Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.
XC
‘And these words shall then becom
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain
Heard again—again—again—
XCI
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
370
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.’
NOTE ON THE MASK OF ANARCHY, BY MRS. SHELLEY
THOUGH Shelley’s first eager desire to excite his countrymen to resist openly the oppressions existent during ‘the good old times’ had faded with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He was a republican, and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our nature; the necessaries of life when fairly earned by labour, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism that looked upon the people as not to be consulted, or protected from want and ignorance, was intense. He was residing near Leghorn, at Villa Valsovano, writing The Cenci, when the news of the Manchester Massacre reached us; it roused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion. The great truth that the many, if accordant and resolute, could control the few, as was shown some years after, made him long to teach his injured countrymen how to resist. Inspired by these feelings, he wrote the Mask of Anarchy, which he sent to his friend Leigh Hunt, to be inserted in the Examiner, of which he was then the Editor.
‘I did not insert it,’ Leigh Hunt writes in his valuable and interesting preface to this poem, when he printed it in 1832, ‘because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.’ Days of outrage have passed away, and with them the exasperation that would cause such an appeal to the many to be injurious. Without being aware of them, they at one time acted on his suggestions, and gained the day. But they rose when human life was respected by the Minister in power; such was not the case during the Administration which excited Shelley’s abhorrence.
The poem was written for the people, and is therefore in a more popular tone than usual: portions strike as abrupt and unpolished, but many stanzas are all his own. I heard him repeat, and admired, those beginning
‘My Father Time is old and gray,’
before I knew to what poem they were to belong. But the most touching passage is that which describes the blessed effects of liberty; it might make a patriot of any man whose heart was not wholly closed against his humbler fellow-creatures.
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, 1810.
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,
5
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—
10
(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
15
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,
20
And that portion of the whole
Without which the rest would seem
Ends of a disjointed d
ream.—
And the Third is he who has
O’er the grave been forced to pass
25
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
30
Born from that world into this.
The next Peter Bell was he,
Predevote, like you and me,
To good or evil as may come;
His was the severer doom,—
35
For he was an evil Cotter,
And a polygamic Potter.1
And the last is Peter Bell,
Damned since our first parents fell,
Damned eternally to Hell—
40
Surely he deserves it well!
PART THE FIRST
DEATH
I
AND Peter Bell, when he had been
With fresh-imported Hell-fire warmed,
Grew serious—from his dress and mien
’Twas very plainly to be seen
5
Peter was quite reformed.
II
His eyes turned up, his mouth turned down;
His accent caught a nasal twang;
He oiled his hair;2 there might be heard
The grace of God in every word
10
Which Peter said or sang.
III
But Peter now grew old, and had
An ill no doctor could unravel;
His torments almost drove him mad;—
Some said it was a fever bad—
15
Some swore it was the gravel.
IV
His holy friends then came about,
And with long preaching and persuasion
Convinced the patient that, with out
The smallest shadow of a doubt,
20
He was predestined to damnation.
V
They said—‘Thy name is Peter Bell;
Thy skin is of a brimstone hue;
Alive or dead—ay, sick or well—
The one God made to rhyme with hell;
25
The other, I think, rhymes with you.’
VI
Then Peter set up such a yell! —
The nurse, who with some water gruel
Was climbing up the stairs, as well
As her old legs could climb them—fell,
30
And broke them both—the fall was cruel.
VII
The Parson from the casement lept
Into the lake of Windermere—
And many an eel—though no adept
In God’s right reason for it—kept
Gnawing his kidneys half a year.
VIII
And all the rest rushed through the door,
And tumbled over one another,
And broke their skulls.—Upon the floor
Meanwhile sat Peter Bell, and swore,
40
And cursed his father and his mother;
IX
And raved of God, and sin, and death,
Blaspheming like an infidel;
And said, that with his clenchèd teeth
He’d seize the earth from underneath,
45
And drag it with him down to hell.
X
As he was speaking came a spasm,
And wrenched his gnashing teeth asunder;
Like one who sees a strange phantasm
He lay,—there was a silent chasm
Between his upper jaw and under.
XI
And yellow death lay on his face;
And a fixed smile that was not human
Told, as I understand the case,
That he was gone to the wrong place:—
55
I heard all this from the old woman.
XII
Then there came down from Langdale Pike
A cloud, with lightning, wind and hail;
It swept over the mountains like
An ocean,—and I heard it strike
60
The woods and crags of Grasmere vale.
XIII
And I saw the black storm come
Nearer, minute after minute;
Its thunder made the cataracts dumb;
With hiss, and clash, and hollow hum,
65
It neared as if the Devil was in it.
XIV
The Devil was in it:—he had bought
Peter for half-a-crown; and when
The storm which bore him vanished, nought
That in the house that storm had caught
70
Was ever seen again.
XV
The gaping neighbours came next day—
They found all vanished from the shore:
The Bible, whence he used to pray,
Half scorched under a hen-coop lay;
75
Smashed glass—and nothing more!
PART THE SECOND
THE DEVIL
I
THE DEVIL, I safely can aver,
Has neither hoof, nor tail, nor sting;
Nor is he, as some sages swear,
A spirit, neither here nor there,
80
In nothing—yet in everything.
II
He is—what we are; for sometimes
The Devil is a gentleman;
At others a bard bartering rhymes
For sack; a statesman spinning crimes;
85
A swindler, living as he can;
III
A thief, who cometh in the night,
With whole boots and net pantaloons,
Like some one whom it were not right
To mention;—or the luckless wight
90
From whom he steals nine silver spoons.
IV
But in this case he did appear
Like a slop-merchant from Wapping,
And with smug face, and eye severe,
On every side did perk and peer
Till he saw Peter dead or napping.
V
He had on an upper Benjamin
(For he was of the driving schism)
In the which he wrapped his skin
From the storm he travelled in,
100
For fear of rheumatism.
VI
He called the ghost out of the corse;—
It was exceedingly like Peter,—
Only its voice was hollow and hoarse—
It had a queerish look of course—
105
Its dress too was a little neater.
VII
The Devil knew not his name and lot;
Peter knew not that he was Bell:
Each had an upper stream of thought,
Which made all seem as it was not;
110
Fitting itself to all things well.
VIII
Peter thought he had parents dear,
Bothers, sisters, cousins, cronies,
In the fens of Lincolnshire;
He perhaps had found them there
115
Had he gone and boldly shown his
IX
Solemn phiz in his own village;
Where he thought oft when a boy
He’d clomb the orchard walls to pillage
The produce of his neighbour’s tillage,
120
With marvellous pride and joy.
X
And the Devil thought he had,
’Mid the misery and confusion
Of an unjust war, just made
A fortune by the gainful trade
125
Of giving soldiers rations bad—
The world is full of strange delusion—
XI
That he
had a mansion planned
In a square like Grosvenor Square,
That he was aping fashion, and
130
That he now came to Westmoreland
To see what was romantic there.
XII
And all this, though quite ideal,—
Ready at a breath to vanish,—
Was a state not more unreal
135
Than the peace he could not feel,
Or the care he could not banish.
XIII
After a little conversation,
The Devil told Peter, if he chose,
He’d bring him to the world of fashion
140
By giving him a situation
In his own service—and new clothes.
XIV
And Peter bowed, quite pleased and proud,
And after waiting some few days
For a new livery—dirty yellow
145
Turned up with black—the wretched fellow
Was bowled to Hell in the Devil’s chaise.
PART THE THIRD
HELL
I
HELL is a city much like London—
A populous and a smoky city;
There are all sorts of people undone,
150
And there is little or no fun done;
Small justice shown, and still less pity.
II
There is a Castles, and a Canning,
A Cobbett, and a Castlereagh;
All sorts of caitiff corpses planning
155