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BOWLES, REV. WILLIAM LISLE. 



BOWLES, REV. WILLIAM LISLE. 



671 



Trinity College, he seems to have taken a high place ; gaining, among 

 other honours, the prize for the chancellor's Latin poem in 1783. On 

 quitting college, in 1787, at the age of twenty-five, he looked forward 

 to some " independent provision in the church," which would enable 

 him to marry a young lady to whom he was much attached. Dr. Moore, 

 archbishop of Canterbury, had been indebted, when a poor curate, to 

 his maternal grandfather, Dr. Grey ; and the young clergyman was 

 led in consequence to expect some preferment from that prelate. 

 None came however ; and " worldly circumstances interfering," the 

 engagement with the young lady was broken off. A second engage- 

 ment also came to a melancholy close by the death of the young lady. 

 After it had been determined not to wait longer for " episcopal or 

 archiepiscopal patronaa;e," in great depression of spirits, Bowles made 

 a tour through the north of England, Scotland, and some parts of the 

 continent ; and it was during this tour that he composed the 'Sonnets ' 

 which first made him known as a poet The ' Sonnets' were intended 

 for his own solace, and were not even committed to paper ; but in 

 1789, when he had been some time back in England, it occurred to 

 him, as he was passing through Bath on his way to Oxford, to write 

 out as many of them as he could remember, correct them, and have 

 them printed. Accordingly, he got Mr. Cruttwell, printer of a Bath 

 newspaper, to strike off a hundred copies in 4 to, under the title of 

 ' Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots during a 

 Journey.' The expense of this modest publication was 51. About 

 six months after the publication, he received a letter from Mr. Crutt- 

 well informing him that the 100 copies were all sold, and that he 

 could have sold 5uO. Much encouraged (his father wag just dead, and 

 liis mother was in somewhat reduced circumstances), he printed a 

 second edition of 500, adding some new sonnets ; and some time after- 

 wards a third edition of 750 was called for. 



It is curious now, looking back, to think that, in a year like 1789, 

 when France was in the throes of revolution, the publication from a 

 provincial press of ' Fourteen Sonnets,' by a young clergyman disap- 

 pointed in love, should have been an event of any consequence in 

 England ; and yet so it was. A new literary spirit, and new notions 

 of poetry, were beginning to be abroad ; and young men were craving 

 for something fresh and natural, even if but feeble, after the strong 

 and fine artificialities, as they are called, of Drydeo, Pope, and their 

 followers. Bowles's sonnets came at the proper moment. Other 

 young men of promise had already attempted, or were attempting 

 poems in a new vein ; but, both as the pupil of the Wartons and by 

 reason of his natural susceptibility, Bowles was fitted to take the lead. 

 His sonnets were read and read again by all academic young men of 

 taste and poetical aspiration, including Coleridge, Wordsworth, 

 Southey, and LovelL " I had juet entered on my seventeenth year," 

 aays Coleridge, " when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty-one in num- 

 ber [this was the second edition], and just then published in a quarto 

 pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me by a school- 

 fellow who had quitted us [that is, Christ's Hospital] for the university. 

 As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, 

 within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptons, as 

 the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my 

 regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four 

 following publications of the same author." These " three or four 

 following publications " of Bowles were short copies of verses on 

 occasional subjects, published separately at Bath or Salisbury in 

 1789, 1790, and 1791. Thus in 1789 were published 'Verses to John 

 Howard on his "State of Prisons and Lazarettos;"' and in 1790 

 verses ' On the Grave of Howard.' In these, although not so con- 

 spicuously as in the 'Sonnets,' a tender and true spirit of poetry was 

 visible, while the diction was far less artificial than had till that time 

 been usual in poems. In short, though the revolution in British 

 poetry had already broken forth in Cowper and Burns, and though it 

 was to be completed in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bowles's 'Sonnets' 

 and other pieces, published in 1789 and the following years, were 

 perhaps tho first conscious insinuation of the new principles. Words- 

 worth and Coleridge soon proclaimed and illustrated them with 

 greater power of genius ; but all their lives theae poets kept up a kind 

 of dutiful allegiance to Bowles as their titular patriarch. 



Hardly foreseeing all this, Bowles left Oxford finally in 1792, having 

 taken his degree, and devoted himself to the duties of his profession. 

 From an humble curacy in Wilts, which was his first appointment, he 

 was transferred first to a living in the same county, and afterwards to 

 another in Gloucestershire. In 1797 he married a daughter of the 

 Itev. Dr. Wake, prebendary of Westminster. In 1803 he obtained a 

 vacant prebend in the cathedral church of Salisbury ; and in 1805 the 

 long-expected patronage of Archbishop Moore (it last visited him in 

 the shape of a preferment to the valuable living of Bremhill in Wilt- 

 shire. Bowles was then forty-three yearn of age ; but he continued to 

 reside in his picturesque and elegant parsonage of Bremhill almost 

 continually during the remaining forty-five years of his long life, dis- 

 charging the duties of his pariah in such a manner as to win the 

 affection of bis parishioners, varying his theological readings and his 

 ecclesiastical business with continued exercises in literature, receiving 

 visit* from his friends, and happy in what he considered " the inesti- 

 mable advantage of the social intercourse of such a family as that of 

 Bowood" (Lord Lansdowne's). Subsequent ecclesiastical preferments, 

 which did not interfere with the quiet tenor of his life as rector of 



Bremhill, were, his appointment in 1818 to be chaplain to the prince 

 regent, and his appointment in 1828 to be canon of Salisbury 

 cathedral. 



Till 1804, Bowles was contented with issuing fresh editions of his 

 'Sonnets' and early poems (an eighth edition of the 'Sonnets' 

 appeared in 1802), and with adding a few occasional pieces to the 

 collection. In 1804 he published his longest poem, entitled ' The 

 Spirit of Discovery,' in six books of blank verse ; which was followed 

 by his edition of Pope's works in 10 vols. in 1807. These two publi- 

 cations, together with his general fame as a writer of sonnets, were the 

 ground for the well-known attack upon him in Byron's ' English Bards 

 and Scotch Reviewers." Notwithstanding Byron's onslaught, Bowles, 

 like Coleridge and Wordsworth, retained his reputation, and went on 

 republishing old and producing new poems. He and Byron met in a 

 friendly way at Rogers' s in 1812; and Byron in later life made amends 

 for his satire by speaking of him with respect. Omitting minor pro- 

 ductions, the following is a list of Bowles's poetical publications 

 subsequent to the 'Spirit of Discovery:' 'The Missionary of the 

 Andes,' in six books of heroic verse, published in 1815 ; ' The Grave 

 of the Last Saxon, a Legend of the Battle of Hastings,' in six books, 

 published in 1822 ; ' Days Departed, or Bauwell Hill,' a descriptive 

 didactive poem in blank verae, published in 1829; 'St. John in 

 Patmos,' a blank verse poem of considerable length, first published 

 anonymously in 1S33; 'Scenes and Shadows of Days Departed,' a 

 series of poems with a prose autobiographic introduction, published 

 in 1837, in the author's seventy-sixth year ; and the ' Village Verse- 

 Book,' published in the same year, and consisting of simple hymns 

 composed by him for the use of the children of his parish. After 

 1837 Bowles did not publish much. Nor had any of his poems since 

 ' The Missionary,' which is considered on the whole the best of his 

 large works, greatly added to his reputation. In all of them were 

 discerned the same free taste, the game sensibility to the gentler 

 beauties of nature, the same pathos, tho same poetic fancy, and the 

 same power of cultured expression which had distinguished his first 

 sonnets; but it was felt on the whole that he was a kind of feebler' 

 Wordsworth, whose poetry, so long as he chose to write any, was 

 rather to be received with respect and dipped into at leisure than 

 eagerly read and appreciated. 



But the whole virtue of Bowles's life did not lie in his poems. He 

 was also a very busy prose-writer. If the list of his prose-writings is 

 classified, it will be found to prove considerable versatility on the part 

 of the author. 



The 'Pope and Bowles Controversy,' which lasted from 1819 to 

 1828, if indeed it may not date from 1807, when Bowles's edition of 

 Pope was published, has a permanent interest in our literary history. 

 It was the battle, fought in prose, between the old or eighteenth century 

 school of English poetry and the so-called new or nineteenth century 

 school. Bowles, while doing justice as he thought to Pope's true 

 excellences, had made some reflections on his moral character, tending 

 to depreciate it ; and had also, in an appended essay ' On the Poetical 

 Character of Pope,' laid down this proposition, as determining the 

 comparatively inferior rank of certain portions of Pope's poetry "All 

 images drawn from what is beautiful or sublime in nature are moo 

 beautiful and sublime than images drawn from art, and are therefore 

 more poetical ; and in like manner the passions of the human heart, 

 which belong to nature in general, are per se more adapted to the higher 

 species of poetry than those which are derived from incidental and 

 transient manners." Byron in his ' English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' 



to Bowles's critical theory of poetry. Campbell vigorously defended 

 the right of tho world of the artificial to furnish images to poetry, and 

 instanced ' ships ' and the like to prove how beautiful and poetical 

 such images might be. Bowles replied in his ' Letter on the Invariable 

 Principles," &c. Byron, then in Italy, wrote home to Murray that he 

 was going " to plunge into the contest, and lay about him like a dragon, 

 till he had made manure of Bowles for the top of Parnassus." He 

 accordingly sent over two spirited letters for Pope and Campbell 

 against Bowles, to which also Bowles replied. Other critics, including 

 Octavius Gilchrist and the ' Quarterly Review," took up the question 

 on Campbell's side. Bowles manfully met them one after another, 

 restating his real views in opposition to what he considered misrepre- 

 sentations of them, and supporting these views by reasonings and 

 examinations of the reasonings and examples of his antagonists. For 

 some time he stood alone; but at last Hazlitt and the 'Blackwood' 

 critics came to his assistance, and maintained that on the whole he had 

 had the best of the argument. This view is now pretty generally 

 acquiesced in. Bowles never said anything so absurd as that Pope 

 was no poet an opinion which has been ignorantly palmed on him by 

 some who have engaged in the controversy ; he only laid down some 

 critical canons determining the kind of much of Pope's poetry, as 

 compared with higher kinds, of which fine examples were found, he 

 said, in other poems of Pope himself; and what he advanced on these 

 points was founded on a light instinct, and was argued with much 

 logical acumen, though not with any of that philosophical depth which 

 distinguishes the similar reasonings of Coleridge and De Quincey. 

 Enjoying repose in his old age after this battle, and looking round 



