style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">More than a decade on from the blissful dawn of the French Revolution, William Wordsworth issued an apology. “Genius of Burke! Forgive the pen seduced/ By specious wonders”, he wrote in the 1805 version of The Prelude. Whereas the poet had been taken in by the cries from the Paris street, Edmund Burke – “like an oak whose staghorn branches start/ Out of its leafy brow” – had forewarned terror. It is a fine recantation, amplified a century later by WB Yeats’s “The Seven Sages”, which paid tribute to Burke’s campaigns for justice in America, India, France and his native Ireland.