Thomas Moore--William Lisle Bowles's friend, fellow minor poet, and longtime Wiltshire neighbor--recorded in a journal for 20 March 1819 that he found the middle-aged vicar "in the bar of the White Hart, dictating to a waiter (who acted as an amanuensis for him) his ideas of the true Sublime in Poetry." He concluded by recalling the innocent, absentminded, and benevolent country parson in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742): "Never was there such a Parson Adams, since the real one...." Here, Moore seems to express the view of those contemporaries who found in this clergyman-poet-antiquarian-controversialist-musician a human being of warmth and good nature in spite of his vanities, naïveté, and uncritical self-esteem. His discerning friends, as well as critical readers of the day, knew Bowles was not a major poet--or, often enough, not even a passable one. What reputation he had rested not on widespread acclaim but on a...