Finally, as
though the very spirit of parody danced in the company of this strange
poem, Wordsworth himself chronicled its ill-fate in a sonnet imitated
from Milton's defence of "Tetrachordon," singing how, on the
appearance of _Peter Bell_,
_a harpy brood
On Bard and Hero clamourously fell_.
Of the poem which enjoyed so singular a fate, Lord Houghton has
quietly remarked that it could not have been written by a man with a
strong sense of humour. This is true of every part of it, of the stiff
and self-sufficient preface, and of the grotesque prologue, both of
which in all probability belong to 1819, no less than of the story
itself, in its three cantos or parts, which bear the stamp of Alfoxden
and 1798. The tale is not less improbable than uninteresting. In the
first part, a very wicked potter or itinerant seller of pots, Peter
Bell, being lost in the woodland, comes to the borders of a river, and
thinks to steal an ass which he finds pensively hanging its head over
the water; Peter Bell presently discovers that the dead body of the
master of the ass is floating in the river just below. (The poet, as
he has naively recorded, read this incident in a newspaper.
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