1825.] 
I am sorry, indeed, that our encounter 
has been so long delayed: for, though 
Ido not think that a casual essayist is 
called upon to enter into controversy 
upon. every incidental remark which 
he may throw out, in the course 
of a slight. and, unmethodical disser- 
tation; and still less, that he should be 
called upon to load his careless pages 
with critical notes, analyses, and quota- 
tions from every author whom he may 
happen in his way to mention, with an 
epithet either of censure or commenda- 
tion—yet, most assuredly, if other and 
indispensable vocations had not en- 
grossed my time, I should not so long 
have delayed some notice of the sup- 
posed “ parrot-like injustice” imputed 
to me, with respect to Mr. Bowles. 
With respect to the parroting part 
of the accusation, Sir, permit me in the 
outset to undeceive Mr, Jennings alto- 
gether, by assuring him, not only that 
I have not taken up my opinions of 
Mr. Bowles, or any other author, either 
from Capt. Medwin’s contemptible in- 
ventions, or equally contemptible repe- 
titions of the supposed loose conversa- 
tions of Lord Byron, or from any thing 
really said or written by Lord Byron 
himself; but that I hold the trashy 
book-making, catch-penny farragoes of 
the Medwins, Dallases and Co., &c. quite 
in as much contempt as Mr. Jennings 
himself can possibly do. With respect 
to Lord Byron, I not only agree with 
Mr. Jennings, that he was one of those 
“ who too often write for effect, and 
for effect only ;? but I consider him 
(and trace the undeniable evidence of 
such estimation in almost every page 
of his writings) as being so completely 
in the habit of indulging and venting 
eyery brilliant conception of his own 
irregular and extraordin-ry mind, with- 
out the least cons.deration of its truth 
or accuracy, that I even doubt whether 
he had ever permitted himself to form 
what might properly be called a settled 
and digested opinion upon any one sub- 
ject. whatever — except the splendour 
and power of his own rapid and imagi- 
native talent.* He was a comet-birth 
of eccentric genius that revolved not in 
the ordered sphere of analytic attrac- 
tion: too vivid —too headlong — and 
too precipitate for the ratiocination of 
criticism: and, even if I were one of 
those who could be content to follow 
* Lhope I shall not be called upon for 
quotations to support this incidental opi- 
nion also. 
Bowles’s Sonnets. 
413 
in the wake of others, I should as soon 
think of taking an égnis-fatuus for my 
guide across a fen-bog, as Lord Byron 
for my director through the labyrinths 
of critical opinion. Supposing even 
that his Lordship did absolutely ever 
indulge his spleen, or his vanity, in “ the 
silliness of the question, what poets had 
we in 1795?” so far from consider- 
ing it as any proof of the settled con- 
tempt in which he held all the writers 
of that era (though some of those, I 
confess, whom Mr. Jennings has singled 
out, I should regard as of the cream- 
and-water school, and one or two of 
them, even, as crab verjuice), I should 
regard it as only one of those para~ 
doxical sallies, in which men of wit 
and vivacity occasionally indulge, merely 
for the sport and absurdity of the 
thing, or to keep up the battledoor and 
shuttle-cock of conversational levity : or 
sometimes, perhaps, more in contempt 
for the understandings of those whom 
they are addressing, than for the talents 
of those whom they are pretending to 
decry ; but certainly with no intention 
that any lick-spittle pick-phrase should 
record their rhodomontade as settled 
judgments and critical opinions, for 
the information of the world. Every 
man of genius and literature is not a 
Johnson, to converse in preconsidered 
dogmas and set phrases, with a Bos- 
well and a note-book at his elbow, to 
transmit his oracular witticisms to pos- 
terity. 
Mr. Bowles, therefore, if he troubles 
himself about it, and Mr. Bowles’s ad- 
mirer, may assure himself that my opi- 
nion of his sonnets, &c. has not been 
caught up from either Lord Byron, or 
Lord Byron’s_ distorted shadow, 
Capt. Medwin. That opinion was, in 
fact, formed and settled long before 
ever the name of Byron was heard in 
the precincts of poetic literature ; and 
the identical question which Lord 
Byron is reported to have put : “ What 
could Coleridge mean, by praising 
Bowles’s poetry as he does?” I had 
put to myself full thirty years ago, on 
seeing in Coleridge’s own hand-writing, 
on the blank leaf of a copy of Bowles’s 
sonnets, presented by him to a lady, 
among other extravagant encomiums, 
a protestation, that that little volume 
had “done him more good than any 
thing he had ever read, except his Bible.” 
That the pietist may be very much 
delighted with the slipslop of some of 
these sonnets (the sugared “ cream and 
water” of some of which have, I ae 
little 
