Pope to be reproved for his connection with Martha Blount:  Cowper was the almoner of Mrs. Throgmorton; but Pope’s charities were his own, and they were noble and extensive, far beyond his fortune’s warrant.  Pope was the tolerant yet steady adherent of the most bigoted of sects; and Cowper the most bigoted and despondent sectary that ever anticipated damnation to himself or others.  Is this harsh?  I know it is, and I do not assert it as my opinion of Cowper personally, but to show what might be said, with just as great an appearance of truth and candour, as all the odium which has been accumulated upon Pope in similar speculations.  Cowper was a good man, and lived at a fortunate time for his works.

[Footnote:  One more poetical instance of the power of art, and even its superiority over nature, in poetry; and I have done:—­the bust of Antinous!  Is there any thing in nature like this marble, excepting the Venus?  Can there be more poetry gathered into existence than in that wonderful creation of perfect beauty?  But the poetry of this bust is in no respect derived from nature, nor from any association of moral exaltedness; for what is there in common with moral nature, and the male minion of Adrian?  The very execution is not natural, but super-natural, or rather super-artificial, for nature has never done so much.

Away, then, with this cant about nature, and “invariable principles of poetry!” A great artist will make a block of stone as sublime as a mountain, and a good poet can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than inhabits the forests of America.  It is the business and the proof of a poet to give the lie to the proverb, and sometimes to “make a silken purse out of a sow’s ear;” and to conclude with another homely proverb, “a good workman will not find fault with his tools.”]

Mr. Bowles, apparently not relying entirely upon his own arguments, has, in person or by proxy, brought forward the names of Southey and Moore.  Mr. Southey “agrees entirely with Mr. Bowles in his invariable principles of poetry.”  The least that Mr. Bowles can do in return is to approve the “invariable principles of Mr. Southey.”  I should have thought that the word “invariable” might have stuck in Southey’s throat, like Macbeth’s “Amen!” I am sure it did in mine, and I am not the least consistent of the two, at least as a voter.  Moore (et tu, Brute!) also approves, and a Mr. J. Scott.  There is a letter also of two lines from a gentleman in asterisks, who, it seems, is a poet of “the highest rank:”—­who can this be? not my friend, Sir Walter, surely.  Campbell it can’t be; Rogers it won’t be.

  “You have hit the nail in the head, and * * * *
  [Pope, I presume] on the head also.

  “I remain yours, affectionately,
  “(Five Asterisks.)”

And in asterisks let him remain.  Whoever this person may be, he deserves, for such a judgment of Midas, that “the nail” which Mr. Bowles has “hit in the head,” should he driven through his own ears; I am sure that they are long enough.