is like a gothic fabric, stretching over an unlimited space of ground, here crowning the summit of a deep ravine, and boldly jutting forth in battlements and turrets-there in unpretending majesty, looking from no height upon the tranquil plain; containing too, its donjons and its keeps, its haunted tower and prison cell, contrasted with the tranquillity of its grassy courts, and the solitude of many a retired bower.

A person of ever so much taste may not, indeed cannot, find equal delight in so many different scenes; the lover of Spenser may not be an admirer of Dryden; the lover of Thomson may be no admirer of Pope. In a lover of the deep passion, the heartwrung poetry, of Byron, we can conceive nothing more insipid than the quaint simplicity, the bonhommie, the very sorry, "lackadaisical" lamentations of the "Fairy Queen;"-to the imaginative and temperate-blooded reader of Spenser and Southey, the muse of Byron,, distorted and convulsive under the excessive influence of passion, must appear disgusting, at best unintelligible. And how can the fanciful spirit, that has learned to feast upon the subtilized simplicities of the Lake school, how can he do other than smile with contempt upon what he deems the nothingnesses of Crabbe or of Campbell? And this is as it should be. Let party flourish in poetics as in politics,-only let us carry on the war without virulence or animosity, nor introduce the daggerwork of political warfare into the calmer retirements of criticism. Our poetic library, Heaven knows, is wide enough for all the votaries of all our muses, without there being any necessity for jostling, for stabbing with sharpened pens, shooting one another with pamphlets, or annihilating antagonists with quartos.

If the critical taste of the present age be unjust towards the merit of Pope, this, it must be confessed, is but retributive justice towards the poet who esteemed not Milton, as we learn from Spence, and still less Shakspeare, whom he has often slighted. "It was mighty simple in Rowe," says Pope, "to write a play now professedly in Shakspeare's style, that is, professedly in the style of a bad age." Thus unjust to his predecessors, as well as cruelly and wantonly so to his cotemporaries, the memory of Pope is certainly not one to silence, by its unoffending character, the voice of hostile criticism; on the contrary, we know of no literary character that has merited more the re-action of a critical age to come, than the satirist of the Dunciad and the Moral Epistles. And this is quite sufficient to account for the superciliousness of Johnson, without attributing the biographer's harshness to his hatred of Pope as a catholic. Johnson's age, however, was not mature enough to allow of throwing off the yoke of the couplet, or of listening to any cavil against the poetic supremacy of Pope; the biographer, therefore, attacked him as a man, and left to

Warton the task of aiming at a more vulnerable part of his fame. Warton, in his critical examination of the genius of Pope, made no very original and novel discovery; since the popularity of Cowper, such critical opinions had occurred, and were entertained by every one- -Warton embodied and gave them a tongue. He was a critic of by no means power sufficient to cause a revolution in the taste of a country. Like many poets of enormous originality in seeming, he but followed the stream; and the malevolence, of which he is accused, as the detractor of Pope, might as well be applied to his age, as to him. In fact the French school had become effete; the scroll which we borrowed from our neighbours had been stretched, till it really could contain no more. The taste had now endured for the whole space of a century, reckoning from the days of Waller, and was supported by many causes independent of its intrinsic merit.

"This translation of prose thoughts into poetic language, says Mr. Coleridge, in his Biographia, "had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to these exercises in our public schools."

How far this acted as a cause, we shall not here stop to inquire. Mr. Coleridge goes on to account for the revolution in taste which we have all witnessed; and adds, that Cowper and Bowles were "the first poets, who combined in this age natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head."

Having honourably contributed by his poetry to bring about this important revolution, Mr. Bowles, in an unlucky hour for himself, conceived the intention of putting the finishing stroke to Pope's school, by a life of the poet, and a critical edition of his works. In this Mr. B. overshot his mark, and instead of letting the natural course of things run on-that is, permitted the fame of Pope to sink, like all penultimate things, in quiet and honourable slumber, the officiousness of the editor has effected for Pope what the warmest panegyric could never have done. His hostile attempts upon the bard have called up a host of defenders, even amongst those least likely or inclined to become so (for instance, Byron); he has given new life to the memory and reputation of the poet; and whereas no one, in the case of the non-appearance of Bowle's edition, would have dragged, above all other names, that of Pope upon the tapis of contention, it has so happened that this little read poet of the last age has since retaken his place in the thoughts, the conversation, pamphlets, and periodicals of a time, when the world has quite enough literary occupation of its own to fill up every leisure

moment.

But the fact is, Mr. Bowles presumed upon his own eminence, and upon the paucity of genius, that marked the commencement of this century: not a planet was apparent in the literary horizon, and such a twinkling star as Hayley had "all heaven to himself." In such a time, a man of genius, like Mr. Bowles, was not overarrogant in assuming a dictatorial air, and he sate down in consequence to his life and edition of Pope, with all the de haut en bas feelings of Johnson. No wholesome dread of the mighty host of critics, that had since appeared, awed his pen into circumspection; he censured boldly, and wrote cavalierly whatever headlong warmth suggested; and unfavourable as were his opinions of the poet he edited, his expressions, not weighed nor examined with sufficient care, frequently exaggerated his thoughts; and the very grave accusations, since preferred against him, have proceeded more, we are conscious, from want of precision in his style, than from any malevolence in his heart. Thus Mr. Gilchrist accused him with some reason of having asserted, "that Pope attempted to ravish Lady Mary Wortley Montague," a conclusion far, we are sure, from the intention of Mr. Bowles; and he has, in another instance, described the connexion between Pope and Miss Blount, in words as indecorous and ambiguous. Even in his argumentative paragraghs, in his exposé of his critical principles, the same slovenliness has rendered him obnoxious to misrepresentation.

"I presume," quotes the Edinburgh Review' from Mr. Bowles, "it will be readily granted, that all images drawn from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature are more beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art; and that they are, therefore, per se, more poetical."

The

Could Mr. Bowles possibly have paid any attention to this sentence? Surely if he did, he would have perceived, that the unqualified extent of this all and any utterly undid and overthrew the force of a proposition otherwise undeniably true. only way of accounting for such, is to attribute them to negligence; in consequence of which guilty negligence, we had almost said, Mr. Bowles has apparently got the worst in a controversy, where, fundamently, he was, without doubt, on the right side. We do not speak of his attacks on the moral character of Pope: some of these may be right, some may be wrong; but the spirit in which they are told, discussed, or commented on, is undeniably bad, partial, malicious;-they are not to be defended. But in his critical opinions, loosely and imprudently as they were at first put forth, and with so formidable a trio of adversaries, as Byron, and Campbell, and Gilchrist against him, we still think Bowles has the advantage. Gilchrist's blows, respecting the moral aspersions on his favourite, are certainly home; Byron may have the laugh

6

on his side; but as to his nonsense about ethics and invention, it is very well for after-dinner argument, where wit and paradox are welcome, even at the expense of logic, but in grave pamphlets, such skirmishing is quite thrown away :-as to Mr. Campbell, we think, he has had his answer; and Mr. Bowles has proved very satisfactorily, in his Invariable Principles of Poetry,' that the talented, but rather negligent, author of the Specimens,' could never have read the criticism he animadverts on, elsewhere than in the mutilated quotations of a review; and he retorts, in our opinion, with success the famed examples adduced, where sublimity is produced from images of art, and asks triumphantly, if "The tower be not cloud-capt, the palaces join with the gorgeousness of earthly magnificence, and the temples associated with the solemnity of religious awe?"

Very unfortunately for the Invariable Principles of Poetry, Mr. Bowles, who took up their cause, and had the genius to appreciate their truth, was too sorry a logician to state their case to the best advantage; and, in consequence, all his antagonists have attacked, not the obnoxious propositions of the superiority of poetry drawn from nature to that drawn from art;-they have argued beside the question,-and instead of aiming their darts at this Ajax-shield of a proposition, with which Mr. Bowles covered himself, they thrust at some more vulnerable part, and by thus overthrowing the champion, think the cause also overthrown. There is not one of them, in fact, who has not allowed the truth of what Mr. Bowles sought mainly to establish. The Edinburgh Reviewer says, that no one, even in Pope's own age, ever thought of placing him by the side of Milton and Shakspeare. We beg the Reviewer's pardon, and do not think Alexander Pope would have been satisfied to place himself below them; nor do we think there was one of the French school of poetry and taste, at that day, that would not have placed Pope above all the great poets of Elizabeth's days. It was against this that Warton reasoned, and that Bowles wrote, not certainly from any wish to sink lower than the second place, a poet of such talent as Pope. He is not of the rank of Milton and Shakspeare, allows the Popeist, and that is all the anti-Popeist would assert; he motions the moral poet to the second rank,—and with that, we are confident, he must ever rest contented. Will any one pretend, that it would not have been easier, for a man of unbiassed powers, such as Johnson defines genius to be, to turn them to the perfection of the couplet, as Pope did; to the study of Quintilian, of Rapin, and Bossu; and by the aid of such studies and daily exercise, to make himself master of that one cast of metre, and versification, and to express in such, pointedly, feelings not very warm, reflections not very original, and satire, the bitterness of which lay more in the

turning of the line, and the personality with which the name was given forth, than by any vis comica or inherent ridicule with which it was accompanied? Will any one uphold, that it would require as lofty a genius to effect this, as to create, like Shakspeare or Scott, an imaginative universe, wide, and warm, and palpable as our own, or to pour forth, like Byron, from the depths of an unfathomable spirit, that lava-flood of passion that overwhelms the soul, and withers up, like insignificant herbs beneath it, all the feeble sentiments, the pithy morality, or the childish feelings, that the verses of Pope could excite?-Away with arguments about nature or art, and all this dull theory, however true, by which it has been attempted to prove demonstratively, what was evident intuitively to the eye of common sense. We would quite as soon take Mr. Bowles' assertion as a poet, that Pope was not a first-rate genius, as we would enter into any round-about proof of a truism so palpable; it is like propping "London's column" with a barber's pole.

It happened to be Pope's fortune through life to be enabled to make his foes more subservient to his fame than any of his friends were-witness the Dunciad, in which, says Roscoe, Pope may be assimilated to a savage conqueror, who raises a trophy of his victory with the skulls of his enemies." The same seems to be his fate after death, for the enmity of Bowles, we are certain, has ultimately proved more beneficial to the poet than will the feeble patronage evinced by Mr. Roscoe in this edition. The best edition, in fact, that could be given of Pope, is one sans phrase, at least accompanied with no more than an historical key. Of what use or amusement can Warburton's finespun pedantry be? There is no such profound philosophy in Pope as to need an Arabian commentary like those on Plato; and, where he is obscure, he is truly not worth explication. Even the notes to the Dunciad, a perusal of which some one has compared to a walk through St. Giles's, and "all that secret intelligence about his Dunces, with which he has burdened posterity, for his own particular gratification," as D'Israeli says, might, at least, be much curtailed. Warburton's notes have been happily characterized by Warton in a quotation of what Bayle says of Scaliger:

"Les commentaires qui viennent de lui sont pleines de conjectures hardies, ingénieuses, et fort savantes; mais il n'est guères apparent, que les auteurs ayent songés à tout de ce qu'il leur fait dire. On s'eloigne de leur sens aussi bien, quand on a beaucoup d'esprit, que quand on n'en a pas."

Warton's annotations on both Pope and Warburton are just the opinions of his age on poetry and pedantry that were then going out of fashion; and Mr. Bowles' strictures are the indig