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which Marvell, Cowley and Milton all played a significant role. 26 Rostvig makes a detailed survey ofthe use of the topic by other seventeenth-century poets, and defines how it came to reflect a neo-stoictradition in the wake of the political disappointment felt, firstly by Royalists when they lost their king,and later by Republicans after the restoration of the Monarchy. And the theme, which was endorsed byDryden in the high regard he held for the Georgics, continued to inspire poetic compositionsthroughout the eighteenth century. 27 For republicans, and for the Country party, the contrast betweencountry and city reflected an idealisation of ‘Sabine’ rural virtues over the corruption of those whopursued luxury in the cities. The traditional ‘Happy Man’ could not dwell in cities, which (asJuvenal’s satires so powerfully portrayed them) were too corrupt for virtue to survive in; and Pope andSwift also represented that understanding in their poetry and prose.A more recent survey of the idealisation of the pastoral/georgic tradition in England is made inthe early chapters of Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City. Williams notes just how much ofa commonplace the comparison between country and city had always been, pointing out that‘Quintilian makes it his first example of a stock thesis’ (46). Williams treats the theme within thecontext of a much longer duration of history than Rostvig, but the two studies are complementary, withWilliams providing the historical and political background to the theme, while Rostvig focuses on theliterary specifics. Her many references to works of both major and minor poets reveals thepervasiveness of this classical ideal in the literary productions of the age of Pope, as well as the age ofJohnson, and even right up to the end of the eighteenth century. Rostvig’s studies provide a historicalcontext for reading Wordsworth as a ‘Happy Man’, whose own mind was especially shaped by theclassical values expressed in the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ‘O fortunatosnimium’ passage from Georgics II, with its over-idyllic representation of the Virgilian happyhusbandman, is not directly invoked in ‘The Ruined Cottage’. But I argue that the passage – wellknown to eighteenth-century poets –would have struck Wordsworth with a great sense of irony as hereflected upon his situation at Racedown where the poem was initially conceived. 28 But before turningto The Ruined Cottage, I want to place the poem in its classical context by commenting briefly on thesignificance of the Georgics, and the link with James Thomson.26 All three poets influenced Wordsworth’s poetic development. That of Milton is obvious, but Wordsworth alsodrew on Marvell, whose The Garden was carefully studied. Cowley’s ‘Essays’ were influential as well as hispoetry – and a collection of his works was in the Racedown library.In Liberty, in 1829, Wordsworth wrote: In a deep vision’s intellectual sceneSuch earnest longings and regrets as keenDepressed and melancholy Cowley, laidUnder a fancied yew-tree’s luckless shade (111- 114)27 The Georgics became a focus of attention at the beginning of the eighteenth century largely due to Dryden’spopular 1697 translation. His edition was accompanied by an influential essay written by Joseph Addisonwho had proposed that the Georgics were the ‘most Complete, Elaborate, and finisht Piece of all Antiquity –the Aeneid was Nobler, but the Georgics more perfect.’ In order to succeed, ‘this kind of poetry…addressesitself wholly to the Imagination: It is altogether conversant among the fields and woods, and has the mostdelightful part of Nature for its Province. It raises in our Minds a pleasing variety of Scenes and Landskips,whilst it teaches us’ (‘Essay on the Georgics’ in The Works of John Dryden. Ed W. Frost V 5, pp. 145-154).28 James Sambrook notes that ‘Virgil’s Georgics provided tags for nearly every eighteenth-century Englishwriter on rural subjects,’ The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of EnglishLiterature, 1700-1789, 2nd ed p. 200.232