Accordingly, the thin octavo described at the head of this chapter duly appeared in April 1819.  It was so tiny that it had to be eked out with the Sonnets written to W. Westall’s Views, and it was adorned by an engraving of Bromley’s, after a drawing specially made by Sir George Beaumont to illustrate the poem.  A letter to Beaumont, unfortunately without a date, in which this frontispiece is discussed, seems to suggest that the engraving was a gift from the artist to the poet; Wordsworth, “in sorrow for the sickly taste of the public in verse,” opining that he cannot afford the expense of such a frontispiece as Sir George Beaumont suggests.  In accordance with these fears, no doubt, an edition of only 500 was published; but it achieved a success which Wordsworth had neither anticipated nor desired.  There was a general guffaw of laughter, and all the copies were immediately sold; within a month a ribald public received a third edition, only to discover, with disappointment, that the funniest lines were omitted.

No one admired Peter Bell.  The inner circle was silent.  Baron Field wrote on the title-page of his copy, which now belongs to Mr. J. Dykes Campbell, “And his carcass was cast in the way, and the Ass stood by it.”  Sir Walter Scott openly lamented that Wordsworth should exhibit himself “crawling on all fours, when God has given him so noble a countenance to lift to heaven.”  Byron mocked aloud, and, worse than all, the young men from whom so much had been expected, les jeunes feroces, leaped on the poor uncomplaining Ass like so many hunting-leopards.  The air was darkened by hurtling parodies, the arrangement of which is still a standing crux to the bibliographers.

It was Keats’s friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, who opened the attack.  His parody (Peter Bell:  a Lyrical Ballad.  London, Taylor and Hessey, 1819) was positively in the field before the original.  It was said, at the time, that Wordsworth, feverishly awaiting a specimen copy of his own Peter Bell from town, seized a packet which the mail brought him, only to find that it was the spurious poem which had anticipated Simon Pure. The Times protested that the two poems must be from the same pen.  Reynolds had probably glanced at proofs of the genuine poem; his preface is a close imitation of Wordsworth’s introduction, and the stanzaic form in which the two pieces are written is identical.  On the other hand, the main parody is made up of allusions to previous poems by Wordsworth, and shows no acquaintance with the story of Peter Bell.  Reynolds’s whole pamphlet—­preface, text, and notes—­is excessively clever, and touches up the bard at a score of tender points.  It catches the sententious tone of Wordsworth deliciously, and it closes with this charming stanza: