Life of Lord Byron Volume VI Part 27

LETTER

TO JOHN MURRAY, ESQ. ON THE REV. W.L. BOWLES'S STRICTURES ON THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF POPE.

"I'll play at _Bowls_ with the sun and moon."--OLD SONG.

"My mither's auld, Sir, and she has rather forgotten hersel in speaking to my Leddy, that canna weel bide to be contrad.i.c.kit, (as I ken n.o.body likes it, if they could help themsels.)"

TALES OF MY LANDLORD, _Old Mortality_, vol. ii. p. 163.

Ravenna, February 7. 1821.

Dear Sir,

In the different pamphlets which you have had the goodness to send me, on the Pope and Bowles' controversy, I perceive that my name is occasionally introduced by both parties. Mr. Bowles refers more than once to what he is pleased to consider "a remarkable circ.u.mstance,"

not only in his letter to Mr. Campbell, but in his reply to the Quarterly. The Quarterly also and Mr. Gilchrist have conferred on me the dangerous honour of a quotation; and Mr. Bowles indirectly makes a kind of appeal to me personally, by saying, "Lord Byron, _if he remembers_ the circ.u.mstance, will _witness_"--_(witness_ IN ITALICS, an ominous character for a testimony at present).

I shall not avail myself of a "non mi ricordo," even after so long a residence in Italy;--I _do_ "remember the circ.u.mstance,"--and have no reluctance to relate it (since called upon so to do), as correctly as the distance of time and the impression of intervening events will permit me. In the year 1812, more than three years after the publication of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," I had the honour of meeting Mr. Bowles in the house of our venerable host of "Human Life," &c. the last Argonaut of cla.s.sic English poetry, and the Nestor of our inferior race of living poets. Mr. Bowles calls this "soon after" the publication; but to me three years appear a considerable segment of the immortality of a modern poem. I recollect nothing of "the rest of the company going into another room,"--nor, though I well remember the topography of our host's elegant and cla.s.sically furnished mansion, could I swear to the very room where the conversation occurred, though the "taking _down_ the poem" seems to fix it in the library. Had it been "taken _up_" it would probably have been in the drawing-room. I presume also that the "remarkable circ.u.mstance" took place _after_ dinner; as I conceive that neither Mr. Bowles's politeness nor appet.i.te would have allowed him to detain "the rest of the company" standing round their chairs in the "other room," while we were discussing "the Woods of Madeira," instead of circulating its vintage. Of Mr. Bowles's "good humour" I have a full and not ungrateful recollection; as also of his gentlemanly manners and agreeable conversation. I speak of the _whole_, and not of particulars; for whether he did or did not use the precise words printed in the pamphlet, I cannot say, nor could he with accuracy. Of "the tone of seriousness" I certainly recollect nothing: on the contrary, I thought Mr. Bowles rather disposed to treat the subject lightly: for he said (I have no objection to be contradicted if incorrect), that some of his good-natured friends had come to him and exclaimed, "Eh! Bowles! how came you to make the Woods of Madeira?"

&c. &c. and that he had been at some pains and pulling down of the poem to convince them that he had never made "the Woods" do any thing of the kind. He was right, and _I was wrong,_ and have been wrong still up to this acknowledgment; for I ought to have looked twice before I wrote that which involved an inaccuracy capable of giving pain. The fact was, that, although I had certainly before read "the Spirit of Discovery," I took the quotation from the review. But the mistake was mine, and not the _review's,_ which quoted the pa.s.sage correctly enough, I believe. I blundered--G.o.d knows how--into attributing the tremors of the lovers to "the Woods of Madeira," by which they were surrounded. And I hereby do fully and freely declare and a.s.severate, that the Woods did _not_ tremble to a kiss, and that the lovers did. I quote from memory--

------"A kiss Stole on the listening silence, &c. &c.

They [the lovers] trembled, even as if the power," &c.

And if I had been aware that this declaration would have been in the smallest degree satisfactory to Mr. Bowles, I should not have waited nine years to make it, notwithstanding that "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" had been suppressed some time previously to my meeting him at Mr. Rogers's. Our worthy host might indeed have told him as much, as it was at his representation that I suppressed it. A new edition of that lampoon was preparing for the press, when Mr. Rogers represented to me, that "I was _now_ acquainted with many of the persons mentioned in it, and with some on terms of intimacy;" and that he knew "one family in particular to whom its suppression would give pleasure." I did not hesitate one moment, it was cancelled instantly; and it is no fault of mine that it has ever been republished. When I left England, in April, 1816, with no very violent intentions of troubling that country again, and amidst scenes of various kinds to distract my attention,--almost my last act, I believe, was to sign a power of attorney, to yourself, to prevent or suppress any attempts (of which several had been made in Ireland) at a republication. It is proper that I should state, that the persons with whom I was subsequently acquainted, whose names had occurred in that publication, were made my acquaintances at their own desire, or through the unsought intervention of others. I never, to the best of my knowledge, sought a personal introduction to any. Some of them to this day I know only by correspondence; and with one of those it was begun by myself, in consequence, however, of a polite verbal communication from a third person.

I have dwelt for an instant on these circ.u.mstances, because it has sometimes been made a subject of bitter reproach to me to have endeavoured to _suppress_ that satire. I never shrunk, as those who know me know, from any personal consequences which could be attached to its publication. Of its subsequent suppression, as I possessed the copyright, I was the best judge and the sole master. The circ.u.mstances which occasioned the suppression I have now stated; of the motives, each must judge according to his candour or malignity.

Mr. Bowles does me the honour to talk of "n.o.ble mind," and "generous magnanimity;" and all this because "the circ.u.mstance would have been explained had not the book been suppressed." I see no "n.o.bility of mind" in an act of simple justice; and I hate the word "_magnanimity,"_ because I have sometimes seen it applied to the grossest of impostors by the greatest of fools; but I would have "explained the circ.u.mstance," notwithstanding "the suppression of the book," if Mr. Bowles had expressed any desire that I should. As the "gallant Galbraith" says to "Baillie Jarvie," "Well, the devil take the mistake, and all that occasioned it." I have had as great and greater mistakes made about me personally and poetically, once a month for these last ten years, and never cared very much about correcting one or the other, at least after the first eight and forty hours had gone over them.

I must now, however, say a word or two about Pope, of whom you have my opinion more at large in the unpublished letter _on_ or _to_ (for I forget which) the editor of "Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine;"--and here I doubt that Mr. Bowles will not approve of my sentiments.

Although I regret having published "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," the part which I regret the least is that which regards Mr. Bowles with reference to Pope. Whilst I was writing that publication, in 1807 and 1808, Mr. Hobhouse was desirous that I should express our mutual opinion of Pope, and of Mr. Bowles's edition of his works. As I had completed my outline, and felt lazy, I requested that _he_ would do so. He did it. His fourteen lines on Bowles's Pope are in the first edition of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers;" and are quite as severe and much more poetical than my own in the second. On reprinting the work, as I put my name to it, I omitted Mr. Hobhouse's lines, and replaced them with my own, by which the work gained less than Mr. Bowles. I have stated this in the preface to the second edition. It is many years since I have read that poem; but the Quarterly Review, Mr. Octavius Gilchrist, and Mr.

Bowles himself, have been so obliging as to refresh my memory, and that of the public. I am grieved to say, that in reading over those lines, I repent of their having so far fallen short of what I meant to express upon the subject of Bowles's edition of Pope's Works. Mr.

Bowles says, that "Lord Byron _knows_ he does _not_ deserve this character." I know no such thing. I have met Mr. Bowles occasionally, in the best society in London; he appeared to me an amiable, well-informed, and extremely able man. I desire nothing better than to dine in company with such a mannered man every day in the week: but of "his character" I know nothing personally; I can only speak to his manners, and these have my warmest approbation. But I never judge from manners, for I once had my pocket picked by the civilest gentleman I ever met with; and one of the mildest persons I ever saw was All Pacha. Of Mr. Bowles's "_character_" I will not do him the _injustice_ to judge from the edition of Pope, if he prepared it heedlessly; nor the _justice,_ should it be otherwise, because I would neither become a literary executioner nor a personal one. Mr.

Bowles the individual, and Mr. Bowles the editor, appear the two most opposite things imaginable.

"And he himself one--ant.i.thesis."

I won't say "vile," because it is harsh; nor "mistaken," because it has two syllables too many: but every one must fill up the blank as he pleases.

What I saw of Mr. Bowles increased my surprise and regret that he should ever have lent his talents to such a task. If he had been a fool, there would have been some excuse for him; if he had been a needy or a bad man, his conduct would have been intelligible: but he is the opposite of all these; and thinking and feeling as I do of Pope, to me the whole thing is unaccountable. However, I must call things by their right names. I cannot call his edition of Pope a "candid" work; and I still think that there is an affectation of that quality not only in those volumes, but in the pamphlets lately published.

"Why _yet_ he doth _deny_ his prisoners."

Mr. Bowles says, that "he has seen pa.s.sages in his letters to Martha Blount which were never published by me, and I _hope never will_ be by others; which are so _gross_ as to imply the _grossest_ licentiousness." Is this fair play? It may, or it may not be that such pa.s.sages exist; and that Pope, who was not a monk, although a Catholic, may have occasionally sinned in word and deed with woman in his youth: but is this a sufficient ground for such a sweeping denunciation? Where is the unmarried Englishman of a certain rank of life, who (provided he has not taken orders) has not to reproach himself between the ages of sixteen and thirty with far more licentiousness than has ever yet been traced to Pope? Pope lived in the public eye from his youth upwards; he had all the dunces of his own time for his enemies, and, I am sorry to say, some, who have not the apology of dulness for detraction, since his death; and yet to what do all their acc.u.mulated hints and charges amount?--to an equivocal _liaison_ with Martha Blount, which might arise as much from his infirmities as from his pa.s.sions; to a hopeless flirtation with Lady Mary W. Montagu; to a story of Cibber's; and to two or three coa.r.s.e pa.s.sages in his works. _Who_ could come forth clearer from an invidious inquest on a life of fifty-six years? Why are we to be officiously reminded of such pa.s.sages in his letters, provided that they exist. Is Mr. Bowles aware to what such rummaging among "letters" and "stories" might lead? I have myself seen a collection of letters of another eminent, nay, pre-eminent, deceased poet, so abominably gross, and elaborately coa.r.s.e, that I do not believe that they could be paralleled in our language. What is more strange, is, that some of these are couched as _postscripts_ to his serious and sentimental letters, to which are tacked either a piece of prose, or some verses, of the most hyperbolical indecency. He himself says, that if "obscenity (using a much coa.r.s.er word) be the sin against the Holy Ghost, he most certainly cannot be saved." These letters are in existence, and have been seen by many besides myself; but would his _editor_ have been "_candid_" in even alluding to them? Nothing would have even provoked _me_, an indifferent spectator, to allude to them, but this further attempt at the depreciation of Pope.

What should we say to an editor of Addison, who cited the following pa.s.sage from Walpole's letters to George Montagu? "Dr. Young has published a new book, &c. Mr. Addison sent for the young Earl of Warwick, as he was dying, to show him in what peace a Christian could die; unluckily he died of _brandy:_ nothing makes a Christian die in peace like being maudlin! but don't say this in Gath where you are."

Suppose the editor introduced it with this preface: "One circ.u.mstance is mentioned by Horace Walpole, which, if true, was indeed _flagitious_. Walpole informs Montagu that Addison sent for the young Earl of Warwick, when dying, to show him in what peace a Christian could die; but unluckily he died drunk," &c. &c. Now, although there might occur on the subsequent, or on the same page, a faint show of disbelief, seasoned with the expression of "the _same candour_" (the _same_ exactly as throughout the book), I should say that this editor was either foolish or false to his trust; such a story ought not to have been admitted, except for one brief mark of crus.h.i.+ng indignation, unless it were _completely proved._ Why the words "_if true_?" that "_if"_ is not a peacemaker. Why talk of "Cibber's testimony" to his licentiousness? to what does this amount? that Pope when very young was _once_ decoyed by some n.o.blemen and the player to a house of carnal recreation. Mr. Bowles was not always a clergyman; and when he was a very young man, was he never seduced into as much?

If I were in the humour for story-telling, and relating little anecdotes, I could tell a much better story of Mr. Bowles than Cibber's, upon much better authority, viz. that of Mr. Bowles himself. It was not related by _him_ in my presence, but in that of a third person, whom Mr. Bowles names oftener than once in the course of his replies. This gentleman related it to me as a humorous and witty anecdote; and so it was, whatever its other characteristics might be. But should I, for a youthful frolic, brand Mr. Bowles with a "libertine sort of love," or with "licentiousness?" is he the less now a pious or a good man, for not having always been a priest? No such thing; I am willing to believe him a good man, almost as good a man as Pope, but no better.

The truth is, that in these days the grand "_primum mobile"_ of England is _cant;_ cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. It is the fas.h.i.+on, and while it lasts will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the time. I say _cant,_ because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer, and more divided amongst themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum. This hysterical horror of poor Pope's not very well ascertained, and never fully proved amours (for even Cibber owns that he prevented the somewhat perilous adventure in which Pope was embarking) sounds very virtuous in a controversial pamphlet; but all men of the world who know what life is, or at least what it was to them in their youth, must laugh at such a ludicrous foundation of the charge of "a libertine sort of love;" while the more serious will look upon those who bring forward such charges upon an insulated fact as fanatics or hypocrites, perhaps both. The two are sometimes compounded in a happy mixture.

Mr. Octavius Gilchrist speaks rather irreverently of a "second tumbler of _hot_ white-wine negus." What does he mean? Is there any harm in negus? or is it the worse for being _hot_? or does Mr. Bowles drink negus? I had a better opinion of him. I hoped that whatever wine he drank was neat; or, at least, that, like the ordinary in Jonathan Wild, "he preferred _punch,_ the rather as there was nothing against it in Scripture." I should be sorry to believe that Mr.

Bowles was fond of negus; it is such a "candid" liquor, so like a wishy-washy compromise between the pa.s.sion for wine and the propriety of water. But different writers have divers tastes. Judge Blackstone composed his "Commentaries" (he was a poet too in his youth) with a bottle of port before him. Addison's conversation was not good for much till he had taken a similar dose. Perhaps the prescription of these two great men was not inferior to the very different one of a soi-disant poet of this day, who, after wandering amongst the hills, returns, goes to bed, and dictates his verses, being fed by a by-stander with bread and b.u.t.ter during the operation.

I now come to Mr. Bowles's "invariable principles of poetry." These Mr. Bowles and some of his correspondents p.r.o.nounce "unanswerable;"

and they are "unanswered," at least by Campbell, who seems to have been astounded by the t.i.tle. The sultan of the time being offered to ally himself to a king of France because "he hated the word league;"

which proves that the Padishan understood French. Mr. Campbell has no need of my alliance, nor shall I presume to offer it; but I do hate that word "_invariable_." What is there of _human_, be it poetry, philosophy, wit, wisdom, science, power, glory, mind, matter, life, or death, which is "_invariable_?" Of course I put things divine out of the question. Of all arrogant baptisms of a book, this t.i.tle to a pamphlet appears the most complacently conceited. It is Mr.

Campbell's part to answer the contents of this performance, and especially to vindicate his own "s.h.i.+p," which Mr. Bowles most triumphantly proclaims to have struck to his very first fire.

"Quoth he, there was a _s.h.i.+p;_ Now let me go, thou grey-haired loon, Or my staff shall make thee skip."

It is no affair of mine, but having once begun, (certainly not by my own wish, but called upon by the frequent recurrence to my name in the pamphlets,) I am like an Irishman in a "row," "any body's customer." I shall therefore say a word or two on the "s.h.i.+p."

Mr. Bowles a.s.serts that Campbell's "s.h.i.+p of the Line" derives all its poetry, not from "_art_," but from "_nature_." "Take away the waves, the winds, the sun, &c. &c. _one_ will become a stripe of blue bunting; and the other a piece of coa.r.s.e canva.s.s on three tall poles." Very true; take away the "waves," "the winds," and there will be no s.h.i.+p at all, not only for poetical, but for any other purpose; and take away "the sun," and we must read Mr. Bowles's pamphlet by candle-light. But the "poetry" of the "s.h.i.+p" does _not_ depend on "the waves," &c.; on the contrary, the "s.h.i.+p of the Line" confers its own poetry upon the waters, and heightens _theirs._ I do not deny, that the "waves and winds," and above all "the sun," are highly poetical; we know it to our cost, by the many descriptions of them in verse: but if the waves bore only the foam upon their bosoms, if the winds wafted only the sea-weed to the sh.o.r.e, if the sun shone neither upon pyramids, nor fleets, nor fortresses, would its beams be equally poetical? I think not: the poetry is at least reciprocal. Take away "the s.h.i.+p of the line" "swinging round" the "calm water," and the calm water becomes a somewhat monotonous thing to look at, particularly if not transparently _clear_; witness the thousands who pa.s.s by without looking on it at all. What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? they might have seen the poetical "calm water" at Wapping, or in the "London Dock," or in the Paddington Ca.n.a.l, or in a horse-pond, or in a slop-basin, or in any other vase.

They might have heard the poetical winds howling through the c.h.i.n.ks of a pigsty, or the garret window; they might have seen the sun s.h.i.+ning on a footman's livery, or on a bra.s.s warming pan; but could the "calm water," or the "wind," or the "sun," make all, or any of these "poetical?" I think not. Mr. Bowles admits "the s.h.i.+p" to be poetical, but only from those accessaries: now if they _confer_ poetry so as to make one thing poetical, they would make other things poetical; the more so, as Mr. Bowles calls a "s.h.i.+p of the line"

without them,--that is to say, its "masts and sails and streamers,"--"blue bunting," and "coa.r.s.e canva.s.s," and "tall poles."

So they are; and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is gra.s.s, and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy.

Did Mr. Bowles ever gaze upon the sea? I presume that he has, at least upon a sea-piece. Did any painter ever paint the sea _only_, without the addition of a s.h.i.+p, boat, wreck, or some such adjunct? Is the sea itself a more attractive, a more moral, a more poetical object, with or without a vessel, breaking its vast but fatiguing monotony? Is a storm more poetical without a s.h.i.+p? or, in the poem of the s.h.i.+pwreck, is it the storm or the s.h.i.+p which most interests? both _much_ undoubtedly; but without the vessel, what should we care for the tempest? It would sink into mere descriptive poetry, which in itself was never esteemed a high order of that art.

I look upon myself as ent.i.tled to talk of naval matters, at least to poets:--with the exception of Walter Scott, Moore, and Southey, perhaps, who have been voyagers, I have _swam_ more miles than all the rest of them together now living ever _sailed_, and have lived for months and months on s.h.i.+pboard; and, during the whole period of my life abroad, have scarcely ever pa.s.sed a month out of sight of the ocean: besides being brought up from two years till ten on the brink of it. I recollect, when anch.o.r.ed off Cape Sigeum in 1810, in an English frigate, a violent squall coming on at sunset, so violent as to make us imagine that the s.h.i.+p would part cable, or drive from her anchorage. Mr. Hobhouse and myself, and some officers, had been up the Dardanelles to Abydos, and were just returned in time. The aspect of a storm in the Archipelago is as poetical as need be, the sea being particularly short, das.h.i.+ng, and dangerous, and the navigation intricate and broken by the isles and currents. Cape Sigeum, the tumuli of the Troad, Lemnos, Tenedos, all added to the a.s.sociations of the time. But what seemed the most "_poetical_" of all at the moment, were the numbers (about two hundred) of Greek and Turkish craft, which were obliged to "cut and run" before the wind, from their unsafe anchorage, some for Tenedos, some for other isles, some for the main, and some it might be for eternity. The sight of these little scudding vessels, darting over the foam in the twilight, now appearing and now disappearing between the waves in the cloud of night, with their peculiarly _white_ sails, (the Levant sails not being of "_coa.r.s.e canva.s.s_," but of white cotton,) skimming along as quickly, but less safely than the sea-mews which hovered over them; their evident distress, their reduction to fluttering specks in the distance, their crowded succession, their _littleness_, as contending with the giant element, which made our stout forty-four's _teak_ timbers (she was built in India) creak again; their aspect and their motion, all struck me as something far more "poetical" than the mere broad, brawling, s.h.i.+pless sea, and the sullen winds, could possibly have been without them.

The Euxine is a n.o.ble sea to look upon, and the port of Constantinople the most beautiful of harbours, and yet I cannot but think that the twenty sail of the line, some of one hundred and forty guns, rendered it more "poetical" by day in the sun, and by night perhaps still more, for the Turks illuminate their vessels of war in a manner the most picturesque, and yet all this is _artificial_. As for the Euxine, I stood upon the Symplegades--I stood by the broken altar still exposed to the winds upon one of them--I felt all the "_poetry_" of the situation, as I repeated the first lines of Medea; but would not that "poetry" have been heightened by the _Argo_? It was so even by the appearance of any merchant vessel arriving from Odessa. But Mr. Bowles says, "Why bring your s.h.i.+p off the stocks?"

for no reason that I know, except that s.h.i.+ps are built to be launched. The water, &c. undoubtedly HEIGHTENS the poetical a.s.sociations, but it does not _make_ them; and the s.h.i.+p amply repays the obligation: they aid each other; the water is more poetical with the s.h.i.+p--the s.h.i.+p less so without the water. But even a s.h.i.+p laid up in dock, is a grand and a poetical sight. Even an old boat, keel upwards, wrecked upon the barren sand, is a "poetical" object, (and Wordsworth, who made a poem about a was.h.i.+ng tub and a blind boy, may tell you so as well as I,) whilst a long extent of sand and unbroken water, without the boat, would be as like dull prose as any pamphlet lately published.

What makes the poetry in the image of the "_marble waste of Tadmor_,"

or Grainger's "Ode to Solitude," so much admired by Johnson? Is it the "_marble_" or the "_waste,_" the _artificial_ or the _natural_ object? The "waste" is like all other _wastes_; but the "_marble_" of Palmyra makes the poetry of the pa.s.sage as of the place.

The beautiful but barren Hymettus, the whole coast of Attica, her hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, &c. &c. are in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of Athens, of Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth. But am I to be told that the "nature" of Attica would be _more_ poetical without the "art" of the Acropolis? of the Temple of Theseus? and of the still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely artificial genius? Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands? The COLUMNS of Cape Colonna, or the Cape itself? The rocks at the foot of it, or the recollection that Falconer's _s.h.i.+p_ was bulged upon them? There are a thousand rocks and capes far more picturesque than those of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves; what are they to a thousand scenes in the wilder parts of Greece, of Asia Minor, Switzerland, or even of Cintra in Portugal, or to many scenes of Italy, and the Sierras of Spain? But it is the "_art_," the columns, the temples, the wrecked vessel, which give them their antique and their modern poetry, and not the spots themselves. Without them, the _spots_ of earth would be unnoticed and unknown; buried, like Babylon and Nineveh, in indistinct confusion, without poetry, as without existence; but to whatever spot of earth these ruins were transported, if they were _capable_ of transportation, like the obelisk, and the sphinx, and the Memnon's head, _there_ they would still exist in the perfection of their beauty, and in the pride of their poetry. I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture; but why did I do so? The _ruins_ are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less so without them.

Such is the poetry of art.

Mr. Bowles contends again that the pyramids of Egypt are poetical, because of "the a.s.sociation with boundless deserts," and that a "pyramid of the same dimensions" would not be sublime in "Lincoln's Inn Fields:" not _so_ poetical certainly; but take away the "pyramids," and what is the "_desert?"_ Take away Stone-henge from Salisbury plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow heath, or any other unenclosed down. It appears to me that St. Peter's, the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Palatine, the Apollo, the Laoc.o.o.n, the Venus di Medicis, the Hercules, the dying Gladiator, the Moses of Michael Angelo, and all the higher works of Canova, (I have already spoken of those of ancient Greece, still extant in that country, or transported to England,) are as _poetical_ as Mont Blanc or Mount aetna, perhaps still more so, as they are direct manifestations of mind, and _presuppose_ poetry in their very conception; and have, moreover, as being such, a something of actual life, which cannot belong to any part of inanimate nature, unless we adopt the system of Spinosa, that the world is the Deity. There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice: does this depend upon the sea, or the ca.n.a.ls?--

"The dirt and sea-weed whence proud Venice rose?"

Is it the ca.n.a.l which runs between the palace and the prison, or the "Bridge of Sighs," which connects them, that render it poetical? Is it the "Ca.n.a.l Grande," or the Rialto which arches it, the churches which tower over it, the palaces which line, and the gondolas which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than Rome itself? Mr. Bowles will say, perhaps, that the Rialto is but marble, the palaces and churches only stone, and the gondolas a "coa.r.s.e"

black cloth, thrown over some planks of carved wood, with a s.h.i.+ning bit of fantastically formed iron at the prow, "_without_" the water.

And I tell him that without these, the water would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch; and whoever says the contrary, deserves to be at the bottom of that, where Pope's heroes are embraced by the mud nymphs. There would be nothing to make the ca.n.a.l of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington, were it not for the artificial adjuncts above mentioned; although it is a perfectly natural ca.n.a.l, formed by the sea, and the innumerable islands which const.i.tute the site of this extraordinary city.

The very Cloaca of Tarquin at Rome are as poetical as Richmond Hill; many will think more so: take away Rome, and leave the Tibur and the seven hills, in the nature of Evander's time. Let Mr. Bowles, or Mr.