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—­antithesis.”

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.