“Would rather that the dean should die,
  Than his prediction prove a lie.”

After a definition of a “traducer,” which was quite superfluous (though it is agreeable to learn that Mr. Bowles so well understands the character), we are assured, that “he feels equally indifferent, Mr. Gilchrist, for what your malice can invent, or your impudence utter.”  This is indubitable; for it rests not only on Mr. Bowles’s assurance, but on that of Sir Fretful Plagiary, and nearly in the same words,—­“and I shall treat it with exactly the same calm indifference and philosophical contempt, and so your servant.”

“One thing has given Mr. Bowles concern.”  It is “a passage which might seem to reflect on the patronage a young man has received.”  MIGHT seem!!  The passage alluded to expresses, that if Mr. Gilchrist be the reviewer of “a certain poet of nature,” his praise and blame are equally contemptible.”—­Mr. Bowles, who has a peculiarly ambiguous style, where it suits him, comes off with a “not to the poet, but the critic,” &c.  In my humble opinion, the passage referred to both.  Had Mr. Bowles really meant fairly, he would have said so from the first—­he would have been eagerly transparent.—­“A certain poet of nature” is not the style of commendation.  It is the very prologue to the most scandalous paragraphs of the newspapers, when

  “Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.”

“A certain high personage,”—­“a certain peeress,”—­“a certain illustrious foreigner,”—­what do these words ever precede, but defamation?  Had he felt a spark of kindling kindness for John Clare, he would have named him.  There is a sneer in the sentence as it stands.  How a favourable review of a deserving poet can “rather injure than promote his cause” is difficult to comprehend.  The article denounced is able and amiable, and it has “served” the poet, as far as poetry can be served by judicious and honest criticism.

With the two next paragraphs of Mr. Bowles’s pamphlet it is pleasing to concur.  His mention of “Pennie,” and his former patronage of “Shoel,” do him honour.  I am not of those who may deny Mr. Bowles to be a benevolent man.  I merely assert, that he is not a candid editor.

Mr. Bowles has been “a writer occasionally upwards of thirty years,” and never wrote one word in reply in his life “to criticisms, merely as criticisms.”  This is Mr. Lofty in Goldsmith’s Good-natured Man; “and I vow by all that’s honourable, my resentment has never done the men, as mere men, any manner of harm,—­that is, as mere men.”