Isaac D'Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern authors to the dust, and that he earnestly wished for a dozen volumes of _The Diary_. At Green's death material for at least so many supplements were placed in the hands of John Mitford, who did not venture to produce them. From January 1834 to May 1843, however, Mitford was incessantly contributing to _The Gentleman's Magazine_ unpublished extracts from this larger _Diary_. These have never been collected, but my friend, Mr. W. Aldis Wright, possesses a very interesting volume, into which the whole mass of them has been carefully and consecutively pasted, with copious illustrative matter, by the hand of Edward FitzGerald, whose interest in and curiosity about Thomas Green were unflagging. PETER BELL AND HIS TORMENTORS PETER BELL: _A Tale in Verse, by William Wordsworth. London: Printed by Strahan and Spottiswoode, Printers-Street: for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, Paternoster Row_. 1819. None of Wordsworth's productions are better known by name than _Peter Bell_, and yet few, probably, are less familiar, even to convinced Wordsworthians. The poet's biographers and critics have commonly shirked the responsibility of discussing this poem, and when the Primrose stanza has been quoted, and the Parlour stanza smiled at, there is usually no more said about _Peter Bell_. A puzzling obscurity hangs around its history. We have no positive knowledge why its publication was so long delayed; nor, having been delayed, why it was at length determined upon. Yet a knowledge of this poem is not merely an important, but, to a thoughtful critic, an essential element in the comprehension of Wordsworth's poetry. No one who examines that body of literature with sympathetic attention should be content to overlook the piece in which Wordsworth's theories are pushed to their furthest extremity. When _Peter Bell_ was published in April 1819, the author remarked that it had "nearly survived its _minority_; for it saw the light in the summer of 1798." It was therefore composed at Alfoxden, that plain stone house in West Somersetshire, which Dorothy and William Wordsworth rented for the sum of £23 for one year, the rent covering the use of "a large park, with seventy head of deer."