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Godwin’s intellectual reasoning was found wanting – when confronted with the reality of a man whocould act like Rivers. 29The play is set in the borderlands, where there is no established sense of civil law, andMortimer leads a group of ‘outlaws’ who have rebelled against the false values of the aristocraticBarons who administer ‘justice’ in the surrounding ‘civilised’ lands, according to their own ends.Rivers argues that the only law there is, is based on an individual’s ‘independent intellect’; and hedeceives Mortimer into committing an act of ‘murder’, to prove his point. At the end of the play theoutlaws (who had for a while been deceived by Rivers’ rhetoric), kill the unrepentant villain, acting asagents of natural law. But Mortimer, whose mind is ‘overturned’ by his feelings of guilt, is unable toforgive himself for his crime and wanders in a self-imposed state of exile from mankind, an outcast byhis own choosing. The play focuses on ‘moral questions’ and is something of a meditation on theAristotelian understanding that virtue and vice are closely allied, that virtuous self-righteousness can,all too easily, become the vice of Pride and self-love. The two attitudes of mind border closely on eachother in Aristotle’s system of virtue-ethics, which acknowledges that human emotions play as great apart as reason in defining moral values, and that the workings of the human psyche cannot be expectedto follow the dictates of absolute reason. At a later date Wordsworth wrote that the play was based onobservations he had made of human behaviour during his time in revolutionary France in 1792.The questions raised in composing The Borderers led, in turn, to a remarkable work, in atotally new style, one that indicated a major shift in Wordsworth’s thinking: ‘The Ruined Cottage’.The main character in the poem, the Pedlar, serves as a counterpart to Rivers, in a complex attempt byWordsworth to redeem some sense of moral certainty. It would seem that Wordsworth turned toStoicism as a system of belief that might counter the nihilism evident in Rivers’ character, since theStoic prizes the value of an independent intellect, and also accepts that there is a natural law, a logosthat dictates true value. Wordsworth’s poetry, during his time at Racedown, takes on a moralseriousness that he gained from a careful study of Cicero’s philosophical works. It is in pursuing thismore detailed enquiry into the original sources of republican virtù that I suggest he became soimpressed by the comprehensive nature of Cicero’s moral philosophy that he modelled his owncharacter and intellect on Cicero’s example, someone whose ethos he had secretly decided to emulate.In this he was following the example of Brissot, who had carried his imitation of Cicero to its finalend, also losing his head on account of his political principles – another martyr to the cause of Liberty.I suggest the great change that can be perceived in Wordsworth’s life after the Racedownperiod can be attributed to his adoption of a secretive Ciceronian ethos, rather than any great debt toColeridge. His behaviour, in representing himself as a ‘good man,’ and a ‘happy man’, reveals hisstudious adoption of the manners of a classical humanist gentleman and committed him to a veryspecific set of ethical beliefs that defined both his behaviour and his manner of thinking. Thisparticular, very ‘classical’ ideology, followed the principles set down by Aristotle in his definition of29 Before starting on The Borderers he had been working on a narrative referred to as ‘a Gothic Tale’, and earlydrafts of that work were incorporated into the more serious plot of his ‘tragedy’.194