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to express his frustration at being unable to influence Wordsworth’s ethos as a philosopher, a ‘happyman’ whose philosophic principles had been established in ‘the first dawn of his manhood’(CL II1033-4). So the question posed by Beatty about the need to account for the great change inWordsworth’s thinking, something that Gill also acknowledges to have occurred at Racedown,remains.I therefore argue that Cicero was someone Wordsworth was reading during his ‘transitionyear’ and who did matter greatly to him. Like Gill, I cannot point to any reference that tells me whatWordsworth was reading, nor does Duncan Wu’s research in Wordsworth’s Reading provide suchevidence. But my research leads me to make a scholarly deduction, from a study of the evidence in therecord of Wordsworth’s life and in his writings, that Cicero provided Wordsworth with a consistentphilosophy that he would follow, with almost religious dedication, for at least the next ten years. Itwas Coleridge, not Wordsworth, who was compulsively addicted to the need to find certainty, andwho grasped at ‘whatever philosophical formulations seemed to help’ as he progressed through anumber of differing systems of philosophy in his search for ‘truth’, a quest that came to something ofa conclusion in his ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’ in The Friend of 1818. According to myhypothesis, Wordsworth would have, indeed, felt no compulsion to ‘eradicate [the] uncertainties thatdrove Coleridge to a lifetime’s philosophical enquiry’ because ironically (like Socrates), he saw virtuein ‘ignorance’. I believe that by the time he had moved to Alfoxden he had actively adopted a positionof philosophical equanimity, one that saw virtue in uncertainty. I suggest that it was Cicero’s ownphilosophical position, clearly defined as that of an Academic Sceptic, with strong Stoic sympathies,that provided Wordsworth with his own philosophical principles. It was a distinctive philosophicalposition to hold, and my suggestion that Wordsworth also held it, and knew Cicero’s philosophicalworks well, is justified in the light of the distinctive language used to define its concepts. They areconcepts that Wordsworth applies to his description of the Pedlar’s character in 1797, and whichremain in place as definitive of those of the Wanderer in 1814. Moreover, in 1799, Wordsworth tookhis description of the growth of the Pedlar’s mind, and made it the basis for the early development ofhis own mind, as he composed the ‘Two Part Prelude’, writing a narrative that conformed toepistemological principles defined in early Stoic philosophy which are most comprehensivelydescribed in Cicero’s philosophical works.III. ‘Parallel Lives’Plutarch, in his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, compared famous Roman characterswith their Greek counterparts. Cicero, for instance, is compared with Demosthenes. In arguing for amore critical, historical perspective in the study of Wordsworth and his works, one that considersinfluences over a period of time that is of a much ‘longer duration’ than that normally considered byRomantic studies, I wish to compare Wordsworth with Cicero here. Specifically, I compare thecircumstances of Wordsworth’s retirement from the city to a country house in 1795 with that of190