LV make LXII 250 'Thou art clothes, and fire, and food'Or turn their wealth to arms, and LVI 'To the rich thou art a check, LVII 225 Thou art Justice-ne'er for gold 230 LVIII "Thou art Wisdom-Freemen never LIX 'Thou art Peace-never by thee LX 'What if English toil and blood Was poured forth, even as a flood? It availed, Oh, Liberty, To dim, but not extinguish thee. 245 LXI War for thy beloved sake On wealth, and war, and fraudwhence they Drew the power which is their 270 "Thou art Love-the rich have kissed' From the corners uttermost Christ, Give their substance to the free moan For others' misery or their own 1, 233 the Hunt MS., edd. 1832, 1839; both Wise MS. 234 Freemen Wise MS., Hunt MS., edd. 1839; Freedom ed. 1832. 235 Dream Wise MS., Hunt MS., edd. 1839 ; Dreams ed. 1832. damn] doom edd. 1839 only. The following stanza is found (cancelled) at this place in the Wise MS. :— 'From the cities where from caves, Like the dead from putrid graves, Troops of starvelings gilding come, years after, made him long to teach his injured countrymen how to resist. Inspired by these feelings, he wrote the Mask of Anarchy, which he sent to his friend Leigh Hunt, to be inserted in the Examiner, of which he was then the Editor. THOUGH Shelley's first eager desire | compassion. The great truth that the to excite his countrymen to resist openly many, if accordant and resolute, could the oppressions existent during the control the few, as was shown some good old times' had faded with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He was a republican, and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our nature; the necessaries of life when fairly earned by labour, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism that looked upon the people as not to be consulted, or protected from want and ignorance, was intense. He was residing near Leghorn, at Villa Valsovano, writing The Cenci, when the news of the Manchester Massacre reached us; it roused in him violent emotions of indignation and 346 slay Wise MS., Hunt MS., edd. 1839; Hunt MS., ed. 1832; in the wars edd. 1839. 'I did not insert it,' Leigh Hunt writes in his valuable and interesting preface to this poem, when he printed it in 1832, 'because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.' Days of outrage have passed away, and with them the exasperation that would stay ed. 1832. 357 in wars Wise MS., and unpolished, but many stanzas are all his own. I heard him repeat, and admired, those beginning cause such an appeal to the many to be injurious. Without being aware of them, they at one time acted on his suggestions, and gained the day. But they rose when human life was respected by the Minister in power; such was not the case during the Adminis- to belong. But the most touching tration which excited Shelley's abhor rence. 'My Father Time is old and gray,' before I knew to what poem they were passage is that which describes the blessed effects of liberty; it might make a patriot of any man whose heart was not wholly closed against his humbler The poem was written for the people, and is therefore in a more popular tone than usual: portions strike as abrupt | fellow-creatures. PETER BELL THE THIRD BY MICHING MALLECHO, Esq. Is it a party in a parlour, Some sipping punch-some sipping tea; damned! Peter Bell, by W. WORDSWORTH. OPHELIA.-What means this, my lord? SHAKESPEARE. [Composed at Florence, October, 1819, and forwarded to Hunt (Nov. 2) to be published by C. & J. Ollier without the author's name; ultimately printed by Mrs. Shelley in the second edition of the Poetical Works, 1839. A skit by John Hamilton Reynolds, Peter Bell, a Lyrical Ballad, had already appeared (April, 1819), a few days before the publication of Wordsworth's Peter Bell, a Tale. These productions were reviewed in Leigh Hunt's Examiner (April 26, May 3, 1819); and to the entertainment derived from his perusal of Hunt's criticisms the composition of Shelley's Peter Bell the Third is chiefly owing.] DEDICATION TO THOMAS BROWN, ESQ., THE YOUNGER, H.F. 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. DEAR TOM-Allow me to request | from this introduction to his brothers. 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 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 colours 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 ultra-legitimate 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 '--so Peter informed us before his conversion to White Obi '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 moonlike 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 splendour, 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 Bells and the Fudges, and their hisof criticism, the respective merits of the torians. I remain, dear Tom, yours sincerely, MICHING MALLECHO. December 1, 1819. 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. PROLOGUE PETER BELLS, one, two and three, meant The second Peter; whose ambition Is to link the proposition, As the mean of two extremes- Shielding from the guilt of schism 10 Aldric's] i. e. Aldrich's—a spelling adopted here by Woodberry. 10 15 |