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complemented by the work of James Chandler, David Simpson, Alan Liu, Richard Bourke, TerenceHoagwood and David Bromwich, who have all engaged in a more ‘metahistorical’ approach, as theyhave attempted to define the manner in which Wordsworth constructed his own sense of history, inorder to better understand what he was doing in his poetry. 35 Such studies also overlap with those thatfocus on language. And both the language of politics, as discussed by James Boulton, and the politicsof language as treated by Olivia Smith, have an important bearing on interpretations of Wordsworth’shistory. Ronald Paulson’s study of representations of the revolution also combines matters of languageand politics, as well as contributing a chapter on The Prelude. 36 The earlier studies of Harold Parkerand Zera Fink, on the English and French Republicans have also been of significant importance inhelping to define the nature of Wordsworth’s republicanism. 37But it is the work of two more recent historiographers, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, thathas been most useful in helping me to identify Wordsworth’s republican ethos and his involvement in‘politics’. Because of his commitment to classical republican ideals, Wordsworth understood his owninterests to be inextricably bound up with the affairs of the state. His own ethical position closelyfollowed that of Aristotle as set out in the Nichomachian Ethics, a work that Aristotle described as astudy of ‘political science’ and which led, in turn, to his study of the state itself in his Politics. Boththese studies were linked with a third work, his Rhetoric, to form a comprehensive understanding ofhuman nature. 38 The language and the concepts Wordsworth uses to describe ‘Man, Nature, andHuman Life’ in his work in the early 1800s suggest a strong Aristotelian influence that, I argue, wasmediated by Cicero. These ties in with the reading of history explored by Pocock and Skinner in theirstudy of civic humanism; and in defining their new approach to the study of history both men hadmade a point of exploring the role that language plays in creating history.My approach to producing a more critical historical reading of Wordsworth was directedinitially by Pocock’s study of the influence of classical republicanism on seventeenth and eighteenthcenturypolitical thought in England in The Machiavellian Moment. His argument helped me to makesense of Wordsworth’s actual political allegiances as I came to realise the significance of hisidentification with the English Republican cause after the French cause had degenerated into theReign of Terror. Pocock’s discussion of the concepts of ‘Virtue, Fortune and Corruption’ in hisintroductory chapter, and his comments on the eighteenth-century debate on the topics of ‘Virtue,Passion and Commerce’ in the last, helped me identify the particular classical humanist idiom that35 James K Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics; David Simpson,Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination; Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History; Richard Bourke,Discourse and Political Modernity: Wordsworth, The Intellectual and Cultural Critique; TerenceHoagwood, Politics, Philosophy and the Production of Romantic Texts; David Bromwich, Disowned byMemory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s.36 James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke; Olivia Smith, The Politics ofLanguage, 1791-1819; Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution:1789-1820. See also RichardMarggraf Turley, The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature.37Harold T Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries. A Study in the Development of theRevolutionary Spirit; Zera Fink, The Classical Republicans. See also Fink’s essay ‘Wordsworth and theEnglish Republican Tradition’. JEGP XLVII, (1948): 107-26.38 Wordsworth had all three of these works in the library at Rydal Mt.17