Mr. Bowles is avowedly the champion and the poet of nature.  Art and the arts are dragged, some before, and others behind his chariot.  Pope, where he deals with passion, and with the nature of the naturals of the day, is allowed even by themselves to be sublime; but they complain that too soon—­

  “He stoop’d to truth and moralised his song,”

and there even they allow him to be unrivalled.  He has succeeded, and even surpassed them, when he chose, in their own pretended province.  Let us see what their Coryphaeus effects in Pope’s.  But it is too pitiable, it is too melancholy, to see Mr. Bowles “sinning” not “up” but “down” as a poet to his lowest depth as an editor.  By the way, Mr. Bowles is always quoting Pope.  I grant that there is no poet—­not Shakspeare himself—­who can be so often quoted, with reference to life;—­but his editor is so like the devil quoting Scripture, that I could wish Mr. Bowles in his proper place, quoting in the pulpit.

And now for his lines.  But it is painful—­painful—­to see such a suicide, though at the shrine of Pope.  I can’t copy them all:—­

  “Shall the rank, loathsome miscreant of the age
  Sit, like a night-mare, grinning o’er a page.”

  “Whose pye-bald character so aptly suit
  The two extremes of Bantam and of Brute,
  Compound grotesque of sullenness and show,
  The chattering magpie, and the croaking crow.”

  “Whose heart contends with thy Saturnian head,
  A root of hemlock, and a lump of lead. 
  Gilchrist proceed,” &c. &c.

  “And thus stand forth, spite of thy venom’d foam,
  To give thee bite for bite, or lash thee limping home.”

With regard to the last line, the only one upon which I shall venture for fear of infection, I would advise Mr. Gilchrist to keep out of the way of such reciprocal morsure—­unless he has more faith in the “Ormskirk medicine” than most people, or may wish to anticipate the pension of the recent German professor, (I forget his name, but it is advertised and full of consonants,) who presented his memoir of an infallible remedy for the hydrophobia to the German diet last month, coupled with the philanthropic condition of a large annuity, provided that his cure cured.  Let him begin with the editor of Pope, and double his demand.

Yours ever,

BYRON.

To John Murray, Esq.

P.S.  Amongst the above-mentioned lines there occurs the following, applied to Pope—­

  “The assassin’s vengeance, and the coward’s lie.”