“Let us hear no more of this trash about ‘licentiousness.’  Is not ‘Anacreon’ taught in our schools?—­translated, praised, and edited? and are the English schools or the English women the more corrupt for all this?  When you have thrown the ancients into the fire, it will be time to denounce the moderns.  ’Licentiousness!’—­there is more real mischief and sapping licentiousness in a single French prose novel, in a Moravian hymn, or a German comedy, than in all the actual poetry that ever was penned or poured forth since the rhapsodies of Orpheus.  The sentimental anatomy of Rousseau and Mad. de S. are far more formidable than any quantity of verse.  They are so, because they sap the principles by reasoning upon the passions; whereas poetry is in itself passion, and does not systematise.  It assails, but does not argue; it may be wrong, but it does not assume pretensions to optimism.”

Mr. Bowles having, in his pamphlet, complained of some anonymous communication which he had received, Lord Byron thus comments on the circumstance.

“I agree with Mr. B. 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 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. B. 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. B.’s fame, excepting that the anonymous denunciation was addressed to the Cardinal Legate of Romagna, instead of to * * * *.  I append the menace in all its barbaric but literal Italian, that Mr. B. 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. B.’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.”

The following just tribute to my Reverend Friend’s merits as a poet I have peculiar pleasure in extracting:—­