“The letter to the editor of the newspaper” is owned; but “it was not on account of the criticism.  It was because the criticism came down in a frank directed to Mrs. Bowles!!!”—­(the italics and three notes of admiration appended to Mrs. Bowles are copied verbatim from the quotation), and Mr. Bowles was not displeased with the criticism, but with the frank and the address.  I agree with Mr. Bowles that the intention was to annoy him; but I fear that this was answered by his notice of the reception of the criticism.  An anonymous letter-writer has but one means of knowing the effect of his attack.  In this he has the superiority over the viper; he knows that his poison has taken effect, when he hears the victim cry;—­the adder is deaf.  The best reply to an anonymous intimation is to take no notice directly nor indirectly.  I wish Mr. Bowles could see only one or two of the thousand which I have received in the course of a literary life, which, though begun early, has not yet extended to a third part of his existence as an author.  I speak of literary life only.  Were I to add personal, I might double the amount of anonymous letters.  If he could but see the violence, the threats, the absurdity of the whole thing, he would laugh, and so should I, and thus be both gainers.

To keep up the farce,—­within the last month of this present writing (1821), I have had my life threatened in the same way which menaced Mr. Bowles’s fame,—­excepting that the anonymous denunciation was addressed to the Cardinal Legate of Romagna, instead of to Mrs. Bowles.  The Cardinal is, I believe, the elder lady of the two.  I append the menace in all its barbaric but literal Italian, that Mr. Bowles may be convinced; and as this is the only “promise to pay,” which the Italians ever keep, so my person has been at least as much exposed to a “shot in the gloaming,” from “John Heatherblutter” (see Waverley), as ever Mr. Bowles’s glory was from an editor.  I am, nevertheless, on horseback and lonely for some hours (one of them twilight) in the forest daily; and this, because it was my “custom in the afternoon,” and that I believe if the tyrant cannot escape amidst his guards (should it be so written?), so the humbler individual would find precautions useless.

Mr. Bowles has here the humility to say, that “he must succumb; for with Lord Byron turned against him, he has no chance,”—­a declaration of self-denial not much in unison with his “promise,” five lines afterwards, that “for every twenty-four lines quoted by Mr. Gilchrist, or his friend, to greet him with as many from the ’Gilchrisiad’;” but so much the better.  Mr. Bowles has no reason to “succumb” but to Mr. Bowles.  As a poet, the author of “The Missionary” may compete with the foremost of his cotemporaries.  Let it be recollected, that all my previous opinions of Mr. Bowles’s poetry were written long before the publication of his last and best poem; and that a poet’s last poem should be his best, is his highest praise.  But, however, he may duly and honourably rank with his living rivals.  There never was so complete a proof of the superiority of Pope, as in the lines with which Mr. Bowles closes his “to be concluded in our next.”