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,