“monodies,” “epitaphs,” “odes,” and “stanzas.” [14] Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and parodied himself—­and incidentally Bowles—­in three sonnets printed at the end of Chapter I. of the “Biographia Literaria,” designed to burlesque his own besetting sins, a “doleful egotism,” an affected simplicity, and the use of “elaborate and swelling language and imagery.”  He never attained much success in the use of the sonnet form.  A series of twelve sonnets in his first collection opens with one to Bowles: 

  “My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains
  Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring
  Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring,” etc.

More important to our inquiries than the poetry of Bowles is the occasion which he gave to the revival, under new conditions, of the Pope controversy.  For it was over the body of Pope that the quarrel between classic and romantic was fought out in England, as it was fought out in France, a few years later, over the question of the dramatic unities and the mixture of tragedy and comedy in the drame.  In 1806, just a half century after Joseph Warton published the first volume of his “Essay on Pope,” Bowles’ edition of the same poet appeared.  In the life of Pope which was prefixed, the editor made some severe strictures on Pope’s duplicity, jealousy, and other disagreeable traits, though not more severe than have been made by Pope’s latest editor, Mr. Elwin, who has backed up his charges with an array of evidence fairly overwhelming.  The edition contained likewise an essay on “The Poetical Character of Pope,” in which Bowles took substantially the same ground that had been taken by his master, Joseph Warton, fifty years before.  He asserted in brief that, as compared with Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet of the second order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior to Thomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden and Gray; and that, except in his “Eloisa” and one or two other pieces, he was the poet of artificial manners and of didactic maxims, rather than of passions.  Bowles’ chief addition to Warton’s criticism was the following paragraph, upon which the controversy that ensued chiefly hinged:  “All images drawn from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature are more beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art, and they are therefore per se (abstractedly) more poetical.  In like manner those passions of the human heart, which belong to nature in general, are per se more adapted to the higher species of poetry than those derived from incidental and transient manners.”