He quits that moonlight yard of skulls, And still he feels right glad, and smiles With moral joy at that old tomb; Peter’s cheek recalls its bloom, And as he creepeth by the tiles, He mutters ever—­“W.W.  Never more will trouble you, trouble you.”

Peter Bell the Second, as it is convenient, though not strictly accurate, to call Reynold’s “antenatal Peter,” was more popular than the original.  By May a third edition had been called for, and this contained fresh stanzas and additional notes.

Another parody, which ridiculed the affection for donkeys displayed both by Wordsworth and Coleridge, was called The Dead Asses:  A Lyrical Ballad; and an elaborate production, the author of which I have not been able to discover, was published later on in the year, Benjamin the Waggoner (Baldwin, Craddock and Joy, 1819), which, although the title suggests The Waggoner of Wordsworth, is entirely taken up with making fun of Peter Bell.  This parody—­and it is certainly neither pointless nor unskilful—­chiefly deals with the poet’s fantastic prologue.  Then, no less a person than Shelley, writing to Leigh Hunt from Florence in November of the same year, enclosed a Peter Bell the Third which he desired should be printed, yet in such a form as to conceal the name of the author.  Perhaps Hunt thought it indiscreet to publish this not very amusing skit, and it did not see the light till long after Shelley’s death.  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.) In the second part Peter drags the dead man to land, and starts on the ass’s back to find the survivors.  In the third part a vague spiritual chastisement falls on Peter Bell for his previous wickedness.  Plot there is no more than this, and if proof were wanted of the inherent innocence of Wordsworth’s mind, it is afforded by the artless struggles which he makes to paint a very wicked man.  Peter Bell has had twelve wives, he is indifferent to primroses upon a river’s brim, and he beats asses when they refuse to stir.  This is really all the evidence brought against one who is described, vaguely, as combining all vices that “the cruel city breeds.”