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Peter Bell the Third By: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) |
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By Miching Mallecho Is it a party in a parlour,
Crammed just as they on earth were crammed,
Some sipping punch some sipping tea;
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent, and all damned!
"Peter Bell", by W. WORDSWORTH. OPHELIA. What means this, my lord?
HAMLET. Marry, this is Miching Mallecho; it means mischief.
SHAKESPEARE.
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. 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
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 of
criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their
historians. I remain, dear Tom, yours sincerely, MICHING MALLECHO. December 1, 1819... Continue reading book >>
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Literature |
Poetry |
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