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past history. 39 In the notebook used for Ms 1 of The Borderers, a page in the middle of the draft isheaded ‘Druids’ and lists texts about them, mainly from ancient classical sources, but includingDrayton’s PolyOlbion. 40 Geoffrey Hiller argues that Drayton discovered ‘a new poet-archetype’,suggesting a “perfecte paterne of a Poete” in the bards and druids of old British History’. 41 Draytonwas the first poet to treat them imaginatively, well before they became a topic of interest in theeighteenth century. He also distinguishes between bards and Druids – the former are ‘singers andpoets’, the latter are ‘wise lawgivers, teachers and priests’. Drayton creates a tradition where noneactually existed, imagining a continuity between the ancient Druids and Welsh bards who had kept aBritish voice alive over the centuries, and he grants their inspirations to be of divine origin. InPolyOlbion Drayton records that the bards are:Addicted from their births so much to PoesieThat in the Mountaines those who scarce have seene a Booke,Most skilfully will make, as though from Art they tooke. (Book 4. 188-90)The linkage between innate poetic ability, the mountain environment, and the lack of books allsuggest, very strongly, an influence on Wordsworth’s characterisation of the Pedlar, whose ‘art’would appear to be a product of Nature. The Pedlar might therefore be seen as something of a druidicbard, given his natural wisdom and eloquence, but Wordsworth had quite other plans for hischaracter.IV. ‘In all forms of things there is a mind’Nor less I deem that there are powers,Which of themselves our minds impress,That we can feed this mind of ours,In a wise passiveness.Virgil’s ‘O fortunatos nimium’ passage presented a picture of rural delight, and wasemblematic of a pastoral ideal in a land, extremely happy under the benign rule of Saturn. Butbetween the opening description of the ‘happy tillers of the soil’, and the closing lines describing thehappy husbandman whose work ‘sustains /Country and cottage homestead’, Virgil calls upon themuses to ‘Receive’ him and grant him a vision of the truths of ‘the nature of things’. 42 He seeks toknow the secrets behind Nature, for that knowledge will give him the wisdom that a poet, writingabout man and the universe, needs for his work. At the time of writing The Ruined Cottage at39 Richard Gravil has conveniently summarised various studies on Wordsworth’s interest in Druids as part ofhis own argument in Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation and Christine Gerrard comments on earlier interest inthe Druids, and on Thomson’s connection with them, in The Patriot Opposition to Walpole.40 The Borderers. Ed. R. Osborne p. 420-1. It was from Selden’s commentary on Drayton’s PolyOlbion thatWordsworth took his obscure motto for the main title page of Lyrical Ballads: Quam nihil ad genium,Papiniane, tuum!41 Geoffrey G. Hiller, ‘“Sacred Bards” and “Wise Druides”: Drayton and his Archetype of the Poet’ ELH 51(Spring 1984): 1-15 This paragraph draws directly on Hiller.42 See Appendix B.238