style, as burlesque as the "Splendid Shilling." These two writers, for Cowper is no poet, come into comparison in one great work, the translation of Homer. Now, with all the great, and manifest, and manifold, and reproved, and acknowledged, and uncontroverted faults of Pope's translation, and all the scholarship, and pains, and time, and trouble, and blank verse of the other, who can ever read Cowper? and who will ever lay down Pope, unless for the original? Pope's was "not Homer, it was Spondanus;" but Cowper's is not Homer either, it 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. Has any human reader ever succeeded? And now that we have heard the Catholic reproached with envy, duplicity, licentiousness, 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 with Mrs. Unwin was pure enough, for the old lady was devout, and he was deranged; but why then is the infirm and then elderly Pope to be reproved for his connection with Martha Blount? Cowper was the almoner of Mrs. Throgmorton; but Pope's charities were his own, and they were noble and extensive, far beyond his fortune's warrant. Pope was the tolerant yet steady adherent of the most 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. Mr. Bowles, apparently not relying entirely upon his own arguments, has, in person or by proxy, brought forward the names of Southey and Moore. Mr. Southey "agrees entirely with Mr. Bowles in his invariable principles of poetry." The least that Mr. Bowles can do in return is to approve the "invariable principles of Mr. Southey." I should have thought that the word "invariable" might have stuck in Away, then, with this cant about nature, and "invariable principles of poetry!" A great artist will make a block of stone as sublime as a mountain, and a good poet can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than inhabits the forests of America. It is the business and the proof of a poet to give the lie to the proverb, and sometimes to “make a silken purse out of a sow's ear;" and to con Southey's throat, like Macbeth'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, And in asterisks let him remain. Whoever this person may be, he deserves, for such judgment of Midas, that "the nail" which Mr. Bowles has "hit in the head," should be driven through his own ears; I am sure that they are long enough. 1 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 architecture; and, more barbarous than the barbarians from whose practice I have borrowed the 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 that amongst those I have been (or it may be and theirs for ever and ever. I shall be told still am) conspicuous true, and I am ashamed of it. I have been amongst the builders of this Babel, attended by a confusion of tongues, but never amongst the envious destroyers of the classic temple of our predecessor. I have loved and honoured the fame and name of that illustrious and unrivalled man, far more than my own paltry renown, and the trashy jingle of the crowd of "Schools" and upstarts, who pretend to rival, or even surpass him. Sooner than a single leaf should be torn 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, There are those who will believe this, and those who will not. You, sir, know how far I am sincere, and whether my opinion, not only in the short work intended for publication, and in private letters which can never be published, clude with another homely proverb, "a good workman will not find fault with his tools." ["How the deuce was I to suppose that the first four asterisks meant Campbell' and not Pope, and that the blank signature meant Thomas Moore ? You see what comes of being familiar with parsons."— Lord Byron to Mr. Moore. See antè, p. 513.] 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 mankind, 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 has or has not been the same. I look upon this as the declining age of English poetry; no regard for others, no selfish feeling, can prevent me from seeing this, and expressing the truth. There can be no worse sign for the taste of the times than the depreciation of 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 moral-preservation of Shakspeare and Milton; but the ists. Of 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 only true "poet" in its real sense, "the maker," 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 poet as 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 I "To rival all but Shakspeare's name below." 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 Satur day Night, a 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 1 If the opinions cited by Mr. Bowles, of Dr. Johnson against Pope, are to be taken as decisive authority, they will also hold good against Gray, Milton, Swift, Thomson, and Dryden: in that case what becomes of Gray's poetical, and Milton's moral character? even of Milton's poetical character, or, indeed, of English poetry in general? for Johnson strips many a leaf from every laurel. Still Johnson's is the finest critical work extant, and can never be read without instruction and delight. 2 ["Mr. Pope never flattered any body for money. Alderman Barber had a great inclination to have a stroke in his commendation inserted in some part of Mr. Pope's writings. He did not want money and he wanted fame. 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. Το John Murray, Esq. Yours ever, very truly, BYRON. Post Scriptum.-Long as this letter has grown, I find it necessary to append a postscript; if possible, a short one. Mr. Bowles denies that he has accused 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. 2 There is Pope's cold answer to Halifax when he proposed a pension 3; his behaviour to Craggs 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 He would probably have given four or five thousand pounds to have been gratified in this desire, and gave Mr. Pope to understand as much; but Mr. Pope would never comply with such a baseness."— SPENCE, p. 308.] 3 ["I wrote to Lord Halifax to thank him for his most obliging offer; saying, that I had considered the matter over fully, and that all the difference I could find in having or not having a pension was, that if I had one I might live more at large in town; and that if I had not, I might live happily enough in the country. So the thing dropped, and I had my liberty without a coach." - POPE, in Spence, p. 305.] 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 something a little more serious in Mr. Bowles's declaration, 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."1 What! is it come to this? Does Mr. Bowles sit down to write a minute and laboured life and edition of a great poet? Does he anatomise 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 recollection?" 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 pardoned to a schoolboy, to pass current in a matter which so nearly concerns the fame of the first poet of his age, if not of his country? If Mr. Bowles so readily forgets the virtues of others, why complain so grievously that others have a better memory for his own faults?? They are but the faults of an author; while the virtues he omitted from his catalogue are essential to the justice due to a man. 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 Quarterly. 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 ["Mr. Pope desired Dr. Young to forward five guineas to poor Savage, when he was in Newgate for the death of Sinclair; the doctor was so good as to carry it himself, and Mr. Pope afterwards told him that if Savage should be in want of necessaries he had five more ready at his service."— SPENCE, p. 356.] 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 be well pronounced. In the review of "The Fall of Jerusalem," it is stated, that I have devoted "my powers, &c. 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 the critic might have praised Milman without finding it necessary to abuse me;" but did I not add at the same time, or soon after (àpropos, 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 circumstance which occurred on board of a frigate in which I was a passenger and guest of the captain's for a considerable time. The surgeon on board, a very gentlemanly young mas, and remarkably able in his profession, wore a wig. Upon this ornament he was extremely tenacious. As naval jests are sometimes a little rough, his brother officers made 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 with you; you grow scurrilous." He would not 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. 2 ["The memory of Mr. Bowles is of a peculiar nature: if it be defective as to one class of ideas, it is remarkably retentive of another; like a sieve, letting the fine slip away, but retaining whatever is coarse and offensive." Quart. Rev. vol. xxxii. p. 278.] 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.! Dear Sir, Ravenna, March 25. 1821. IN the further "Observations" of Mr. Bowles, in rejoinder to the charges brought against his edition of Pope, it is to be regretted that he has lost his 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 case and, 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. con Mr. Bowles sets out with repeating his " firmed conviction," that "what he said of the moral part of Pope's character was, generally speaking, true; and that the principles of poetical criticism which he has laid down are invariable and invulnerable," &c. ; 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 But it is nothing to the purpose for it was 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. persons. After these prefatory remarks of "conviction," &c. 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 up 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 1 [First published in 1835.] 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. 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 examination 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 pretensions 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," &c. &c. &c. - Mr. Bowles's sensibility in denying his "sensitiveness to criticism" proves, perhaps, too much. But if he has been so charged, and truly what then? There is no moral turpitude 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. I should rather hope that some of the downright and dishonest will read and be But the whole of his converted or convicted. reasoning is here superfluous "an author is justified in appealing," &c. 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 literary public all the circumstances which have led to his name and Mr. Gilchrist's being brought together," &c. Courtesy requires, in speaking of others and ourselves, that we should place the name of the former first- and not "Ego 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, &c. 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, And so on-to "bloody law" and "red scourges," with other similar phrases, which may not be altogether agrecable to the above-mentioned "most respectable characters." Mr. Bowles goes on, "I concluded my observations in 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 always have been ready to ludmit 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 a 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 tenour, 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 -- 1 ["Hold, Sir!" said Johnson; "don't talk of rudeness: remember, Sir, you told me," puffing hard with passion struggling for a vent, "I was short-sighted. « 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. But Mr. Bowles" has since read a publication by him (Mr. Gilchrist) containing such vulgar slander, affecting private life and character," &c. &c. ; and Mr. Gilchrist has also had the advantage of reading 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 shop-boy, half a hogshead of brown treacle," &c. 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.” 1 As a man's profession is generally no more in his own power than his person- both having been made out for him-it is hard that be should be reproached with either, and still more that an honest calling should be made a reproach. If there is any thing more honourable to Mr. Gilchrist than another, it is that being engaged in commerce he has had the taste, and found the leisure, to become so able a proficient in the higher literature of his own and other countries. Mr. Bowles, who will be proud to own Glover, Chatterton, Burns, and Bloomfield for his peers, should hardly have quarrelled with Mr. Gilchrist for his eritie. 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 respectable 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 We have done with civility. We are to be as rude as we please."- Boswell, vol. vii. p. 111.] |