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But it is an absurd account of this motive, to say, that my having recourse to the faculty ofspeech, amounts to any tacit engagement that I will use it for any genuine purposes. The trueground of confidence between man and man, is the knowledge we have of the motives bywhich the human mind is influenced; our perception, that the motives to deceive can butrarely occur, while the motives to veracity will govern the stream of human actions. (PoliticalJustice I 195)Wordsworth would later challenge just this assertion in The Borderers, where his character study ofRivers would belie Godwin’s idealism, and can be seen as a direct response to one aspect of Godwin’sEnquiry that Wordsworth could not accept. Rivers, like Robespierre, is a rhetorician who uses wordsto deceive, and his ‘independent intellect’ to justify his reasoning, and Wordsworth spent many hoursattempting to analyse the motives of such a character whose existence, based on observation of actualhuman behaviour, was at odds with Godwin’s ‘perception’.But in 1794, having read the first edition of Political Justice, Wordsworth was attracted toGodwin’s ideals, and in early 1795 he travelled to London with the intention of meeting him. OnFebruary 27 th 1795, he was introduced to Godwin at a meeting of radical intellectuals in London, andthis provided him with the opportunity to call on him the following day. 23 Over the next few months hehad further meetings with Godwin and was, according to Hazlitt’s later record of events, initiallyimpressed by his doctrine of necessity. 24 Godwin would also have impressed Wordsworth with hisknowledge both of the French philosophers, and of the classics, something gained from his studiouspursuit of a liberal education in his youth. It is possible he suggested Wordsworth might gain fromreading more widely in Cicero, having read all his works as a young man. 25 Alternatively the two menmay have discussed Godwin’s novel, Caleb Williams, and the importance of producing realisticcharacters whose motives were believable. Wordsworth’s fascination with defining the character ofRivers, and then with describing the circumstances of the growth of the Pedlar’s mind, might be seenas evidence that such a conversation had occurred. Godwin prided himself on producing characterswhose ‘manners’ were credible and fitted with their actions, and one of the first things Wordsworthwould do on arrival at Racedown was to revise ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’.The relationship between Wordsworth and Godwin has been the subject of much speculation,but not of any recent detailed critical analysis. There was much that Godwin had to offer Wordsworthat a time when he was looking for guidance, and it seems Wordsworth was initially in awe ofGodwin’s intellect. But as time went on he found himself disappointed with Godwin’s (andHolcroft’s) overly rational form of discussion, and began to discover the limitations of the argument inPolitical Justice. Godwin was himself aware of some of those limitations and was preoccupied, in1795, with revising the finer details of several of the claims he had made in the first edition, having23 The group included Holcroft, Losh, Tweddell, Jones, Raine, Edwards, Higgins, French, and Dyer. SeeNicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Radical Years, pp. 175-198.24 In The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt records that Wordsworth was reputed to have told ‘a young man, a student inthe temple’ to “Throw aside [his] books of chemistry …and read Godwin on Necessity.’’’25 In his passion for the classics as a young man, Godwin had studied the philosophical works of Aristotle,Cicero, Xenophon, and Plato, and devoted a part of each day to their study, spending about six months toread the works of one author. ‘He worked his way through Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Livy, Sallust and Tacitusamong the Romans, and Homer, Sophocles, Xenophon, Herodotus and Thucydides among the Greeks.’ PeterMarshall, William Godwin, p.37.174