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philosophical and poetic advisor, he discovered that Wordsworth already had a philosophy and was inthe process of developing a poetic theory based on its moral values. I suggest it is a better to followBlake’s dictum that ‘opposition is true friendship’, rather than idealise and romanticise the two men’srelationship.Curiously, Coleridge is believed to have borrowed the third Volume of Middleton’s Life ofCicero, the volume containing the summary of his philosophical works, during the period Wordsworthwas completing the Ms B text of ‘The Ruined Cottage’. 18 I would suggest that Coleridge’s interest inMiddleton’s Cicero might have been inspired by Wordsworth’s discussion, at this time, of his ownearlier reading of Middleton at Racedown. Possibly Wordsworth suggested Middleton’s Cicero toColeridge as a guide for him to gain a more comprehensive knowledge of Cicero’s philosophy in orderto better understand his indebtedness to Cicero’s work. In the Wordsworth Trust Library at Grasmerethere is a handsome five volume edition of Ciceronis Opera printed at the Clarendon Press in Oxfordin 1783. 19 It is expensive, leather bound scholarly edition cum indicibus et variiis lectionibus with eachbound volume containing two volumes of the original text and containing around 500 pages. We candeduce that it was acquired at some time before John Wordsworth left Grasmere for the last time sinceit has his signature in it, and one can only assume that the set was left with William and Dorothy whileJohn was away at sea. One might speculate that it was purchased on William’s recommendation, andthat he grateful to have such an edition in his Library.Once Coleridge had turned to ‘critical’ philosophy, after 1800, he was unwilling to acceptWordsworth’s looser form of reasoning and must have been frustrated by Wordsworth’s commitmentto principles that saw any claim for certainty, in philosophical discussion, as a dogmatic approach thatundermined genuine attempts at enquiry. I have stressed the relativity of Coleridge’s influence onWordsworth by pointing to ideas in Wordsworth’s poetry in the late 1790s that appear to originate inCicero’s philosophical works. In contrast, those works of Coleridge’s that have been cited asinfluential on Wordsworth’s development during this period, can be seen to have made far less impacton the kind of poetry Wordsworth was writing at the time. Certainly there is the, by now, well tracedrecord of the allusive interplay between the two men’s poetic productions, but this interchange doesnot add up to serious evidence that Coleridge’s work was instrumental in defining Wordsworth’s. Asis well known by now, Coleridge borrowed as much (if not more) from Wordsworth as he gave. It isalso significant that the two men were never able to work together on producing a poem.In contrast to Wordsworth, Coleridge’s life was spent in a continual search for some absolutephilosophical principles that he hoped might provide him with his own sense of security. In his‘Essays on the Principles of Method’, in The Friend (1818) he had defined ‘philosophy’ as the pursuitof an ‘absolute truth’. In announcing his quest to find ‘a ground that is unconditional and absolute, and18 Duncan Wu records that Joseph Cottle borrowed Volume 2 of Middleton’s Life from the Bristol Library fromthe 15 January to the 19 February 1798, and Volume 3 from the 21 February to the 9 March. Wu proposesthat Cottle probably borrowed these books for Coleridge, since Coleridge borrowed Volume 1 in January(WR I 185-6). Wu also records that Cottle borrowed Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres inMay, and that Coleridge had also been reading them in February. Wu again surmises that the Lectures wereborrowed for Coleridge.19 Ref 1995. R29285