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neglected the study of Cicero at Cambridge as he turned his attention to his bardic vocation and thestudy of romance languages, something made easier by his good knowledge of Latin.In 1792 Michel Beaupuy would have reintroduced Wordsworth to Cicero’s works as heattempted to teach him political philosophy by the banks of the Loire, as recorded in Book IX of ThePrelude. Cicero’s De Legibus and De Republica were the foundational texts of republican politicaltheory. Cicero had drawn on Plato’s Republic and Laws to produce works that focussed on Romanmores and in which Plato’s philosophical idealism was displaced by Stoic concepts of virtue and ofNature. 6 De Republica, contained the classic description of the ‘balanced constitution’ as defined byPolybius, the model idealised by ancient republicans, and which later republics attempted to emulate.In De Legibus, Cicero set out his appreciation that all civil law must be based on the laws of Nature,and asserts that the wise man who pursues the path of philosophy will be able to come to anunderstanding of the divinity of Nature as his own mind attains divine powers of understanding. WhenWordsworth returned from France he would have had a general knowledge of eighteenth-centuryFrench political theorists and the works of important historical figures, such as Machiavelli andGrotius, and much earlier, Cicero and Polybius. But, as he reports in The Prelude, he had not paidsufficient attention to Beaupuy’s teaching about political philosophy. When he actually becameinvolved in the activities of the revolution, he did so as an enthusiast.He returned to England fired up with millennial fervour, in an inspired state of mind that helater identified as manic, and bordering on madness. In Book X of The Prelude he relates how hisenthusiasm had led him into error, to a fanatical belief that he was actually possessed by a divine‘influx’ as a prophet of the revolution who believed his actions on behalf of Liberty to be virtuous. Itwas only after he had suffered an inevitable mental collapse from such a state of extreme elation thathe was later able to recognise that he had acted in a manner very similar to that of Robespierre. Hewas then able to acknowledge that ideals he had thought virtuous at the time were, in fact, vicious.That realisation was salutary, and led him to question all such enthusiastic states of mind, even poeticones. But although shocked by events in France, where people he had met had been executed, he didnot abandon his republican ideals. He transferred his allegiance to the English Republicans, while stillhoping that a true republican voice might emerge from the in-fighting between the factions in France.Meanwhile he turned his attention to making a careful study of republican political principles, anactivity that would have inevitably led him to a more detailed study of De Republica and De Legibus.The record of his experiences in Book X is difficult to follow, and reflects something of his confusedand manic state of mind at the time. It is a confessional piece and argues a defence of his actionsappealing ‘to equity and reason’ as he attempts to explain and justify that his radicalism had beencarried out in the name of the principles of true Liberty.The revisions to An Evening Walk carried out at Windy Brow in 1794 suggest thatWordsworth had already been reading in Cicero’s philosophical works by this time, as he defines6 Parts of Cicero’s De Republica were known to eighteenth-century readers, but the text, like that of De Legibuswas incomplete. It was not until the early nineteenth-century that a more complete text of De Republica wasdiscovered, one that allowed scholars to have a better idea of the form of the original work. One part of DeRepublica that was already well known was ‘The Dream of Scipio’.144