Peter Bell the Third

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Peter Bell the Third
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
PETER BELL THE THIRD.
BY MICHING MALLECHO, ESQ.
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.
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
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)
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