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 

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