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 Byron was romantic and would seem to have
had little in common with Pope. But there was another side to Byron--and
William Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side--viz., his wit and
understanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is well
known that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besides
the manuscript of "Childe Harold," which he thought little of, certain
"Hints from Horace" which the world thinks less of, but which he was
eager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to print "Childe
Harold." "Engli