Mr. Bowles makes the chief part of a ship’s poesy depend upon the “wind:” then why is a ship under sail more poetical than a hog in a high wind?  The hog is all nature, the ship is all art, “coarse canvass,” “blue bunting,” and “tall poles;” both are violently acted upon by the wind, tossed here and there, to and fro, and yet nothing but excess of hunger could make me look upon the pig as the more poetical of the two, and then only in the shape of a griskin.

Will Mr. Bowles tell us that the poetry of an aqueduct consist in the water which it conveys?  Let him look on that of Justinian, on those of Rome, Constantinople, Lisbon, and Elvas, or even at the remains of that in Attica.

We are asked, “What makes the venerable towers of Westminster Abbey more poetical, as objects, than the tower for the manufactory of patent shot, surrounded by the same scenery?” I will answer—­the architecture.  Turn Westminster Abbey, or Saint Paul’s into a powder magazine, their poetry, as objects, remains the same; the Parthenon was actually converted into one by the Turks, during Morosini’s Venetian siege, and part of it destroyed in consequence.  Cromwell’s dragoons stalled their steeds in Worcester cathedral; was it less poetical as an object than before?  Ask a foreigner on his approach to London, what strikes him as the most poetical of the towers before him:  he will point out Saint Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, without, perhaps, knowing the names or associations of either, and pass over the “tower for patent shot,”—­not that, for any thing he knows to the contrary, it might not be the mausoleum of a monarch, or a Waterloo column, or a Trafalgar monument, but because its architecture is obviously inferior.

To the question, “Whether the description of a game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists equal, as a description of a walk in a forest?” it may be answered, that the materials are certainly not equal; but that “the artist,” who has rendered the “game of cards poetical,” is by far the greater of the two.  But all this “ordering” of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. Bowles.  There may or may not be, in fact, different “orders” of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not according to his branch of the art.

Tragedy is one of the highest presumed orders.  Hughes has written a tragedy, and a very successful one; Fenton another; and Pope none.  Did any man, however,—­will even Mr. Bowles himself,—­rank Hughes and Fenton as poets above Pope?  Was even Addison (the author of Cato), or Rowe (one of the higher order of dramatists as far as success goes), or Young, or even Otway and Southerne, ever raised for a moment to the same rank with Pope in the estimation of the reader or the critic, before his death or since?  If Mr. Bowles will contend for classifications of this kind, let him recollect that descriptive poetry has been ranked as among the