The artillery of the demons was but the first step of his mistake, the thunder the next, and it is a step lower.  It would have been fit for Jove, but not for Jehovah.  The subject altogether was essentially unpoetical; he has made more of it than another could, but it is beyond him and all men.

In a portion of his reply, Mr. Bowles asserts that Pope “envied Phillips,” because he quizzed his pastorals in the Guardian, in that most admirable model of irony, his paper on the subject.  If there was any thing enviable about Phillips, it could hardly be his pastorals.  They were despicable, and Pope expressed his contempt.  If Mr. Fitzgerald published a volume of sonnets, or a “Spirit of Discovery,” or a “Missionary,” and Mr. Bowles wrote in any periodical journal an ironical paper upon them, would this be “envy?” The authors of the “Rejected Addresses” have ridiculed the sixteen or twenty “first living poets” of the day, but do they “envy” them?  “Envy” writhes, it don’t laugh.  The authors of the Rejected Addresses may despise some, but they can hardly “envy” any of the persons whom they have parodied; and Pope could have no more envied Phillips than he did Welsted, or Theobald, or Smedley, or any other given hero of the Dunciad.  He could not have envied him, even had he himself not been the greatest poet of his age.  Did Mr. Ings “envy” Mr. Phillips when he asked him, “How came your Pyrrhus to drive oxen and say, I am goaded on by love?” This question silenced poor Phillips; but it no more proceeded from “envy” than did Pope’s ridicule.  Did he envy Swift?  Did he envy Bolingbroke?  Did he envy Gay the unparalleled success of his “Beggar’s Opera?” We may be answered that these were his friends—­true:  but does friendship prevent envy?  Study the first woman you meet with, or the first scribbler, let Mr. Bowles himself (whom I acquit fully of such an odious quality) study some of his own poetical intimates:  the most envious man I ever heard of is a poet, and a high one; besides, it is an universal passion.  Goldsmith envied not only the puppets for their dancing, and broke his shins in the attempt at rivalry, but was seriously angry because two pretty women received more attention than he did. This is envy; but where does Pope show a sign of the passion?  In that case Dryden envied the hero of his Mac Flecknoe.  Mr. Bowles compares, when and where he can, Pope with Cowper—­(the same Cowper whom in his edition of Pope he laughs at for his attachment to an old woman, Mrs. Unwin; search and you will find it; I remember the passage, though not the page;) in particular he requotes Cowper’s Dutch delineation of a wood, drawn up, like a seedsman’s catalogue[1], with an affected imitation of Milton’s style, as burlesque as the “Splendid Shilling.”  These two writers, for Cowper is no poet, come into comparison in one great work, the translation of Homer.  Now, with all the great, and manifest, and manifold,