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eloquence. 31 Although Blair’s Lectures are often referred to as having influenced Wordsworth’s andColeridge’s ideas about poetry, I argue that Wordsworth was learning about the art of eloquence fromthe original sources of Blair’s materials, the works of Cicero, Quintilian and Aristotle where it wastreated, pragmatically, as a technical skill. Where Blair might describe the ‘ornaments’ of poetry,drawing on neo-classical concepts of ‘taste’, Cicero and Quintilian had written about the armaments(ornatus) of rhetoric, utilised as ‘weapons’ in a not-so-gentle art of persuasion that was, in Cicero’scase, a matter of life or death. As Wordsworth was learning more about the art of eloquence, he wasalso developing a theory of poetry that incorporated the expertise and techniques set out by these‘elder writers’. Acknowledging the ‘power’ available to those who speak a natural language of theemotions, Wordsworth’s theory also incorporates an understanding of the need to temper that ‘truevoice of feeling’, to calm its impassioned rhetoric, through the use of a poetic eloquence that knowsjust how to balance the emotions, and how to play on the reader’s affections. This was a skill that helearnt, most particularly from Quintilian, who had drawn much of his understanding from Cicero.In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cicero was recognised as the politicalspokesperson, and hero, of the English Republicans. But a century later the Victorians took delight inshowing their more sophisticated manners by attacking the character of the man, and denigrating hisreputation. 32 Due to prejudices that became institutionalised in academic studies in Britain andGermany in the nineteenth century (ones defining a new ‘Romantic’ attitude of mind), Cicero’sinfluence was marginalised. By the middle years of the twentieth century his reputation was almostunknown, so it is not surprising that his influence is rarely noted in modern literary studies of writersof the Romantic period. In the Introduction to a book on Cicero’s Elegant Style published in 1979,Harold Gottoff comments on the contemporary lack of awareness of Cicero’s exceptional role inhistory, and in the history of ideas:It would be difficult to think of any other figure of Western cultural history who has sufferedthe eclipse of reputation that Cicero has undergone. To the humanists, he was thequintessential model for and of the Renaissance man. In our time he is generally considered tobe a vain, long-winded, essentially ineffectual politician, derivative as a thinker andpretentious as a man of letters. 33Neil Wood opens his study of Cicero’s Social and Political Thought with an equally negativeappraisal of Cicero’s current status. 34 Writing in 1988, he asked, ‘Why should anyone today be31 A measure of the topicality of Blair’s Lectures is seen in the fact that more copies were sold in the nineteenththan in the eighteenth century.32 It was fashionable to attack Cicero, the man, in the later years of the Victorian era and Anthony Trollopemade a point of defending his character in the Preface to his two volume Life of Cicero.33 Harold C Gottoff, Cicero’s Elegant Style: An Analysis of the Pro Archia p. 3.Gottof provides an eloquent analysis of the reasons for Cicero’s startling decline in popularity, treating bothhistorical and literary aspects. The historical circumstances obviously relate to the decline of the immenseauthority of classical culture with the rise of scientific thinking, and a new Romantic attitude of mind. Theliterary causes he puts down to the focus on poetry and the novel, at the expense of all other forms of prose,and the influence of the ‘new criticism’.34 Wood is not a classicist and writes from a Marxist political agenda. Miriam Griffin, (Editor of On Duties (DeOfficiis) in the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) cautions against Wood’s treatmentof Cicero’s history and his analysis of Ciceronian texts, which she sees as oversimplified. I have used Wood35