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In producing an analysis of Wordsworth’s work that does not accept, or follow, Coleridge’sauthority I have aimed to produce a far more ‘critical’ study of the historical circumstances that led tothe development of Wordsworth’s mind. I have paid far greater attention to Wordsworth’s owneloquent language and his knowledge of classical rhetoric rather than studying the ‘rhetoric ofromanticism’. I also argue that the original version of The Prelude in its guise as an ‘Address toColeridge’, addressed a specific argument to him: one that explicitly refused his discriminationbetween ‘Fancy’ and ‘Imagination’. It has also been necessary to recognise that, as a classical theorist,Wordsworth was concerned to ‘hide his art’, as Horace had suggested (ars est celare artem). Thisthesis sets out grounds for helping the contemporary reader recognise that Wordsworth’s ethos wasthat of a classical humanist ‘gentleman’, whose theory of poetry was based on ideas about imaginationoriginating in a set of principles that defined a very classical ideology. In looking for someone whomight have had a significant influence on Wordsworth’s thinking in the later 1790s I argue that themind of Marcus Tullius Cicero was of greater importance in shaping Wordsworth’s ethos than eventhat of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.In using the term ‘ethos’ here I am referring to the notion of ‘character’ or ‘mind’, or even‘soul’, and I use the word in the classical sense that Wordsworth would have understood. Although theterm can now be used to refer to a modern notion of character, a unique sense of individual selfhoodor ‘self–consciousness’ 7 (the sense of ‘I am’), it originally implied a notion of character that was asocial construct, something formed ‘by habit’. In referring to ‘ethos’ rather than ‘character’ or‘identity’ I am also invoking another cluster of associations to do with the use of the term in classicalrhetoric. Both meanings also ascribe an ethical or ‘moral’ value to the term, something thatWordsworth would have appreciated as a classically educated ‘gentleman’, concerned with success in‘painting [the] manners and passions’ of his characters. 8 The Greek term ηθος can be translated as‘character’ or ‘habit’. In Greek the word was stressed to distinguish the different meanings; butsubsequent usage has led to a blurring of that distinction. In Roman times a further metamorphosis inmeaning occurred as ethos was translated from Greek into Latin, as mores – and ‘ethical’ concernsbecame ‘moral’ ones. But Greek and Roman concepts of ‘morality’ differed, and the term ethos wasused in novel ways when translated into Roman as mores. It was also used by the Roman oratorMarcus Quintilian to refer to mild or well-mannered expressions of feeling, representative of goodcharacter, or good manners, as distinguished from more vehement expressions of emotion or passion –pathos. Quintilian was concerned with defining technical terms referring to appeals to the emotions ofan audience in the practice of forensic rhetoric, and was drawing on the work of both Cicero andAristotle in making his own distinctions as he wrote his mammoth treatise on the education of theorator, De Institutione Oratoria. Wordsworth was aware of Quintilian’s particular use of the term, as7 As exemplified in Geoffrey Hartman’s influential study Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814.8 See, specifically, Wordsworth’s comments in the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads on the need for genuinepoetry to portray ‘a natural delineation of human passions, human characters and human incidents’, and hisreference to ‘our elder writers and those in modern times who have been the most successful in paintingmanners and passions’.3