“Dear Wordsworth—­I received a copy of ‘Peter Bell’ a week ago, and I hope the author will not be offended if I say I do not much relish it.  The humour, if it is meant for humour, is forced; and then the price!—­sixpence would have been dear for it.  Mind, I do not mean your ‘Peter Bell’, but a Peter Bell, which preceded it about a week, and is in every bookseller’s shop window in London, the type and paper nothing differing from the true one, the preface signed W. W., and the supplementary preface quoting, as the author’s words, an extract from the supplementary preface to the ‘Lyrical Ballads.’  Is there no law against these rascals?  I would have this Lambert Simnel whipt at the cart’s tail.” (’The Letters of Charles Lamb’, edited by A. Ainger, vol. ii. p. 20.)

Barron Field wrote on the title-page of his copy of the edition of ‘Peter Bell’, 1819,

  “And his carcase was cast in the way, and the ass stood by it.”

  1 Kings xiii. 24.—­Ed.]

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SUB-FOOTNOTES ON THE TEXT

[Sub-Footnote a:  This stanza, which was deleted from every edition of ‘Peter Bell’ after the two of 1819, was prefixed by Shelley to his poem of ‘Peter Bell the Third’, and many of his contemporaries thought that it was an invention of Shelley’s.  See the note which follows this poem, p. 50.  Crabb Robinson wrote in his ‘Diary’, June 6, 1812: 

“Mrs. Basil Montagu told me she had no doubt she had suggested this image to Wordsworth by relating to him an anecdote.  A person, walking in a friend’s garden, looking in at a window, saw a company of ladies at a table near the window, with countenances fixed.  In an instant he was aware of their condition, and broke the window.  He saved them from incipient suffocation.”

Wordsworth subsequently said that he had omitted the stanza only in deference to the “unco guid.”  Crabb Robinson remonstrated with him against its exclusion.—­Ed.]

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LINES,[A] COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR, JULY 13, 1798 [B]

Composed July 1798.—­Published 1798

[July 1798.  No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this.  I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days, with my sister.  Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.  It was published almost immediately after in the little volume of which so much has been said in these Notes, the “Lyrical Ballads,” as first published at Bristol by Cottle.—­I.F.]

Included among the “Poems of the Imagination.”—­Ed.