3 14 POPE. 



that what Warton really meant to say was that Pope was not a 

 poet at all. This, I think, is shown by what Johnson says in 

 his Life of Pope/ though he does not name Warton. The 

 dispute on this point went on with occasional lulls for more than 

 a half-century after Warton s death. It was renewed with 

 peculiar acrimony when the Rev. W. L. Bowles diffused and 

 confused Warton s critical opinions in his own peculiarly help 

 less way in editing a new edition of Pope in 1806. Bowles 

 entirely mistook the functions of an editor, and maladroitly 

 entangled his judgment of the poetry with his estimate of the 

 author s character.* Thirteen years later, Campbell, in his 

 Specimens, controverted Mr. Bowles s estimate of Pope s 

 character and position, both as man and poet. Mr. Bowles 

 replied in a letter to Campbell on what he called * the invariable 

 principles of poetry. This letter was in turn somewhat sharply 

 criticised by Gilchrist in the Quarterly Review. Mr. Bowles 

 made an angry and unmannerly retort, among other things 

 charging Gilchrist with the crime of being a tradesman s son, 

 whereupon the affair became what they call on the frontier a 

 free fight, in which Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder Disraeli, and 

 Byron took part with equal relish, though with various fortune. 

 The last shot, in what had grown into a thirty years war, 

 between the partisans of what was called the Old School of 

 poetry and those of the New, was fired by Bowles in 1826. 

 Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had, 

 and though, in a vague way, aesthetically right, contrived 

 always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse con 

 fusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the 

 scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of 

 his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid 

 himself open to dreadful punishment, especially from Byron, 

 whose two letters are masterpieces of polemic prose. Bowles 

 most happily exemplified in his own pamphlets what was really 

 the turning-point of the whole controversy (though all the com 

 batants more or less lost sight of it or never saw it), namely, 

 that without clearness and terseness there could be no good writ 

 ing, whether in prose or verse ; in other words, that, while pre 

 cision of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought, yet good writing 



* Bowles s Sonnets, well-nigh forgotten now, did more than his controversial 

 writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence upon the coming generation 

 was great (greater than we can well account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us 

 that he made forty copies of them while at Christ s Hospital. Wordsworth s prefaces 

 first made imagination the true test of poetry, in its more modern sense. But they 

 drew little notice till later. 



