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letter on or to (for I forget which) the | have lent his talents to such a task. I editor of "Blackwood's Edinburgh Maga- he had been a fool, there would have been zine;" and here I doubt that Mr. Bowles some excuse for him; if he had been will not approve of my sentiments.

Although I regret having published “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," the part which I regret the least is that which regards Mr. Bowles with reference to Pope. Whilst I was writing that publication, in 1807 and 1808, Mr. Hobhouse was desirous that I should express our mutual opinion of Pope, and of Mr. Bowles's edition of his works. As I had completed my outline, and felt lazy, I requested that he would do so. He did it. His fourteen lines on Bowles's Pope are in the first edition of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers;" and are quite as severe and much more poetical than my own in the second. On reprinting the work, as I put my name to it, I omitted Mr. Hobhouse's lines, and replaced them with my own, by which the work gained less than Mr. Bowles. I have stated this in the preface to the second edition. It is many years since I have read that poem; but the Quarterly Review, Mr. Octavius Gilchrist, and Mr. Bowles himself, have been so obliging as to refresh my memory, and that of the public. I am grieved to say, that in reading over those lines, I repent of their having so far fallen short of what I meant to express upon the subject of Bowles's edition of Pope's Works. Mr. Bowles says, that "Lord Byron knows he does not deserve this character." I know no such thing. I have met Mr. Bowles occasionally, in the best society in London; he appeared to me an amiable, well informed, and extremely able man. I desire nothing better than to dine in company with such a mannered man every day in the week: but of "his character" I know nothing personally; I can only speak to his manners, and these have my warmest approbation. But I never judge from manners, for I once had my pocket picked by the civilest gentleman I ever met with; and one of the mildest persons I ever saw was Ali Pacha. Of Mr. Bowles's "character" I will not do him the injustice to judge from the edition of Pope, if he prepared it heedlessly; nor the justice, should it be otherwise, because I would neither become a literary executioner, nor a personal one. Mr. Bowles the individual, and Mr. Bowles the editor, appear the two most opposite things imaginable.

needy or a bad man, his conduct would have been intelligible: but he is the oppo site of all these; and thinking and feeling as I do of Pope, to me the whole thing is unaccountable. However, I must call thing by their right names. I cannot call his edition of Pope a "candid" work; and 1 still think that there is an affectation d that quality not only in those volumes, ba in the pamphlets lately published.

"Why yet he doth deny his prisoners." Mr. Bowles says, that "he has seen passges in his letters to Martha Blount which were never published by me, and I hop never will be by others; which are s gross as to imply the grossest licentio ness." Is this fair play? It may, or it may not be that such passages exist; and the Pope, who was not a monk, although i catholic, may have occasionally sinned it word and in deed with woman in his youth but is this a sufficient ground for such i sweeping denunciation? Where is the married Englishman of a certain rank life, who provided he has not taken ders) has not to reproach himself between the ages of sixteen and thirty with far more licentiousness than has ever yet bee traced to Pope? Pope lived in the public eye from his youth upwards; he had all the dunces of his own time for his enemies. and, I am sorry to say, some, who have not the apology of dulness for detractisz since his death; and yet to what do all thei accumulated hints and charges amount?to an equivocal liaison with Martha Blount which might arise as much from his infirm ities as from his passions; to a hopeles flirtation with Lady Mary W. Montagu to a story of Cibber's; and to two or three coarse passages in his works. Who could come forth clearer from an invidions in quest on a life of fifty-six years? Why are we to be officiously reminded of such passages in his letters, provided that they exist. Is Mr. Bowles aware to what suc rummaging among "letters" and "stories might lead? I have myself seen a collee tion of letters of another eminent. pre-eminent, deceased poet, so abominably gross, and elaborately coarse, that not believe that they could be paralleled in our language. What is more strange. is, that some of these are couched postscripts to his serious and sentimental letters, to which are tacked either a piece of prose, or some verses, of the most hy perbolical indecency. He himself that if "obscenity (using a much coarser What I saw of Mr. Bowles increased my word) be the sin against the Holy Gh surprise and regret that he should ever he most certainly cannot be saved. Thes

"And he himself one--antithesis."

I won't say "vile," because it is harsh; nor "mistaken," because it has two sylla bles too many but every one must fill up the blank as he pleases.

letters are in existence, and have been seen | cant moral; but always cant, multiplied by many besides myself; but would his through all the varieties of life. It is the editor have been “candid ” in even alluding fashion, and while it lasts will be too to them? Nothing would have even pro- powerful for those who can only exist by voked me, an indifferent spectator, to allude taking the tone of the time. I say cant, to them, but this further attempt at the because it is a thing of words, without depreciation of Pope. the smallest influence upon human actions; What should we say to an editor of the English being no wiser, no better, and Addison, who cited the following passage much poorer, and more divided amongst from Walpole's letters to George Montagu? themselves, as well as far less moral, than Dr. Young has published a new book. they were before the prevalence of this Mr. Addison sent for the young Earl of verbal decorum. This hysterical horror Warwick, as he was dying, to show him of poor Pope's not very well ascertained in what peace a Christian could die; un- and never fully proved amours (for even inckily he died of brandy: nothing makes Cibber owns that he prevented the somea Christian die in peace like being maud- what perilous adventure in which Pope lin! but don't say this in Gath where you was embarking) sounds very virtuous in are." Suppose the editor introduced it a controversial pamphlet; but all men of with this preface: "One circumstance is the world who know what life is, or at mentioned by Horace Walpole, which if least what it was to them in their youth, true was indeed flagitious. Walpole in- must langh at such a ludicrous foundation forms Montagu that Addison sent for the of the charge of “a libertine sort of love;" young Earl of Warwick, when dying, to while the more serious will look upon show him in what peace a Christian could | those who bring forward such charges die; but unluckily he died drunk." Now, upon an insulated fact, as fanatics or hyalthough there might occur on the subse-pocrites, perhaps both. The two are somequent, or on the same page, a faint show times compounded in a happy mixture. of disbelief, seasoned with the expression Mr. Octavius Gilchrist speaks rather of "the same candour" (the same exactly irreverently of a "second tumbler of hot as throughout the book), I should say white-wine-negus." What does he mean? that this editor was either foolish or false Is there any harm in negus? or is it the to his trust; such a story ought not to worse for being hot? or does Mr. Bowles have been admitted, except for one brief drink negus? I had a better opinion of mark of crushing indignation, unless it him. I hoped that whatever wine he drank were completely proved. Why the words was neat; or at least, that like the ordi"if true?" that "if" is not a peace-maker.nary in Jonathan Wild, "he preferred punch, Why talk of "Cibber's testimony" to his the rather as there was nothing against it licentiousness; to what does this amount? in Scripture." I should be sorry to believe that Pope when very young was once de- that Mr. Bowles was fond of negus; it is coyed by some nobleman and the player to such a “candid” liquor, so like a wishya house of carnal recreation. Mr. Bowles washy compromise between the passion for was not always a clergyman; and when wine and the propriety of water. But difhe was a very young man, was he never ferent writers have divers tastes. Judge seduced into as much? If I were in the Blackstone composed his "Commentaries" humour for storytelling, and relating little (he was a poet too in his youth) with a anecdotes, I could tell a much better story bottle of port before him. Addison's conof Mr. Bowles, than Cibber's, upon much versation was not good for much till he better authority, viz. that of Mr. Bowles had taken a similar dose. Perhaps the himself. It was not related by him in my prescription of these two great men was presence, but in that of a third person, not inferior to the very different one of a whom Mr. Bowles, names oftener than once soi-disant poet of this day, who after wanin the course of his replies. This gentle-dering amongst the hills, returns, goes to man related it to me as a humourous bed, and dictates his verses, being fed by and witty anecdote; and so it was, what-a bystander with bread and butter during ever its other characteristics might be. the operation. But should I, for a youthful frolic, brand I now come to Mr. Bowles's "invariable Mr. Bowles with a "libertine sort of love," principles of poetry." These Mr. Bowles or with "licentiousness?" Is he the less and some of his correspondents pronounce now a pions or a good man, for not hav- "unanswerable;" and they are "unanswering always been a priest? No such thing; I am willing to believe him a good man, almost as good a man as Pope, but no better. The truth is, that in these days the grand "primum mobile" of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious,

ed," at least by Campbell, who seems to have been astounded by the title. The sultan of the time being offered to ally himself to a king of France, because "he hated the word league;" which proves that the Padisha understood French. Mr.

Campbell has no need of my alliance, nor they might have seen the sun shining on shall I presume to offer it; but I do hate a footman's livery, or on a brass warmingthat word "invariable." What is there of pan; but could the "calm water," or the human, be it poetry, philosophy, wit, wis-"wind," or the "sun," make all, or any dom, science, power, glory, mind, matter, of these "poetical?" I think not. Mr. life, or death, which is "invariable?" Of Bowles admits "the Ship" to be poetical, but course I put things divine out of the ques-only from those accessaries: now if they tion. Of all arrogant baptisms of a book, confer poetry so as to make one thing poetthis title to a pamphlet appears the most ical, they would make other things poetcomplacently conceited. It is Mr. Camp-ical; the more so, as Mr. Bowles calls a bell's part to answer the contents of this "ship of the line" without them, that is performance, and especially to vindicate his own "Ship," which Mr. Bowles most triumphantly proclaims to have struck to his very first fire.

"Quoth he, there was a Ship;

Now let me go, thou gray-hair'd loon, Or my staff shall make thee skip." It is no affair of mine, but having once begun (certainly not by my own wish, but called upon by the frequent recurrence to my name in the pamphlets), I am like an Irishman in a “row,” “any body's customI shall therefore say a word or two on the "Ship."

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to say, its "masts and sails and streamers," "blue bunting,” and “coarse_canvas,” and "tall poles." So they are; and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is grass, and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy.

Did Mr. Bowles ever gaze upon the sea? I presume that he has, at least upon a seapiece. Did any painter ever paint the sea only, without the addition of a ship, boat, wreck, or some such adjunct? Is the sea itself a more attractive, a more moral, a more poetical object with or without a vessel, breaking its vast but fatiguing monotony? Is a storm more poetical without a ship; or, in the poem of the Shipwreck is it the storm or the ship which most interests? both much undoubtedly; but without the vessel, what should we care for the tempest? It would sink into mere descriptive poetry, which in itself was never esteemed a high order of that art

Mr. Bowles asserts that Campbell's "Ship of the Line" derives all its poetry not from "art," but from "nature." "Take away the waves, the winds, the sun, one will become a stripe of blue bunting; and the other a piece of coarse canvas on three tall poles." Very true; take away the "waves," "the winds," and there will be no ship at all, not only for poetical, but I look upon myself as entitled to talk for any other purpose; and take away "the of naval matters, at least to poets:- with sun," and we must read Mr. Bowles's pam- the exception of Walter Scott, Moore, and phlet by candlelight. But the "poetry" Southey, perhaps (who have been voyagers), of the "Ship" does not depend on the I have swam more miles than all the rest waves;" on the contrary, the "Ship of the of them together now living ever sailed, Line" confers its own poetry upon the and have lived for months and months waters, and heightens theirs. I do not shipboard; and during the whole peried deny, that the waves and winds," and of my life abroad have scarcely ever passed above all "the sun," are highly poetical; a month out of sight of the ocean: besides we know it to our cost, by the many de- being brought up from two years till te scriptions of them in verse: but if the on the brink of it. I recollect, when waves bore only the foam upon their anchored off Cape Sigeum, in 1810, in an bosoms, if the winds wafted only the sea- English frigate, a violent squall coming weed to the shore, if the sun shone neither on at sunset, so violent as to make us upon pyramids, nor fleets, nor fortresses, imagine that the ship would part cable. would its beams be equally poetical? I or drive from her anchorage. Mr. Hob think not: the poetry is at least reciprocal. house and myself, and some officers had Take away "the Ship of the Line" "swing-been up the Dardanelles to Abydos, and ing round" the "calm water," and the were just returned in time. The aspect calm water becomes a somewhat monoton-of a storm in the Archipelago is as pot ous thing to look at, particularly if not ical as need be, the sea being particularly transparently clear; witness the thousands short, dashing, and dangerous, and the who pass by without looking on it at all. navigation intricate and broken by the isles What was it attracted the thousands to the and currents. Cape Sigeum, the tumali ef launch? they might have seen the poetical the Troad, Lemnos, Tenedos, all added to "calm water" at Wapping or in the "Lon- the associations of the time. don Dock," or in the Paddington Canal, seemed the most "poetical" of all at the or in a horse-pond, or in a slopbasin, or moment, were the numbers (about two in any other vase. They might have heard hundred) of Greek and Turkish craft the poetical winds howling through the which were obliged to "cut and run" be chinks of a pigstye, or the garret-window; fore the wind, from their unsafe anchorage.

But what

some for Tenedos, some for other isles, some for the main, and some it might be for eternity. The sight of these little cudding vessels, darting over the foam in the twilight, now appearing and now disappearing between the waves in the cloud of night, with their peculiarly white sails (the Levant sails not being of "coarse canvas,” but of white cotton), skimming along as quickly, but less safely than the sea-mews which hovered over them; their evident distress, their reduction to fluttering specks in the distance, their crowded succession, their littleness, as contending with the giant element, which made our stout forty-four's teak timbers (she was built in India) creak again; their aspect and their motion, all struck me as something far more "poetical" than the mere broad, brawling, shipless sea, and the sullen winds, could possibly have been without them.

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The Euxine is a noble sea to look upon, and the port of Constantinople the most beautiful of harbours, and yet I cannot but think that the twenty sail of the line, some of one hundred and forty guns, rendered it more "poetical" by day in the sun, and by night perhaps still more, for the Turks illuminate their vessels of war in a man- | ner the most picturesque, and yet all this is artificial. As for the Euxine, I stood upon the Symplegades -I stood by the broken altar still exposed to the winds upon one of them-I felt all the "poetry' of the situation, as I repeated the first lines of Medea; but would not that "poetry" have been heightened by the Argo? It was so even by the appearance of any merchantvessel arriving from Odessa But Mr. Bowles says, "why bring your ship off the stocks?" For no reason that I know, except that ships are built to be launched. The water undoubtedly HEIGHTENS the poetical associations, thus it does not make them; and the ship amply repays the obligation: they aid each other; the water is more poetical with the ship-the ship less so without the water. But even a ship, laid up in dock, is a grand and a poetical sight. Even an old boat, keel upwards, wrecked upon the barren sand, is a "poetical" object (and Wordsworth, who made a poem about a washingtub and a blind boy, may tell you so as well as I); whilst a long extent of sand and unbroken water, without the boat, would be as like dull prose as any pamphlet lately published.

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What makes the poetry in the image of the "marble waste of Tadmor," in Grainger's “Ode to Solitude," so much admired by Johnson? Is it the "marble," or the "waste," the artificial or the natural object? The "waste" is like all other wastes; but the "marble" of Palmyra makes the poetry of the passage as of the place.

The beautiful but barren Hymettus, the whole coast of Attica, her hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, are in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of Athens, of Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth. But am I to be told that the "nature" of Attica would be more poetical without the “art” of the Acropolis? of the Temple of Theseus? and of the still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely artificial genius? Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands? The COLUMNS of Cape Colonna, or the Cape itself? The rocks at the foot of it, or the recollection that Falconer's ship was bulged upon them? There are a thousand rocks and capes, far more picturesque than those of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves; what are they to a thousand scenes in the wilder parts of Greece, of Asia Minor, Switzerland, or even of Cintra in Portugal, or to many scenes of Italy, and the Sierras of Spain? But it is the "art," the columns, the temples, the wrecked vessel, which give them their antique and their modern poetry, and not the spots themselves. Without them, the spots of earth would be unnoticed and unknown; buried, like Babylon and Nineveh, in indistinct confusion, without poetry, as without existence; but to whatever spot of earth these ruins were transported, if they were capable of transportation, like the obelisk, and the sphinx, and the Memnon's head, there they would still exist in the perfection of their beauty and in the pride of their poetry. I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture; but why did I do so? The ruins are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less so without them. Such is the poetry of art.

Mr. Bowles contends, again, that the pyramids of Egypt are poetical, because of "the association with boundless deserts," and that a "pyramid of the same dimensions" would not be sublime in "Lincoln's Inn Fields:" not so poctical certainly; but take away the "pyramids," and what is the "desert?" Take away Stone-henge from Salisbury-plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow-Heath, or any other uninclosed down. It appears to me that St. Peter's, the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Palatine, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venus di Medicis, the Hercules, the dying Gladiator, the Moses of Michel Angelo, and all the higher works of Canova (Î have already spoken of those of ancient Greece, still extant in that country, or transported to England), are as poetical as Mont Blanc or Mount Etna, perhaps still more so, as

they are direct manifestations of mind, and the celestial armour, and the very brazen presuppose poetry in their very conception; greaves of the wellbooted Greeks? Is it and have, moreover, as being such, a something of actual life, which cannot belong to any part of inanimate nature, unless we adopt the system of Spinoza, that the world is the Deity. There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice: does this depend upon the sea, or the canals?

"The dirt and sea-weed whence proud Venice rose?"

solely from the legs, and the back, and the breast, and the human body, which they inclose? In that case, it would have been more poetical to have made them fight naked; and Gulley and Gregson, as being nearer to a state of nature, are more poetical, boxing in a pair of drawers, than Heetor and Achilles in radiant armour, and with heroic weapons.

Instead of the clash of helmets, and the Is it the canal which runs between the pa- rushing of chariots, and the whizzing of lace and the prison, or the "Bridge of Sighs" spears, and the glancing of swords, and which connects them, that renders it poet- the cleaving of shields, and the piercing of ical? Is it the "Canal' Grande,” or the Ri- breast-plates, why not represent the Greeks alto which arches it, the churches which and Trojans like two savage tribes, tugging tower over it, the palaces which line, and and tearing, and kicking, and biting, and the gondolas which glide over the waters, gnashing, foaming, grinning, and gouging. that render this city more poetical than in all the poetry of martial nature, uniaRome itself? Mr. Bowles will say, per-cumbered with gross, prosaic artificial arms, haps, that the Rialto is but marble, the an equal superfluity to the natural warrior, palaces and churches only stone, and the gondolas a "coarse" black cloth, thrown over some planks of carved wood, with a shining bit of fantastically-formed iron at the prow, "without" the water. And I tell him that without these the water would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch, and whoever says the contrary, deserves to be at the bottom of that were Pope's heroes are embraced by the mud nymphs. There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington, were it not for the artificial adjuncts above mentioned, although it is a perfectly natural canal, formed by the sea, and the innumerable islands which constitute the site of this extraordinary city.

and his natural poet? Is there any thing unpoetical in Ulysses striking the horses of Rhesus with his bow (having forgotten his thong), or would Mr. Bowles have had him kick them with his foot, or smack them with his hand, as being more unsophisticated?

In Gray's Elegy, is there an image more striking than his "shapeless sculpture?" Of sculpture in general, it may be observed, that it is more poetical than nature itself, inasmuch as it represents and bodies forth that ideal beauty and sublimity which is never to be found in actual nature. This at least is the general opinion; but, always excepting the Venus di Medicis, I differ from that opinion, at least as far as regardi The very Cloaca of Tarquin at Rome female beauty; for the head of Lady Charare as poetical as Richmond - Hill; many lemont (when I first saw her, nine years will think more so. Take away Rome, and ago) seemed to possess all that sculpture leave the Tiber and the seven hills in the could require for its ideal. I recollect seenature of Evander's time: let Mr. Bowles, ing something of the same kind in the head or Mr. Wordsworth, or Mr. Southey, or of an Albanian girl, who was actually enany of the other "naturals," make a poem ployed in mending a road in the mountains, upon them, and then see which is most and in some Greek, and one or two Italian poetical, their production, or the common-faces. But of sublimity, I have never seen est guide-book which tells you the road from St. Peter's to the Coliseum, and informs you what you will see by the way. The ground interests in Virgil, because it will be Rome, and not because it is Evander's rural domain.

Mr. Cowles then proceeds to press Homer into his service, in answer to a remark of Mr. Campbell's, that "Homer was a great describer of works of art." Mr. Bowles contends that all his great power, even in this, depends upon their connexion with nature. The "shield of Achilles derives its poetical interest from the subjects described on it." And from what does the spear of Achilles derive its interest? and the helmet and the mail worn by Patroclus, and

any thing in human nature at all to ap proach the expression of sculpture, either in the Apollo, the Moses, or other of the sterner works of ancient or modern art

Let us examine a little further this “babble of green fields," and of bare nature in general, as superior to artificial imagery, for the poetical purposes of the fine arts. In landscape-painting, the great artist does not give you a literal copy of a country, but he invents and composes one. Nature, in her actual aspect, does not furnish him with such existing scenes as he requires Even where he presents you with some famous city, or celebrated scene from mountain or other nature, it must be taken from some particular point of view, and with

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