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Wordsworth’s text at face value, he failed to appreciate that the poem was more ‘sentimental’ than‘naïve’, and that Wordsworth had structured the poem according to the dictates of a controlling theme.Although the poem is ‘autobiographical’, it is also allegorical. It presents a narrative defined accordingto an example provided by another very popular late eighteenth-century text: James Beattie’s TheMinstrel, or the Progress of Genius, which was modelled, in turn, on a theme set out, earlier, by JamesThomson in The Castle of Indolence: An Allegorical Poem. Both works reproduce a classic theme, onewidely recognised by those who had received a ‘liberal education’. They represent the ancient debateconcerning the relative values of Nature and Art – whether genius was simply a product of Nature, aninnate predisposition – or whether it was also dependent on Art, something that improved on Nature,producing a Second Nature. ‘Art’ was something acquired through Education, and in the Preface toThe Excursion Wordsworth would later explicitly comment on fact that he had retired to his nativemountains (to Nature) in 1800 in order to consciously ‘examine how far Nature and Education hadqualified him’ to ‘construct a literary work that might live’ (PW V 2).Both Thomson’s and Beattie’s works originally glorify Nature and suggest, naively, thatgenius can do without Art. But as both poems proceed with their narratives, the tables are turned, 8 andboth writers reveal that their works are written to expose the folly of youth and its attitude of mind –one that would glorify both indolence and enthusiasm, in a narcissistic celebration of innate genius.Such an attitude also represents a rejection of any form of social or political cohesion. Both Beattie’sand Thomson’s poems discourse on political philosophy and present republican arguments that definethe nature of true Liberty, rather than the false concept of liberty entertained by young Edwin, and bythe inhabitants of the Castle of Indolence. Both poems confront the folly of youthful minds that areonly concerned with satisfying their own desires and are, therefore, incapable of civilised life. Theinhabitants of Thomson’s castle are freed from their illusions by the efforts of the Knight of Arts andIndustry while the Minstrel commands Edwin to undertake a serious course of study in the liberal artsif he is to experience true liberty of mind.Wordsworth’s poem on the growth of his own mind is deliberately constructed to representhis mature appreciation of this topic. In demonstrating his awareness of his own youthful folly herepresents himself to his reader as a man of virtue, a man capable of recognising the vicious nature ofyouthful idealism, if it is taken to extremes. Values that Wordsworth had once celebrated as virtuesfrom the ‘golden’ perspective of his youthful, enthusiastic mind are later acknowledged as vices, whenviewed from the more sober perspective of manhood. Thomson’s, Beattie’s, and Wordsworth’s moraljudgements are all based on ethical ideals that are relative, and reflect an Aristotelian appreciation ofvirtue–ethics. In following the examples of Beattie’s, and Thomson’s allegories, Wordsworth’snarrative needed to include a significant krisis - a turning point that marked a transition from hisyouthful attitude of mind to one capable of recognising the follies of youth’s self-centred, narcissistic,fancies. The turning point of The Prelude occurs when Wordsworth dramatises a particular sequenceof events that relate to his frustration with Godwin’s philosophical method, and declares, dramatically,that he had ‘Yielded up moral question in despair’ (X 901). In the 1850 text that Legouis would have8 ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’ in Lyrical Ballads treat this theme in a playful manner.133