This point he wishes “particularly to address to those most respectable characters, who have the direction and management of the periodical critical press.”  That the press may be, in some instances, conducted by respectable characters is probable enough; but if they are so, there is no occasion to tell them of it; and if they are not, it is a base adulation.  In either case, it looks like a kind of flattery, by which those gentry are not very likely to be softened; since it would be difficult to find two passages in fifteen pages more at variance, than Mr. Bowles’s prose at the beginning of this pamphlet, and his verse at the end of it.  In page 4. he speaks of “those most respectable characters who have the direction, &c. of the periodical press,” and in page 10. we find—­

  “Ye dark inquisitors, a monk-like band,
  Who o’er some shrinking victim-author stand,
  A solemn, secret, and vindictive brand,
  Only terrific in your cowl and hood.”

And so on—­to “bloody law” and “red scourges,” with other similar phrases, which may not be altogether agreeable to the above-mentioned “most respectable characters.”  Mr. Bowles goes on, “I concluded my observations in the last Pamphleteer with feelings not unkind towards Mr. Gilchrist, or” [it should be nor] “to the author of the review of Spence, be he whom he might.”—­“I was in hopes, as I have always been ready to admit any errors I might have been led into, or prejudice I might have entertained, that even Mr. Gilchrist might be disposed to a more amicable mode of discussing what I had advanced in regard to Pope’s moral character.”  As Major Sturgeon observes, “There never was a set of more amicable officers—­with the exception of a boxing-bout between Captain Shears and the Colonel.”

A page and a half—­nay only a page before—­Mr. Bowles re-affirms his conviction, that “what he has said of Pope’s moral character is (generally speaking) true, and that his “poetical principles are invariable and invulnerable.”  He has also published three pamphlets,—­ay, four of the same tenour,—­and yet, with this declaration and these declamations staring him and his adversaries in the face, he speaks of his “readiness to admit errors or to abandon prejudices!!!” His use of the word “amicable” reminds me of the Irish Institution (which I have somewhere heard or read of) called the “Friendly Society,” where the president always carried pistols in his pocket, so that when one amicable gentleman knocked down another, the difference might be adjusted on the spot, at the harmonious distance of twelve paces.