But Mr. Bowles “has since read a publication by him (Mr. Gilchrist) containing such vulgar slander, affecting private life and character,” &c. &c.; and Mr. Gilchrist has also had the advantage of reading a publication by Mr. Bowles sufficiently imbued with personality; for one of the first and principal topics of reproach is that he is a grocer, that he has a “pipe in his mouth, ledger-book, green canisters, dingy shop-boy, half a hogshead of brown treacle,” &c.  Nay, the same delicate raillery is upon the very title-page.  When controversy has once commenced upon this footing, as Dr. Johnson said to Dr. Percy, “Sir, there is an end of politeness—­we are to be as rude as we please—­Sir, you said that I was short-sighted.”  As a man’s profession is generally no more in his own power than his person—­both having been made out for him—­it is hard that he should be reproached with either, and still more that an honest calling should be made a reproach.  If there is any thing more honourable to Mr. Gilchrist than another it is, that being engaged in commerce he has had the taste, and found the leisure, to become so able a proficient in the higher literature of his own and other countries.  Mr. Bowles, who will be proud to own Glover, Chatterton, Burns, and Bloomfleld for his peers, should hardly have quarrelled with Mr. Gilchrist for his critic.  Mr. Gilchrist’s station, however, which might conduct him to the highest civic honours, and to boundless wealth, has nothing to require apology; but even if it had, such a reproach was not very gracious on the part of a clergyman, nor graceful on that of a gentleman.  The allusion to “Christian criticism” is not particularly happy, especially where Mr. Gilchrist is accused of having “set the first example of this mode in Europe.”  What Pagan criticism may have been we know but little; the names of Zoilus and Aristarchus survive, and the works of Aristotle, Longinus, and Quintilian:  but of “Christian criticism” we have already had some specimens in the works of Philelphus, Poggius, Scaliger, Milton, Salmasius, the Cruscanti (versus Tasso), the French Academy (against the Cid), and the antagonists of Voltaire and of Pope—­to say nothing of some articles in most of the reviews, since their earliest institution in the person of their respectable and still prolific parent, “The Monthly.”  Why, then, is Mr. Gilchrist to be singled out “as having set the first example?” A sole page of Milton or Salmasius contains more abuse—­rank, rancorous, unleavened abuse—­than all that can be raked forth from the whole works of many recent critics.  There are some, indeed, who still keep up the good old custom; but fewer English than foreign.  It is a pity that Mr. Bowles cannot witness some of the Italian controversies, or become the subject of one.  He would then look upon Mr. Gilchrist as a panegyrist.