is not even Cowper. As a child I first read Pope's Homer with a rapture which no subsequent work could ever afford, and children are not the worst judges of their own language. As a boy I read Homer in the original, as we have all done, some of us by force, and a few by favour; under which description I come is nothing to the purpose, it is enough that I read him. As a man I have tried to read Cowper's version, and I found it impossible. I Has any human reader ever succeeded?

"hit in the head," should be driven through his own ears; I am sure that they are long enough.

figure, they are not contented with their own grotesque edifice, unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which preceded, and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall

The attempt of the poetical populace of the present day to obtain an ostracism against Pope, is as easily accounted for as the Athenian's shell against Aristides; they are tired of hearing him always called "the Just." They are also fighting for life; for, if he maintains his station, they will reach their own by falling. They have raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest arAnd now that we have heard the Catholic re-chitecture; and, more barbarous than the barbaproached with envy, duplicity, licentiousness, rians from whose practice I have borrowed the avarice-what was the Calvinist? He attempted the most atrocious of crimes in the Christian code, viz. suicide-and why? because he was to be examined whether he was fit for an office which he seems to wish to have made a sinecure. His connection | be told that amongst those I have been (or it may with Mrs. Unwin was pure enough, for the old lady be, still am) conspicuous-true, and I am ashamed was devout, and he was deranged; but why then is of it. I have been amongst the builders of this the infirm and then elderly Pope to be reproved for Babel, attended by a confusion of tongues, but his connection with Martha Blount? Cowper was never amongst the envious destroyers of the classic the almoner of Mrs. Throgmorton; but Pope's temple of our predecessor. I have loved and hocharities were his own, and they were noble and ex-noured the fame and name of that illustrious and tensive, far beyond his fortune's warrant. Pope | unrivalled man, far more than my own paltry was the tolerant yet steady adherent of the most renown, and the trashy jingle of the crowd of bigoted of sects; and Cowper the most bigoted and despondent sectary that ever anticipated damnation to himself or others. Is this harsh? I know it is, and I do not assert it as my opinion of Cowper personally, but to show what might be said, with just as great an appearance of truth and candour, as all the odium which has been accumulated upon Pope in similar speculations. Cowper was a good man, and lived at a fortunate time for his works.

"schools" and upstarts, who pretend to rival, or even surpass him. Sooner than a single leaf should betorn from his laurel, it were better that all which these men, and that I, as one of their set, have ever written, should

"Line trunks, clothe spice, or, fluttering in a row,
Befringe the rails of Bedlam, or Soho!"

There are those who will believe this, and those Mr. Bowles, apparently not relying entirely upon who will not. You, sir, know how far I am sinhis own arguments, has, in person or by proxy, cere, and whether my opinion, not only in the short brought forward the names of Southey and Moore. work intended for publication, and in private letMr. Southey "agrees entirely with Mr. Bowles in ters which can never be published, has or has not his invariable principles of poetry." The least been the same. I look upon this as the declining that Mr. Bowles can do, in return, is to approve age of English poetry; no regard for others, no the "invariable principles of Mr. Southey." I selfish feeling, can prevent me from seeing this, and should have thought that the word "invariable" expressing the truth. There can be no worse sign might have stuck in Southey's throat, like Mac-for the taste of the times than the depreciation of beth's "Amen!" I am sure it did in mine, and I am not the least consistent of the two, at least as a voter. Moore (et tu, Brute!) also approves, and a Mr. J. Scott. There is a letter, also, of two lines from a gentleman in asterisks, who, it seems, is a poet of the highest rank:"-who can this be? not my friend, Sir Walter, surely. Campbell it can't be; Rogers it won't be.

"You have hit the nail in the head, and **** [Pope, I presume] on the head also.

"I remain yours, affectionately, "(Five Asterisks)." And in asterisks let him remain. Whoever this person may be, he deserves, for such a judgment of Midas, that "the nail" which Mr. Bowles has

Pope. It would be better to receive for proof Mr. Cobbett's rough but strong attack upon Shakspeare and Milton, than to allow this smooth and “candid” undermining of the reputation of the most perfect of our poets, and the purest of our moralists. On his power in the passions, in description, in the mock-heroic, I leave others to descant. I take him on his strong ground, as an ethical poet: in the former none excel, in the mock-heroic and the ethical none equal, him ; and in my mind, the latter is the highest of all poetry, because it does that, in verse, which the greatest of men have wished to accomplish in prose. If the essence of poetry must be a lie, throw it to the dogs, or banish it from your republic, as Plato would have done. He who

can reconcile poetry with truth and wisdom, is the Post Scriptum.-Long as this letter has grown, only true "poet" in its real sense, "the maker" | I find it necessary to append a postcript; if possible, "the creator,”—why must this mean the "liar," the "feigner," the "tale-teller ?" A man may make and create better things than these.

I shall not presume to say that Pope is as high a poetas Shakspeare and Milton,—though his enemy, Warton, places him immediately under them. (1) I would no more say this than I would assert in the mosque (once Saint Sophia's), that Socrates was a greater man than Mahomet. But if I say that he is very near them, it is no more than has been asserted of Burns, who is supposed

"To rival all but Shakspeare's name below."

a short one. Mr. Bowles denies that he has ac-
cused Pope of "a sordid money-getting passion;"
but, he adds, "if I had ever done so, I should be
glad to find any testimony that might show he was
not so." This testimony he may find, to his heart's
content, in Spence and elsewhere. First, there is
Martha Blount, who, Mr. Bowles charitably says,
"probably thought he did not save enough for her,
as legatee." Whatever she thought upon this
point, her words are in Pope's favour. Then there
is Alderman Barber; see Spence's Anecdotes.
There is Pope's cold answer to Halifax when he
proposed a pension: his behaviour to Graggs and
to Addison upon like occasions, and his own two
lines-

"And, thanks to Homer, since I live and thrive,
Indebted to no prince or peer alive;"

written when princes would have been proud to
pension, and peers to promote him, and when the
whole army of dunces were in array against him,
and would have been but too happy to deprive him
of this boast of independence. But there is some-
thing a little more serious in Mr. Bowles's declara-
tion, that he "would have spoken" of his “noble
generosity to the outcast Richard Savage," and
other instances of a compassionate and generous
heart, had they occurred to his recollection
when he wrote." What! is it come to this? Does
Mr. Bowles sit down to write a minute and laboured

I say nothing against this opinion. But of what "order," according to the poetical aristocracy, are Burns's poems? There are his opus magnum, Tam O'Shanter, a tale; the Cotter's Saturday Night, descriptive sketch; some others in the same style: the rest are songs. So much for the rank of his productions; the rank of Burns is the very first of his art. Of Pope I have expressed my opinion elsewhere, as also of the effect which the present attempts at poetry have had upon our literature. If any great national or natural convulsion could or should overwhelm your country, in such sort as to sweep Great Britain from the kingdoms of the earth, and leave only that, after all, the most living of human things, a dead language, to be studied and read, and imitated by the wise of future and far generations, upon foreign shores; if your literature should become the learning of man-life and edition of a great poet? Does he anatokind, divested of party cabals, temporary fashions, and national pride and prejudice; an Englishman, anxious that the posterity of strangers should know that there had been such a thing as a British epic and tragedy, might wish for the preservation of Shakspeare and Milton; but the surviving world would snatch Pope from the wreck, and let the rest sink with the people. He is the moral poet of all civilisation; and as such, let us hope that he will one day be the national poet of mankind. He is the only poet that never shocks; the only poet whose faultlessness has been made his reproach. Cast your eye over his productions; consider their extent, and contemplate their variety:-pastoral, passion, mock-heroic, translation, satire, ethics, all excellent, and often perfect. If his great charm be his melody, how comes it that foreigners adore him, even in their diluted translations? But I have made this letter too long.-Give my compliments to Mr. Bowles.

mise his character, moral and poetical? Does he present us with his faults and with his foibles? Does he sneer at his feelings, and doubt of his sincerity? Does he unfold his vanity and duplicity? and then omit the good qualities which might, in part, have "covered this multitude of sins ?" and then plead that "they did not occur to his recol lection!" Is this the frame of mind and of memory with which the illustrious dead are to be approached? If Mr. Bowles, who must have had access to all the means of refreshing his memory, did not recollect these facts, he is unfit for his task; but if he did recollect, and omit them, I know not what he is fit for, but I know what would be fit for him. Is the plea of "not recollecting" such prominent facts to be admitted? Mr. Bowles has been at a public school, and as I have been publicly educated also, I can sympathise with his predilection. When we were in the third form even, had we pleaded, on the Monday morning, that we had not brought up the Saturday's exercise, because we had forgotten it," what would have been the reply? And is an excuse, which would not be

good against Gray. Milton, Swift, Thomson, and Dryden : in that case what becomes of Gray's poetical, and Milton's moral cha

pardoned to a school-boy, to pass current in a cumstance which occurred on board of a frigate, matter which so nearly concerns the fame of the in which I was a passenger and guest of the captain's first poet of his age, if not of his country? If Mr. for a considerable time. The surgeon on board. a Bowles so readily forgets the virtues of others, why very gentlemanly young man, and remarkably able complain so grievously that others have a better in his profession, wore a wig. Upon this ornament memory for his own faults? They are but the he was extremely tenacious. As naval jests are faults of an author; while the virtues he omitted sometimes a little rough, his brother officers made from his catalogue are essential to the justice due occasional allusions to this delicate appendage to the doctor's person. One day a young lieutenant, in the course of a facetious discussion, said. "Suppose now, doctor, I should take off your hat.”— “Sir,” replied the doctor, "I shall talk no longer

to a man.

even admit so near an approach as to the hat which protected it. In like manner, if any body approaches Mr. Bowles's laurels, even in his outside capacity of an editor, "they grow scurrilous.” You say that you are about to prepare an edition of Pope; you cannot do better for your own credit as a publisher, nor for the redemption of Pope from Mr. Bowles, and of the public taste from rapid degeneracy.

OBSERVATIONS UPON "OBSERVATIONS."

--A SECOND letter to JOHN MURRAY, ESQ. ON
THE REV. W. L. BOWLES's strictures on the
LIFE AND WRITINGS OF POPE.

Now first published.

Mr. Bowles appears, indeed, to be susceptible beyond the privilege of authorship. There is a plaintive dedication to Mr. Gifford, in which he is made responsible for all the articles of the Quar-with you; you grow scurrilous." He would not terly. Mr. Southey, it seems, "the most able and eloquent writer in that Review," approves of Mr. Bowles's publication. Now it seems to me the more impartial, that notwithstanding that "the great writer of the Quarterly” entertains opinions opposite to the able article on Spence, nevertheless that essay was permitted to appear. Is a Review to be devoted to the opinions of any one man? Must it not vary, according to circumstances, and according to the subjects to be criticised? I fear that writers must take the sweets and bitters of the public journals as they occur, and an author of so long a standing as Mr. Bowles might have become accustomed to such incidents; he might be angry, but not astonished. I have been reviewed in the Quarterly almost as often as Mr. Bowles, and have had as pleasant things said, and some as unpleasant, as could well be pronounced. In the review of The Fall of Jerusalem, it is stated that I have devoted "my powers, etc. to the worst parts of Manicheism;" which, being interpreted, means that I worship the devil. Now, I have neither written a reply, nor complained to Gifford. I believe that I observed, in a letter to you, that I thought "that In the further "Observations” of Mr. Bowles, in the critic might have praised Milman without find-rejoinder to the charges brought against his edition ing it necessary to abuse me;" but did I not add, of Pope, it is to be regretted that he has lost his at the same time or soon after (apropos of the note in the book of Travels), that I would not, if it were even in my power, have a single line cancelled on my account in that nor in any other publication? Of course, I reserve to myself the privilege of response when necessary. Mr. Bowles seems in a whimsical state about the author of the article on Spence. You know very well that I am not in your confidence, nor in that of the conductor of the journal. The moment I saw that article, I was morally certain that I knew the author "by his style." You will tell me that I do not know him: that is all as it should be; keep the secret, so shall I, though no one has ever intrusted it to me. He is not the person whom Mr. Bowles denounces. Mr. Bowles's extreme sensibility reminds me of a cir

racter? even of Milton's poetical character, or, indeed, of Engfish poetry in general? for Johnson strips many a leat from

DEAR SIR,

3

0

RAVENNA, March 25, 1821.

C

b

ar

temper. Whatever the language of his antagonists may have been, I fear that his replies have afforded more pleasure to them than to the public. That Mr. Bowles should not be pleased is natural, whether right or wrong; but a temperate defence would have answered his purpose in the former caseand, in the latter, no defence, however violent, can tend to any thing but his discomfiture. I have read over this third pamphlet, which you have been so obliging as to send me, and shall venture a few observations, in addition to those upon the previous controversy.

Mr. Bowles sets out with repeating his “confirmed conviction," that "what he said of the moral part of Pope's character was, generally speaking, true; and that the principles of poetical

every laurel. Still Johnson's is the finest critical work extant, and can never be read without instruction and delight.

criticism which he has laid down are invariable and invulnerable, etc.; and that he is the more persuaded of this by the "exaggerations of his opponents." This is all very well, and highly natural and sincere. Nobody ever expected that either Mr. Bowles, or any other author, would be convinced of human fallibility in their own persons. But it is nothing to the purpose-for it is not what Mr. Bowles thinks, but what is to be thought of Pope, that is the question. It is what he has asserted or insinuated against a name which Is the patrimony of posterity, that is to be tried; and Mr. Bowles, as a party, can be no judge. The more he is persuaded, the better for himself, if it give him any pleasure; but he can only persuade others by the proofs brought out in his defence.

tude in such acuteness of feeling: it has been, and may be, combined with many good and great qualities. Is Mr. Bowles a poet, or is he not? If he be, he must, from his very essence, be sensitive to criticism; and even if he be not, he need not be ashamed of the common repugnance to being attacked. All that is to be wished is, that he had considered how disagreeable a thing it is, before he assailed the greatest moral poet of any age, or in any language.

Pope himself" sleeps well,"-nothing can touch him further; but those who love the honour of their country, the perfection of her literature, the glory of her language-are not to be expected to permit an atom of his dust to be stirred in his tomb, or a leaf to be stripped from the laurel which grows over it.

Mr. Bowles assigns several reasons why and when "an author is justified in appealing to every upright and honourable mind in the kingdom." If Mr. Bowles limits the perusal of his defence to the "upright and honourable" only, I greatly fear that it will not be extensively circulated. Ishould rather hope that some of the downright and dishonest will read and be converted, or convicted. But the whole of his reasoning is here superfluous-" an author is justified in appealing," etc. when and why he pleases. Let him make out a tolerable case, and few of his readers will quarrel with his motives. Mr. Bowles "will now plainly set before the li

After these prefatory remarks of "conviction," etc. Mr. Bowles proceeds to Mr. Gilchrist; whom he charges with "slang" and "slander," besides a small subsidiary indictment of "abuse, ignorance, malice," and so forth. Mr. Gilchrist has, indeed, shown some anger; but it is an honest indignation, which rises in defence of the illustrious dead. It is a generous rage which interposes between our ashes and their disturbers. There appears also to have been some slight personal provocation. Mr. Gilchrist, with a chivalrous disdain of the fury of an incensed poet, put his name to a letter avowing the production of a former essay in defence of Pope, and consequently of an attack upon Mr. Bowles. Mr. Bowles appears to be angry with Mr.terary public all the circumstances which have led Gilchrist for four reasons:-firstly, because he wrote an article in The London Magazine; secondly, because he afterwards avowed it; thirdly, because he was the author of a still more extended article in The Quarterly Review; and, fourthly, because he was NOT the author of the said Quarterly article, and had the audacity to disown it-for no earthly reason but because he had NOT written it. Mr. Bowles declares, that "he will not enter into a particular imagination of the pamphlet," which by a misnomer is called Gilchrist's Answer to Bowles, when it should have been called Gilchrist's Abuse of Bowles. On this error in the baptism of Mr. Gilchrist's pamphlet, it may be observed, that an answer may be abusive and yet no less an answer, though indisputably a temperate one might be the better of the two: but if abuse is to cancel all pretentions to reply, what becomes of Mr. Bowles's answers to Mr. Gilchrist ?

Mr. Bowles continues:-"But as Mr. Gilchrist derides my peculiar sensitiveness to criticism, before I show how destitute of truth is this representation, I will here explicitly declare the only grounds," etc. etc. etc.-Mr. Bowles's sensibility, in denying his sensitiveness to criticism," proves, perhaps, too much. But if he has been so charged,

to his name and Mr. Gilchrist's being brought together," etc. Courtesy requires, in speaking of others and ourselves, that we should place the name of the former first-and not "Bgo et Rex meus." Mr. Bowles should have written "Mr. Gilchrist's name and his."

This point he wishes "particularly to address to those most respectable characters who have the direction and management of the periodical critical press." That the press may be, in some instances, conducted by respectable characters is probable enough; but if they are so, there is no occasion to tell them of it; and if they are not, it is a base adulation. In either case, it looks like a kind of flattery, by which those gentry are not very likely to be softened; since it would be difficult to find two passages in fifteen pages more at variance, than Mr. Bowles's prose at the beginning of this pamphlet, and his verse at the end of it. In page 4, he speaks of "those most respectable characters who have the direction, etc. of the periodical press," and in page 10 we find—

"Ye dark inquisitors, a monk-like band,
Who o'er some shrinking victim author stand,

A solemn, secret, and vindictive brood,
Only terrific in your cowl and hood."

and truly-what then? There is no moral turpi- And so on-to "bloody law” and “red scourges,”

with other similar phrases, which may not be altogether agreeable to the above-mentioned "most respectable characters." Mr. Bowles goes on: "I concluded my observations on the last pamphleteer with feelings not unkind towards Mr. Gilchrist, or" [it should be nor] " to the author of the review of Spence, be he whom he might."- 'I was in hopes, as I have always been ready to admit any errors I might have been led into, or prejudice I might have entertained, that even Mr. Gilchrist might be disposed to a more amicable mode of discussing what I had advanced in regard to Pope's moral character." As Major Sturgeon observes, "There never was a set of more amicable officers with the exception of a boxing-bout between Captain Shears and the Colonel."

A page and half-nay, only a page before-Mr. Bowles re-affirms his conviction, that "what he has said of Pope's moral character is (generally speaking) true," and that his "poetical principles are invariable and invulnerable." He has also published three pamphlets-ay, four, of the same tenor, and yet, with this declaration and these declamations staring him and his adversaries in the face, he speaks of his "readiness to admit errors or to abandon prejudices!!!" His use of the word" amicable" reminds me of the Irish institution (which I have somewhere heard or read of) called the "Friendly Society," where the president always carried pistols in his pocket, so that when one amicable gentleman knocked down another, the difference might be adjusted on the spot, at the harmonious distance of twelve paces.

Glover, Chatterton, Burns, and Bloomfield, for his peers, should hardly have quarrelled with Mr. Gilchrist for his critic. Mr. Gilchrist's station, however, which might conduct him to the highest civic honours, and to boundless wealth, has nothing to require apology; but even if it had, such a reproach was not very gracious on the part of a clergyman, nor graceful on that of a gentleman. The allusion to “Christian criticism” is not particularly happy, especially where Mr. Gilchrist is accused of having "set the first example of this mode in Europe." What Pagan criticism may have been, we know but little; the names of Zoilus and Aristarchus survive, and the works of Aristotle, Longinus, and Quintilian: but of "Christian criticism" we have already had some specimens in the works of Philelphus, Poggius, Scaliger, Milton, Salmasius, the Cruscanti (versus Tasso), the French Academy (against the Cid), and the antagonists of Voltaire and of Pope-to say nothing of some articles in most of the reviews, since their earliest institution in the person of their respect able and still prolific parent, The Monthly. Why, then, is Mr. Gilchrist to be singled out "as having set the first example ?" A sole page of Milton, or Salmasius contains more abuse—rank, rancorous, unleavened abuse-than all that can be raked forth from the whole works of many recent critics. There are some, indeed, who still keep up the good old custom; but fewer English than foreign. It is a pity that Mr. Bowles cannot witness some of the Italian controversies, or become the subject of one. He would then look upon Mr. Gilchrist as a panegyrist.

to determine:-"The pruriency with which his nose is laid to the ground" is an expression which, whether founded or not, might have been omitted. But the "anatomical' minuteness" appears to me justified even by Mr. Bowles's own subsequent quotation. To the point;-"Many facts tend to prove the peculiar susceptibility of his passions; nor can we implicitly believe that the connexion between him and Martha Blount was of a nature so pure and innocent as his panegyrist Ruffhead would have us believe,” etc.—“At no time could she have regarded Pope personally with attachment," etc.—

But Mr. Bowles "has since read a publication by him (Mr. Gilchrist) containing such vulgar slander, In the long sentence quoted from the article in affecting private life and character,” etc. etc.; and The London Magazine, there is one coarse image, Mr. Gilchrist has also had the advantage of read-the justice of whose application I shall not pretend ing a publication by Mr. Bowles sufficiently imbued with personality; for one of the first and principal topics of reproach is that he is a grocer, that he has a "pipe in his mouth, ledger-book, green canisters, dingy shopboy, half a hogshead of brown treacle," etc. Nay, the same delicate raillery is upon the very title-page. When controversy has once commenced upon this footing, as Dr. Johnson said to Dr. Percy, "Sir, there is an end of politeness-we are to be as rude as we please-Sir, you said that I was short-sighted." As a man's profession is generally no more in his own power than his person-both having been made out for him-"But the most extraordinary circumstance, in reit is hard that he should be reproached with either, gard to his connection with female society, was the and still more that an honest calling should be strange mixture of indecent and even profane made a reproach. If there is any thing more ho- levity which his conduct and language often exhinourable to Mr. Gilchrist than another it is, that bited. The cause of this particularity may be being engaged in commerce he has had the taste, sought, perhaps, in his consciousness of physical and found the leisure, to become so able a proficient | defect, which made him affect a character uncon- ! in the higher literature of his own and other coun- genial, and a language opposite to the truth." If tries. Mr. Bowles, who will be proud to own this is not "minute moral anatomy," I should be