He became a Tory through
intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain
radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that in 1809 Sir
George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, "Wordsworth may perhaps walk in;
if he do I caution you both against his terrific democratic notions"; and
it must have been many years later that Wordsworth himself told Crabb
Eobinson, "I have no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have a great deal
of the Chartist in me." In 1802, during his tour in Scotland, he
travelled on Sundays as on the other days of the week.[330]
He afterwards became a theoretical churchgoer. "Wordsworth defended
earnestly the Church establishment. He even said he would shed his blood
for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh raised against him on account
of his having confessed that he knew not when he had been in a church in
his own country. 'All our ministers are so vile,' said he. The mischief
of allowing the clergy to depend on the caprice of the multitude he
thought more than outweighed all the evils of an establishment."[331] In
December, 1792, Wordsworth had returned to England, and in the following
year published "Descriptive Sketches" and the "Evening Walk." He did
this, as he says in one of his letters, to show that, although he had
gained no honors at the University, he _could_ do something.
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