430 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 War- 

 ton's death. It was renewed with peculiar acrimony 

 when the Rev. W. L. Bowles diffused and confused War- 

 ton's critical opinions in his own peculiarly helpless way 

 in editing a new edition of Pope in 1806. Bowles en 

 tirely 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, Camp 

 bell, in his " Specimens," controverted Mr. Bowles's esti 

 mate 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 charg 

 ing 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 confu 

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



* Bowles's Sonnets, wellnigh forgotten now, did more than his con 

 troversial 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. 



