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proposed. It was only later, when he was back in Britain that he began to think more carefully aboutBeaupuy’s teaching and to pursue a more balanced understanding of republican principles. He wouldthen have become more aware of the works of the English republicans, ‘Great men’ like Sidney,Marvel, Harrington, Vane and Milton; men who had already defined such principles in an Englishcontext in the seventeenth century. Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana, Sidney’s Discourses,and Milton’s political works were all being read by the Girondins in Paris whose leader Brissot hadvisited Britain in the 1780s. Montesquieu had also thought that the English compromise between purerepublicanism and a monarchy could serve as a model for France. But Wordsworth was only able toconsolidate his understanding of classical republican principles when he had abandoned his earliersupport for the French cause, which had been based on enthusiasm, rather than knowledge. Back inEngland in 1794-5, after his period of manic inspiration in the summer of 1793, he appears to havebeen reading carefully in English republican texts. Caroline Roberts’ The Eighteenth-CenturyCommonwealthman, documents the continuity of classicism in the Whig mind from the end ofrepublicanism to the beginnings of democratic radicalism, and Wordsworth’s comments in his lettersto William Matthews at this time, reflect his growing allegiance to the political ideals of the Englishrepublicans. In The Prelude, Wordsworth links his final rejection of the French revolutionary causeand his radical republican period with his turn to Godwin, who was also associated with an importantgroup of Dissident intellectuals in London. I believe that after a further period of confusion inLondon, he abandoned active political debate and engaged in further private study at Racedown inorder to come to his own understanding of political justice.My argument, like that of J.G.A. Pocock in his discussion of eighteenth-century politicalthought in England, is based on Wordsworth’s use of key terms and concepts which betray hisindebtedness to classical humanist principles and, in particular, the pursuit of virtue as understood byrepublican political theorists. 16 Moreover, because that school of thought was represented to thewestern world through the works of one particular man, and because that man, Cicero, was a hero ofthe British and French republicans, it becomes relatively straightforward to look for, and find directechoes of a number of Cicero’s key concepts and ideas in Wordsworth’s works, something thatsuggests Wordsworth made his own careful study of Cicero’s actual texts. One ideal of the RomanRepublic was that all important political decisions were to be made through debate in the Forum andthe Senate, and Cicero sacrificed his life for this political ideal. He was assassinated for continuing tooppose consuls who chose to rule by use of military force rather than allow for free debate. His head,tongue and hands were nailed up in the Forum as an example to those who thought they had a right to16 See Pocock’s classic study, The Machiavellian Moment (1975). The Introduction with its discussion ofclassical republican concepts of Virtue, Fortune, and Corruption and the final chapter’s focus on matters ofVirtue, Passion and Commerce in the English Eighteenth-century help identify and define key concepts thatdictate Wordsworth’s principles in the late 1790s. See also: ‘VIRTUES, RIGHTS, AND MANNERS: AModel for Historians of Political Thought’. Political Theory 9. 3 (1981): 353-368. Essays on Harrington andBurke in Politics, Language, and Time (1972) are also very relevant in helping to define Wordsworth’sactual loyalty to Harringtonian ideals, and therefore distancing him from those of Burke.150