No More Learning

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.

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,
O'er the wide world wandering be. --
First, the antenatal Peter,
Wrapped in weeds of the same metre,
The so-long-predestined raiment _5
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 Aldric's themes) _10
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, _15
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 _20
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,-- _25
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. _30
The next Peter Bell was he,
Predevote, like you and me,
To good or evil as may come;
His was the severer doom,--
For he was an evil Cotter, _35
And a polygamic Potter.
And the last is Peter Bell,
Damned since our first parents fell,
Damned eternally to Hell--
Surely he deserves it well! _40

NOTES:
_10 Aldric's] i. e. Aldrich's--a spelling adopted here by Woodberry.

(_36 The oldest scholiasts read--
A dodecagamic Potter.
This is at once more descriptive and more megalophonous,--but the
alliteration of the text had captivated the vulgar ear of the herd of
later commentators. --[SHELLEY'S NOTE. ])


PART 1.