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 a forest,' it may be answered that
the materials are certainly not equal, but that the _artist_ who has
rendered the game of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two.
But all this 'ordering' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr.
Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different 'orders' of poetry,
but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not
according to his branch of the art." Byron also contended, like
Campbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not the
water that gave interest to the ship but the ship to the water. "What