamb. Wordsworth passes them by, observing only that he compared them
