Peter Bell the Third was published in Mrs. Shelley's second edition of the collected poems, 1839. The poem was composed at Florence during the latter part of October, 1819, and sent, November 2, to Hunt to be published by Ollier without Shelley's name. Why it was not issued is unknown. John Hamilton Reynolds had published, early in the year, Peter Bell, a Lyrical Ballad, a satire upon Wordsworth's poetry. A few days later Peter Bell, a Lyrical Ballad, by Wordsworth, appeared. Both these poems were noticed in Hunt's Examiner, April 26 and May 3. It is presumed that these reviews are the criticisms referred to by Mrs. Shelley as reaching Shelley at Leghorn and affording him much amusement. His own poem, thus suggested, was due less to dissatisfaction with Wordsworth's verse than with his principles. HAMLET. - Marry, this is Miching Mallecho; it means mischief. DEDICATION SHAKESPEARE. TO THOMAS BROWN, ESQ., THE YOUNGER, H. F. DEAR TOM, Allow me to request you to introduce Mr. Peter Bell to the respectable family of the Fudges. Although he may fall short of those very considerable personages in the more active properties which characterize the Rat and the Apostate, I suspect that even you, their historian, will confess that he surpasses them in the more peculiarly legitimate qualification of intolerable dulness. You know Mr. Examiner Hunt; well- it was he who presented me to two of the Mr. Bells. My intimacy with the younger Mr. Bell naturally sprung from this introduction to his brothers. And in presenting him to you I have the satisfaction of being able to assure you that he is considerably the dullest of the three. There is this particular advantage in an acquaintance with any one of the Peter Bells that, if you know one Peter Bell, you know three Peter Bells; they are not one, but three ; not three, but one. An awful mystery, which, after having caused torrents of blood and having been hymned by groans enough to deafen the music of the spheres, is at length illustrated to the satisfaction of all parties in the theological world by the nature of Mr. Peter Bell. Peter is a polyhedric Peter, or a Peter with many sides. He changes colors like a chameleon and his coat like a snake. He is a Proteus of a Peter. He was at first sublime, pathetic, impressive, profound; then dull; then prosy and dull; and now dull — oh, so very dull! it is an ultralegitimate dulness. You will perceive that it is not necessary to consider Hell and the Devil as supernatural machinery. The whole scene of my epic is in "this world which is ". us before his conversion to White Obi— -so Peter informed The world of all of us, and where We find our happiness, or not at all. Let me observe that I have spent six or seven days in composing this sublime piece; the orb of my moon-like genius has made the fourth part of its revolution round the dull earth which you inhabit, driving you mad, while it has retained its calmness and its splendor, and I have been fitting this its last phase "to occupy a permanent station in the literature of my country." Your works, indeed, dear Tom, sell better; but mine are far superior. The public is no judge; posterity sets all to rights. Allow me to observe that so much has been written of Peter Bell that the present history can be considered only, like the Iliad, as a continuation of that series of cyclic poems which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop, which closes the poem continued by me, being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a very qualified import. Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges, you will receive from them; and in the firm expectation that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians, I remain, dear Tom, December 1, 1819. Yours sincerely, MICHING MALLECHO. P. S.-Pray excuse the date of place; so soon as the profits of the publication come in, I mean to hire lodgings in a more respectable street. |