No More Learning

all the words which have been,
are, or may be expended by, for, against, with, or on him. A
sufficient proof of the utility of this history. Peter's progenitor
who selected this name seems to have possessed A PURE ANTICIPATED
COGNITION of the nature and modesty of this ornament of his
posterity. --[SHELLEY'S NOTE. ])

_602-3 See Editor's Note.

(_583 A famous river in the new Atlantis of the Dynastophylic
Pantisocratists. --[SHELLEY'S NOTE. ])

(_588 See the description of the beautiful colours produced during the
agonizing death of a number of trout, in the fourth part of a long
poem in blank verse, published within a few years. ["The Excursion", 8
2 568-71. --Ed. ] That poem contains curious evidence of the gradual
hardening of a strong but circumscribed sensibility, of the perversion
of a penetrating but panic-stricken understanding. The author might
have derived a lesson which he had probably forgotten from these sweet
and sublime verses:--

'This lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
Taught both by what she (Nature) shows and what conceals,
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels. '--[SHELLEY'S NOTE. ])

(_652 It is curious to observe how often extremes meet. Cobbett and
Peter use the same language for a different purpose: Peter is indeed a
sort of metrical Cobbett.
Cobbett is, however, more mischievous than
Peter, because he pollutes a holy and how unconquerable cause with the
principles of legitimate murder; whilst the other only makes a bad one
ridiculous and odious.

If either Peter or Cobbett should see this note, each will feel more
indignation at being compared to the other than at any censure implied
in the moral perversion laid to their charge. --[SHELLEY'S NOTE. ])


NOTE ON PETER BELL THE THIRD, BY MRS. SHELLEY.

In this new edition I have added "Peter Bell the Third". A critique on
Wordsworth's "Peter Bell" reached us at Leghorn, which amused Shelley
exceedingly, and suggested this poem.

I need 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--a man 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 ardour
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 those 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 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.