The admirers of Pope were not slow in joining issue with his critic, not only upon his general estimate of the poet, but upon the principle here laid down.  Thomas Campbell, in his “Specimens of the British Poets” (1819), defended Pope both as a man and a poet, and maintained that “exquisite descriptions of artificial objects are not less characteristic of genius than the description of simple physical appearances.”  He instanced Milton’s description of Satan’s spear and shield, and gave an animated picture of the launching of a ship of the line as an example of the “sublime objects of artificial life.”  Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on “The Invariable Principles of Poetry.”  He claimed that it was the appearances of nature, the sea and the sky, that lent sublimity to the launch of the ship, and asked:  “If images derived from art are as beautiful and sublime as those derived from nature, why was it necessary to bring your ship off the stocks?” He appealed to his adversary whether the description of a game of ombre was as poetical as that of a walk in the forest, and whether “the sylph of Pope, ’trembling over the fumes of a chocolate pot,’ be an image as poetical as that of delicate and quaint Ariel, who sings ‘Where the bee sucks, there lurk (sic) I.’” Campbell replied in the New Monthly Magazine, of which he was editor, and this drew out another rejoinder from Bowles.  Meanwhile Byron had also attacked Bowles in two letters to Murray (1821), to which the indefatigable pamphleteer made elaborate replies.  The elder Disraeli, Gifford, Octavius Gilchrist, and one Martin M’Dermot also took a hand in the fight—­all against Bowles—­and William Roscoe, the author of the “Life of Lorenzo de Medici,” attacked him in an edition of Pope which he brought out in 1824.  The rash detractor of the little Twitnam nightingale soon found himself engaged single-handed against a host; but he was equal to the occasion, in volubility if not in logic, and poured out a series of pamphlets, covering in all some thousand pages, and concluding with “A Final Appeal to the Literary Public” (1825), followed by “more last words of Baxter,” in the shape of “Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe” (1825).

The opponents of Bowles maintained, in general, that in poetry the subject is nothing, but the execution is all; that one class of poetry has, as such, no superiority over another; and that poets are to be ranked by their excellence as artists, and not according to some imaginary scale of dignity in the different orders of poetry, as epic, didactic, satiric, etc.  “There is, in fact,” wrote Roscoe, “no poetry in any subject except what is called forth by the genius of the poet. . . .  There are no great subjects but such as are made so by the genius of the artist.”  Byron said that to the question “whether ’the description of a game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists equal, as a description of a walk in