POPE. 375 



for his conservatism in this matter. One or two of Pope s 

 letters are so good as to make us regret that he did not 

 oftener don the dressing-gown and slippers in his corres 

 pondence. One in particular, to Lord Burlington, describ 

 ing a journey on horseback to Oxford with Lintot the 

 bookseller, is full of a lightsome humour worthy of Cowper, 

 almost worthy of Gray. 



Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of his essay on 

 the genius and writings of Pope, says that the largest part 

 of his works &quot; is of the didactic, moral, and satiric ; and, 

 consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry ; 

 whence it is manifest that good sense and judgment were his 

 characteristical excellences rather than fancy and inven 

 tion&quot; It is plain that in any strict definition there can be 

 only one kind of poetry, and 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 &quot; Life of Pope,&quot; 

 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 helpless 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 &quot; Specimens,&quot; 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 &quot; the invariable principles of poetry.&quot; 

 This letter was in turn somewhat sharply criticised by 

 Gilchrist in the Quarterly Review. Mr. Bowles made an 



* 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. 



