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Wordsworth’s ‘history’ of his life in The Prelude is certainly not one setting out to describe‘what actually happened’, as Legouis had thought. The Prelude, as a poem, offers a ‘Fained Historie’rather than a ‘true historie’; a distinction made by Bacon in his Advancement of Knowledge. Inaddition to poetic licence, Wordsworth ‘invents’ various ‘arguments’ to express particular opinionsand to emphasise the allegory he was concerned to construct. As historiographers have alwaysstressed, ‘what actually happened’, as a ‘historical record’, is always coloured by the character of theperson narrating the history. Edmund Burke’s appreciation of the way things were in England in theearly 1790s was very different to William Godwin’s - as the history of Caleb Williams, or The WayThings Are, dramatically reveals. The course of Wordsworth’s narrative in The Prelude is predeterminedby the moral tale that he is concerned to relate to Coleridge, in which his daemonic,youthful, prophetic over-imaginative genius is ‘softened down’ and humanised through his necessaryengagement with the world of men and history.As Alan Liu has noted, Wordsworth’s ‘sense of history’ was strongly coloured by his readingin the ancient historians, whose works he is known to have read with interest, and which herecommended as worthy of serious study to Mrs Clarkson in 1805. 9 Plutarch’s Lives, for instance,focussed far more on details about the characters who made history than on events per se. 10 Theintroduction to ‘Dryden’s’ translation records that: ‘it is not primarily as a historian of cities thatPlutarch writes, but as a biographer and a moralist. To see in his characters “duty performed andrewarded; arrogance chastised; hasty anger corrected” and above all virtue triumphant, such are hisinterests’. 11 Wordsworth’s own ‘history’ is a history of the development of his new character as ‘aman speaking to men’ and was ‘designed’ (Prelude XIII 412) with another character, Coleridge, inmind. The history Wordsworth writes in The Prelude is about the growth of his character, it is arepresentation of his ethos, and should not be read as a reliable catalogue of historical events.However much those events shaped his mind, they are also made to fit the concerns of the moralhistory, and the moral argument that he constructed and addressed to Coleridge. Wordsworth readhistory as Plutarch did. In his Parallel Lives Plutarch aimed to reveal his subject’s character, andthereby improve his reader’s character. His biographies had a moralising function, as did The Prelude,9 In reply to a request from Mrs Clarkson, Dorothy replies ‘William scarcely knows what books to recommendto you but you cannot go wrong, he says, if you read the best old writers – Lord Bacon’s Essays, hisAdvancement of Learning &c., for instance, and if you are fond of History read it in the old memoirs or oldChronicles’ (EY 662).10 In his essay, ‘The Lake Poets: William Wordsworth.’ Thomas De Quincey recorded that Plutarch’s Lives wasWordsworth’s favourite book (excepting books of poetry). He also noted that Wordsworth was aware of ‘theinaccuracy and want of authentic weight attaching to Plutarch as a historian: but his business with Plutarchwas not for purposes of research: he was satisfied with his fine moral effects. De Quincey, CollectedWritings. Ed. Mason. II. 288. Given Wordsworth’s early interest in Rousseau, it is also worth noting thatRousseau had written that ‘Plutarch, above all was my favourite author’. (Confessions Book 1). In his FourLetters to M. de Malesherbes he related how he had got his hands on Plutarch at the age of six, and knew himby heart at the age of eight, having read all his ‘novels’ (i.e. his Lives of Illustrious Men). He related that hisreading caused him to ‘shed buckets of tears...From that reading, my heart acquired this heroic and romanticbent which has done nothing but increase until now and which has made me completely disgusted witheverything, except that which resembles my fantasies’.For these references see C.E. Butterworth’s notes to The Reveries of a Solitary Walker p 59.11 Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, The Translation called Dryden’s, 5 vols. I. xxviii.146