[P. 219.] Peter Bell: a Lyrical Ballad. When Wordsworth's Peter Bell was announced in 1819, John Hamilton Reynolds wrote—it is said in a single day—this Lyrical Ballad and hurried it out before Wordsworth's poem was issued. The fact that Reynolds used Wordsworth's measure suggests that he had seen a copy of the original. It was a criticism by Leigh Hunt of Wordsworth's Peter Bell and Reynolds' parody that moved Shelley to the writing of Peter Bell the Third. To his Peter Bell Reynolds attached a Preface and a short Supplementary Essay, also purporting to be written by W. W.
'It is now (the Preface began) a period of one-and-twenty years since I first wrote some of the most perfect compositions (except certain pieces I have written in my later days) that ever dropped from poetical pen.... It has been my aim and my achievement to deduce moral thunder from buttercups, daisies, celandines, and (as a poet scarcely inferior to myself, hath it) "such small deer." Out of sparrows' eggs I have hatched great truths, and with sextons' barrows have I wheeled into human hearts piles of the weightiest philosophy.... Of Peter Bell I have only thus much to say: It completes the simple system of natural narrative, which I began so early as 1798. It is written in that pure unlaboured style, which can only be met with among labourers.... I commit my Ballad confidently to posterity. I love to read my own poetry: it does my heart good.'
In the Supplementary Essay 'W. W.' was made to declare that he proposed 'in the course of a few years to write laborious lives of all the old people who enjoy sinecures in the text or are pensioned off in the notes of my Poetry.'
[P. 221.] As clustering a relationship. See The Critic, Act II., Scene 2:
And thou, my Whiskerandos, shouldst be father
And mother, brother, cousin, uncle, aunt,
And friend to me!
[P. 228.] Blue Bonnets over the Border. Scott's 'ditty to the ancient air of "Blue Bonnets over the Border,"' The Monastery, chap. xxv:
March, march, Ettrick and Teviotdale,
Why the deil dinna ye march forward in order?