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Peter Bell the Third was suggested by some reviews, in The Examiner, of Wordsworth's Peter Bell and of John Hamilton Reynolds's satire on Wordsworth of the same title. They amused Shelley, and he wrote the present poem in that vein of fun which seldom appeared in his verse, though it was a characteristic trait of his private life. I think Peter not bad in his way,' wrote Shelley to Ollier, but perhaps no one will believe in anything in the shape of a joke from me.' Shelley's satire is

SHAKESPEARE.

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meant pleasantly enough, as his admiration for Wordsworth's poetic powers is evident in many ways, and he was careful to change the name Emma to Betty, having inadvertently used the former, Emma, I recollect. is the real name of the sister of a great poet who might be mistaken for Peter. Mrs. Shelley in her note states the case frankly and fairly:

'A critique on Wordsworth's Peter Bell reached us at Leghorn, which amused Shelley exceedingly and suggested this poem. I need

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scarcely observe that nothing personal to the Author of Peter Bell is intended in this poem. No man ever admired Wordsworth's poetry more; he read it perpetually, and taught others to appreciate its beauties. This poem is, like all others written by Shelley, ideal. He conceived the idealism of a poet of lofty and creative genius — quitting the glorious calling of discovering and announcing the beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardor for truth and spirit of toleration which Shelley looked on as the sources of the moral improvement and happiness of mankind; but false and injurious opinions, that evil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best allies of purity and virtue. His idea was that a man gifted even as transcendently as the Author of Peter Bell, with the highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness. This poem was written, as a warning not as a narration of the reality. He was unacquainted personally with Wordsworth or with Coleridge (to whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem), and therefore, I repeat, his poem is purely ideal;

it contains something of criticism on the compositions of these great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves.

No poem contains more of Shelley's peculiar views, with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and of the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society. Much of it is beautifully written- and though, like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it must be looked on as a plaything, it has so much merit and poetry · so much of himself in it, that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written.'

Shelley's own account of the burlesque is given in a letter to Hunt:

Now, I only send you a very heroic poem, which I wish you to give to Ollier, and desire him to print and publish immediately, you being kind enough to take upon yourself the correction of the press - not, however, with my name; and you must tell Ollier that the author is to be kept a secret, and that I confide in him for this object as I would confide in a physician or lawyer, or any other man whose professional situation renders the betraying of what is entrusted a dishonor. My motive in this is solely not to prejudge myself in the present moment, as I have only expended a few days in this party squib, and, of course, taken little pains. The verses and language I have let come as they would, and I am about to publish more serious things this winter; afterwards, that is next year, if the thing should be remembered

so long, I have no objection to the author being known, but not now. I should like well enough that it should both go to press and be printed very quickly; as more serious things are on the eve of engaging both the public attention and mine.'

The poem was written at Florence, in the latter part of October, 1819, and sent forward to Hunt at once for publication. It did not appear, however, until twenty years after, when it was included in Mrs. Shelley's second edition of the collected poems, 1839.

DEDICATION

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.

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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.

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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 dulloh, 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 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.

PROLOGUE

PETER BELLS, one, two and three,
O'er the wide world wandering be.
First, the antenatal Peter,

Wrapped in weeds of the same metre,
The so long predestined raiment,
Clothed in which to walk his way meant
The second Peter; whose ambition
Is to link the proposition,

As the mean of two extremes,

(This was learned from Aldrich's themes),
Shielding from the guilt of schism
The orthodoxal syllogism;

The First Peter- he who was
Like the shadow in the glass
Of the second, yet unripe,

His substantial antitype.

Then came Peter Bell the Second,

Who henceforward must be reckoned
The body of a double soul,
And that portion of the whole
Without which the rest would seem
Ends of a disjointed dream.
And the Third is he who has
O'er the grave been forced to pass
To the other side, which is -
Go and try else - just like this.
Peter Bell the First was Peter
Smugger, milder, softer, neater,
Like the soul before it is
Born from that world into this.
The next Peter Bell was he,

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,

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