If the King of France had been a different man from {295} Louis the Sixteenth he might have faced the rising storm with some hope of success. But he could do nothing, would do nothing. His advisers, his intimates, his kinsmen, his captains, despairing at his vacillation and fearing that they would be abandoned to the fury of insurgent Paris, fled for their lives from a country that seemed to them as if possessed by a devil. The country was possessed, possessed by the spirit of revolution. After ages of injustice a chance had come for the oppressed, and the oppressed had seized their chance and misused it, as the long oppressed always misuse sudden power. Rebellious Paris marched upon Versailles, camped outside the King's palace; broke in the night time into the King's palace, slaying and seeking to slay. The Royal Family were rescued, if rescue it can be called, by the interposition of Lafayette. They were carried in triumph to Paris. Still nominally sovereign, they were practically prisoners in their palace of the Tuileries. Europe looked on in astonishment at the unexpected outbreak. In England at first the leaders of liberal opinion applauded what they believed to be the dawn of a new and glorious era of political freedom. Fox hailed in a rapture of exultation the fall of the Bastille. The Duke of Dorset, the English ambassador to France, saluted the accomplishment of the greatest revolution recorded by history. Eager young men, nameless then but yet to be famous, apostrophised the dawn of liberty. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven," Wordsworth wrote, with a wistful regret, fifteen years after the Bastille had fallen, recalling with a kind of tragic irony the emotions of that hour and contrasting them with his thoughts on the events that had followed through half a generation. All over England strenuous politicians, catching the contagion of excitement from excited France, formulated their sympathy with the Revolution in ardent, eloquent addresses, formed themselves into clubs to propagate the principles that were making France free and illustrious, and sent delegates speeding across the Channel to convey to a confident, constitution-making National Assembly the {296} assurance that the best hearts and the wisest brains in England pulsed and moved in unison with their desires. [Sidenote: 1790--Burke and the French Revolution]