Mr. Octavius Gilchrist speaks rather irreverently of a “second tumbler of hot white-wine negus.”  What does he mean?  Is there any harm in negus? or is it the worse for being hot? or does Mr. Bowles drink negus?  I had a better opinion of him.  I hoped that whatever wine he drank was neat; or, at least, that, like the ordinary in Jonathan Wild, “he preferred punch, the rather as there was nothing against it in Scripture.”  I should be sorry to believe that Mr. Bowles was fond of negus; it is such a “candid” liquor, so like a wishy-washy compromise between the passion for wine and the propriety of water.  But different writers have divers tastes.  Judge Blackstone composed his “Commentaries” (he was a poet too in his youth) with a bottle of port before him.  Addison’s conversation was not good for much till he had taken a similar dose.  Perhaps the prescription of these two great men was not inferior to the very different one of a soi-disant poet of this day, who, after wandering amongst the hills, returns, goes to bed, and dictates his verses, being fed by a by-stander with bread and butter during the operation.

I now come to Mr. Bowles’s “invariable principles of poetry.”  These Mr. Bowles and some of his correspondents pronounce “unanswerable;” and they are “unanswered,” at least by Campbell, who seems to have been astounded by the title.  The sultan of the time being offered to ally himself to a king of France because “he hated the word league;” which proves that the Padishan understood French.  Mr. Campbell has no need of my alliance, nor shall I presume to offer it; but I do hate that word “invariable.”  What is there of human, be it poetry, philosophy, wit, wisdom, science, power, glory, mind, matter, life, or death, which is “invariable?” Of course I put things divine out of the question.  Of all arrogant baptisms of a book, this title to a pamphlet appears the most complacently conceited.  It is Mr. Campbell’s part to answer the contents of this performance, and especially to vindicate his own “Ship,” which Mr. Bowles most triumphantly proclaims to have struck to his very first fire.

  “Quoth he, there was a Ship;
  Now let me go, thou grey-haired loon,
  Or my staff shall make thee skip.”

It is no affair of mine, but having once begun, (certainly not by my own wish, but called upon by the frequent recurrence to my name in the pamphlets,) I am like an Irishman in a “row,” “any body’s customer.”  I shall therefore say a word or two on the “Ship.”

Mr. Bowles asserts that Campbell’s “Ship of the Line” derives all its poetry, not from “art,” but from “nature.”  “Take away the waves, the winds, the sun, &c. &c. one will become a stripe of blue bunting; and the other a piece of coarse canvass on three tall poles.”  Very true; take away the “waves,” “the winds,” and there will be no ship at all, not only for poetical, but for any other purpose;