XCI

"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number-
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 Masque 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,

presenting him to you, I have the tion of being able to assure you t considerably the dullest of the th

There is this particular advanta acquaintance with any one of t Bells, that if you know one Pe you know three Peter Bells; the one, but three; not three, but c awful mystery, which, after havin torrents of blood, and having been by groans enough to deafen the the spheres, is at length illustrate satisfaction of all parties in the th world, by the nature of Mr. Pete

Peter is a polyhedric Peter, o with many sides. He changes like a chameleon, and his coat like

He is a Proteus of a Peter. first sublime, pathetic, impressi found; then dull; then prosy a and now dull-oh so very dull ultra-legitimate dulness.

You will perceive that it is not r to consider Hell and the Devil a natural machinery. The whole my epic is in this world which Peter informed us before his co to White Obi

"The world of all of us, and where We find our happiness, or not at Let me observe that I have spe seven days in composing this piece; the orb of my moon-like has made the fourth part of its r round the dull earth which you driving you mad, while it has ret

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 characterise 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

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 Water loo 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,

Wrapt 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 learnt 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 Peter Bell the Second,
Who henceforward must be reckoned
The body of a double soul,
And that portion of the whole

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,—
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.
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,
And a polygamic Potter.1
And the last is Peter Bell,
Damned since our first parents fell,
Damned eternally to Hell-
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 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 Which Peter said or sang.

1 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.

To those who have not duly appreciated the distinction between Whale and Russia oil, this attribute might rather seem to belong to the Dandy than the Evangelic. The effect, when to the windward, is indeed so similar, that it requires a subtle naturalist to discriminate the animals. They belong, however, to distinct

genera.

They said "Thy name is Peter Bell; Thy skin is of a brimstone hue; Alive or dead-ay, sick or well

And said, that with his clenched tee He'd seize the earth from underneat And drag it with him down to he

X

As he was speaking came a spasm, And wrenched his gnashing t asunder;

Like one who sees a strange phanta 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 hu
Told, as I understand the case,
That he was gone to the wrong place
I heard all this from the old wom

XII

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, And broke them both-the fall was cruel.

VII

The Parson from the casement leapt Into the lake of WindermereAnd 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,

And cursed his father and his mother;

IX

And raved of God, and sin, and death, Blaspheming like an infidel;

Pike

A cloud, with lightning, wind and h It swept over the mountains like An ocean, and I heard it strike

The woods and crags of Grasmere v

XIII

And I saw the black storm come
Nearer, minute after minute;
Its thunder made the cataracts dum
With hiss, and clash, and hollow hu

It neared as if the Devil was in it

XIV

The Devil was in it :-he had boug

Peter for half-a-crown; and when The storm which bore him vanish nought

That in the house that storm had ca Was ever seen again.

XV

The gaping neighbours came next da They found all vanished from

shore :

The Bible, whence he used to pray, Half scorched under a hen-coop lay

Smashed glass-and nothing mor