376 POPE. 



angry and unmannerly retort, among other things charging 

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

 upon 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 for 

 tune. 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, con 

 trived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made 

 worse confusion 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 combatants more or less 

 lost sight of it or never saw it) namely, that without clear 

 ness and terseness there could be no good writing, whether 

 in prose or verse ; in other words, that, while precision 

 of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought, yet good writing 

 is an art as well as a gift. Byron alone saw clearly that 

 here was the true knot of the question, though, as his object 

 was mainly mischief, he was not careful to loosen it. The 

 sincerity of Byron s admiration of Pope has been, it seems 

 to me, too hastily doubted. What he admired in him was 

 that patience in careful finish which he felt to be wanting 

 in himself and in most of his contemporaries. Pope s assail 

 ants went so far as to make a defect of what, rightly 

 considered, was a distinguished merit, though the amount 

 of it was exaggerated. The weak point in the case was 

 that his nicety concerned itself wholly about the phrase, 

 leaving the thought to be as faulty as it would, and that 

 it seldom extended beyond the couplet, often not beyond a 

 single verse. His serious poetry, therefore, at its best, is a 

 succession of loosely strung epigrams, and no poet more 



