Wordsworth met Michel Beaupuy (1755-1796) during his stay in France in 1792. He was an idealistic minor aristocrat who by 1793 had become a general in the French revolutionary army. He died fighting in Germany in 1796. Fifteen years older than Wordsworth, Beaupuy clearly impressed with his enlightened humanity and idealism and was no doubt a major reason behind Wordsworth's espousal of the ideals of the French revolution.
The Prelude, Book 9, lines 302-13:
By birth he ranked
With the most noble, but unto the poor
Among mankind he was in service bound,
As by some tie invisible, oaths professed
To a religious order. Man he loved
As man; and, to the mean and the obscure,
And all the homely in their homely works,
Transferred a courtesy which had no air
Of condescension; but did rather seem
A passion and a gallantry, like that
Which he, a soldier, in his idler day
Had paid to women.
and again, Book 9, lines 509-20
And when we chanced
One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl,
Who crept along fittingly her languid gait
Unto a heifer's motion, by a cord
Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane
Its sustenance, while the girl with pallid hands
Was busy knitting in a heartless mood
Of solitude, and at the sight my friend
In agitation said, "'Tis against that
That we are fighting," I with him believed
That a benignant spirit was abroad
Which might not be withstood.