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 antenata