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commented on in Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria. Many critics have focussed on Coleridge’scomments in their attempts to make better sense of Wordsworth’s reasons for wanting to focus onnatural subjects and dismiss the supernatural. My argument here casts further light on Wordsworth’sreasons for making that discrimination. In my discussion of the character of the Pedlar I show how thegrowth of his mind follows the descriptions of human intellectual development described by the Stoicsand represented most clearly in Cicero’s Academica. It is also important to recognise that Wordsworthtook his description of the growth of the Pedlar’s mind and used it to describe the growth of his ownin The Prelude. In this final section I also discuss Wordsworth’s particular debt to Quintilian’sdescription of ‘imagination’ in De Institutione Oratoria, as I account for the technical aspects ofPedlar’s eloquence. In concluding I briefly discuss the 1802 additions to Lyrical Ballads and commenton the Ciceronian ethos of Wordsworth’s ideal poet. It was this section that had so disturbedColeridge, causing him to voice his concerns about his ‘radical Difference’ of opinion withWordsworth to Southey and Sotheby.IV. Placing Language in History: Methodological ConsiderationsMy argument against reading Wordsworth as an ‘exemplary Romantic’ obviously opposesMcGann’s reading of Wordsworth in The Romantic Ideology. I do not intend to rehearse McGann’sargument about the illusions, elisions, evasions and displacements that he found in Wordsworth’s workas he discovered it to be a ‘paradigm example of the dynamism of Romantic displacement’. 27 But I doprovide alternative readings to the works McGann discussed in his chapter on Wordsworth: ‘TheRuined Cottage’, ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’, and the ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’. Ihave, however, studied McGann’s broader argument in his series of works dedicated to ‘restoring ahistorical methodology to literary studies’ and although I am not sympathetic to the arguments of hisor Marjorie Levinson’s North American Marxist-orientated criticism, I have largely followed themethodological suggestions set out in the opening chapter of The Beauty of Inflections in my ownresearch. 28 In attempting my own ‘new’ historical reading of Wordsworth I have found MarilynButler’s British challenge to North American High Romantic criticism in Romantics, Rebels andReactionaries more useful. 29In The Politics of Romantic Poetry, Richard Cronin stressed the significance of Butler’s workas a ‘pragmatic’ critic (rather than a ‘theorist’), who had quietly ‘reversed the understanding ofRomanticism that had held sway from Arnold to Abrams – a critical tradition that prized above all else27 The Beauty of Inflections p. 335.28 I am more sympathetic to the more applied ‘British’ Marxism expressed in the writings of E.P Thomson,Raymond Williams, John Barrell and David Simpson. In Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems Levinsonargued that, in these representative poems, the factual or material base, the situation in history, has beenerased, transcended or idealised as a means of evading Wordsworth’s distress. This negative appraisal ofWordsworth’s actions I find quite contrary to the demonstration of will that he both exemplified and arguedfor in his life, and represented in his poetry.29 For a discussion of McGann’s and Butler’s differing approaches see David Chandler’s essay ‘‘OneConsciousness’, Historical Criticism and the Romantic Canon.’ Romanticism on the Net 17 (February 2000)[1-9-09]: http://users.ox.ac.u k/~scat0385/17ideology.html.15