It was as patriot, not poet, that he ventured to claim fellowship with Dante.[271] He did not accept the term 'Reformer,' because it implied an organic change in our institutions, and this he deemed both needless and dangerous; but he used to say that while he was a decided Conservative, he remembered that to preserve our institutions we must be ever improving them.

He was, indeed, from first to last, preeminently a patriot, an impassioned as well as a thoughtful one.

Yet his political sympathies were not with his own country only, but with the progress of Humanity.

Till disenchanted by the excesses and follies of the first French revolution, his hopes and sympathies associated themselves ardently with the new order of things created by it; and I have heard him say that he did not know how any generous-minded _young_ man, entering on life at the time of that great uprising, could have escaped the illusion.

To the end his sympathies were ever with the cottage hearth far more than with the palace.