“Thy needles, once a shining store,
  For my sake restless heretofore. 
  Now rust disused and shine no more,
        My Mary.”

Let us contrast with this a characteristic passage from “The Rape of the Lock,” which also contains an artificial image: 

  “On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore
  Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore.”

What is the difference?  It is in the feeling of the poet Pope’s couplet is very charming, but it is merely gallantry, a neatly turned compliment, playful, only half sincere, a spice of mockery lurking under the sugared words; while in Cowper’s lines the humble domestic implement is made sacred by the emotions of pity, sorrow, gratitude, and affection with which it is associated.  The reason why Pope is not a high poet—­or perhaps a poet at all in the best sense of the word—­is indicated by Coleridge with his usual acuteness and profundity in a sentence already quoted; that Pope’s poetry both in matter and diction was “characterised not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry.”

Bowles, on the whole, had hold of the right end of the controversy; his instinct was correct, but he was a wretched controversialist.  As a poet in the minor key, he was tolerable, but as a prose writer, he was a very dull person and a bore.  He was rude and clumsy; he tried to be sarcastic and couldn’t, he had damnable iteration.  Lowell speaks of his “peculiarly helpless way,” and says:  “Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aesthetically right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong.  Anger made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis.  Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of polemic prose.”  Indeed, the most interesting feature of the Pope controversy is Byron’s part in it and the light which it sheds on his position in relation to the classic and romantic schools.  Before the definite outbreak of the controversy, Byron had attacked Bowles for his depreciation of Pope, in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” (1809), in a passage in which he wished that Bowles had lived in Pope’s time, so that Pope might have put him into the “Dunciad.”

It seems at first sight hard to reconcile Byron’s evidently sincere admiration for Pope with the ultra-romantic cast of his own poetry—­romantic, as Pater says, in mood if not in subject.  In his early fondness for Ossian, his intense passion, his morbid gloom, his exaltation in wild and solitary places, his love of night and storm, of the desert and the ocean, in the careless and irregular outpour of his verse, in his subjectivity, the continual presence of the man in the work—­in all these particulars