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Part TwoChapter 7Songs of Innocence and Experience:The French Books of The PreludeI. Wordsworth’s Sense of HistoryIn this second part of the thesis I present my rationale for focussing on Cicero as a significantinfluence on development of Wordsworth’s classical imagination and his Roman – rather thanRomantic – ethos. My argument proposes that Wordsworth made a particular study of Cicero’sphilosophical works after leaving London for Racedown in 1795, having made a deliberate choice toretire to the country and undertake a period of solitary study. He would have earlier read Cicero atschool and at University and would have discussed his political works when engaged in conversationwith Beaupuy in France. But I have reason to believe that it was at Racedown that he pursued a moredetailed reading of Cicero and found his writings on philosophy to provide answers to many of the‘moral questions’ that he had not found in Godwin’s philosophy. Wordsworth would have read Ciceroat school, and Ben Ross Schneider discusses Cicero’s influence on Wordsworth’s education at bothHawkeshead and Cambridge in his study Wordsworth’s Cambridge Education. He points out thatCicero played a significant part in any grammar school education; his orations and letters were astaple for the study of Latin and rhetoric. The most influential of Cicero’s works studied at school wasDe Officiis, a handbook on ‘morals’ for young gentlemen, written originally for Cicero’s son. 1Schneider proposes that Wordsworth used De Officiis as a guide when writing his LinesWritten as a School Exercise at Hawkeshead (PW 1 259-261), and he shows how Wordsworth’s‘exercise’ is constructed using Cicero’s text. In De Officiis Cicero sets out the four cardinal virtues of‘Truth, by which we discern right action; Justice, our obligation to our fellow men; Courage, whichenables us to carry out moral decisions; and Propriety, which teaches us to subject our passions to ourreason and to live in harmony with nature’. 2 These values were still being taught to ‘gentlemen’ in theeighteenth, and even nineteenth centuries as a moral norm. De Officiis was a perfect text for teaching1 Neil Wood notes that classicist A. E. Douglas described De Officiis as ‘the most influential secular prosework ever written’. It was read throughout the Middle Ages and ‘was possibly the first book of classicalantiquity to come from a printing press. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century it was staple fare foryoung European pupils, a universally accepted manual for gentlemanly conduct. Apart from Cicero’sposition on moral obligation, the work is crucial because of its portrait of an ideal gentleman and the attitudeexpressed toward labour and various vocations’ (Cicero’s Social and Political Thought 68).Wordsworth’s own copy of De Officiis is in the Wordsworth Trust Library (Jerwood Centre) at Grasmere.2 See Wordsworth’s Hawkeshead Education pp. 71-6 & 184-5. Schneider gives a useful synopsis of thesignificance of Cicero’s moral concepts, and in his concluding chapter he again emphasises Wordsworth’sdebt to Cicero, to Stoicism, and to the Greek and Roman writers (245–8).142