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Epicurean principles, Wordsworth was looking to the early Stoics and was influenced by Cicero, whohad made a point of distinguishing between the sophisticated philosophical principles of the Stoics,and the mere sophistry of the self-centred Epicureans. It was the latter school of thought that avoidedpolitical matters, as its members sought solace in the pursuit of private visions of the gods; in a quitedeliberate ‘evasion of history’. I have argued that it is important to realise Wordsworth was not of theirparty.The importance of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ lies in the fact it contained materials that seeded thedevelopment of Wordsworth’s distinctive poetic career and formed the prima materia for The Recluse.In 1799, the description of the growth of the Pedlar’s mind was removed from ‘the story of Margaret’as a separate poem, ‘The Pedlar’. At the same time, Wordsworth decided to use the description of thegrowth of the Pedlar’s mind to describe Nature’s influence on the growth of his own mind, in the two–part poem he began at Goslar and finished at Sockburn. The circumstances of the growth of thePedlar’s mind provide the underlying structure for the ‘Two–Part Prelude’, forming a skeleton thatwas then clothed with descriptive passages and biographical detail from Wordsworth’s early life, toproduce a narrative describing Wordsworth’s early years. The Pedlar, as represented in 1798, isprobably the most important character in all of Wordsworth’s poetry, and an identity that Wordsworthlater fancied his own character might have assumed had he been born in the same circumstances. 31 Myreading of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ here, has stressed the importance of recognising that the character ofthe eloquent Pedlar is quite deliberately defined as that of a naturally ‘wise man’, whose wisdomcomes from having pursued a virtuous life, one ‘lived consistently and harmoniously with nature’; theaim of the Stoic. 32 The poem defines Wordsworth’s particularly classical vision of things in 1798, andshows little evidence of the influence of Coleridge’s more romantic vision of ‘the one-life’ as he madehis own, radically different, comments about being a ‘poet of nature’.31[H]ad I been born in a class which would have deprived me of what is called a liberal education, it isnot unlikely that being strong in body, I should have taken to a way of life such as that in which myPedlar passed the greater part of his days. At all events I am here called upon freely to acknowledgethat the character I have represented in his person is chiefly an idea of what I fancied my own charactermight have become in his circumstances. Nevertheless much of what he says and does had an externalexistence that fell under my own youthful and subsequent observation. (IFN 79)32 De Finibus III 26.274