Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron/Conversations/Section 34
“Bowles is one of the same little order of spirits, who has been fussily fishing on for fame, and is equally waspish and jealous. What could Coleridge mean by praising his poetry as he does?
“It was a mistake of mine, about his making the woods of Madeira tremble, &c.; but it seems that I might have told him that there were no woods to make tremble with kisses, which would have been quite as great a blunder.
“I met Bowles once at Rogers’s, and thought him a pleasant, gentlemanly man—a good fellow, for a parson. When men meet together after dinner, the conversation takes a certain turn. I remember he entertained us with some good stories. The reverend gentleman pretended, however, to be much shocked at Pope’s letters to Martha Blount.
“I set him and his invariable principles at rest. He did attempt an answer, which was no reply; at least, nobody read it. I believe he applied to me some lines in Shakspeare.[1] A man is very unlucky who has a name that can be punned upon; and his own did not escape.
“I have been reading ‘Johnson’s Lives,’ a book I am very fond of. I look upon him as the profoundest of critics, and had occasion to study him when I was writing to Bowles.
“Of all the disgraces that attach to England in the eye of foreigners, who admire Pope more than any of our poets, (though it is the fashion to under-rate him among ourselves,) the greatest perhaps is, that there should be no place assigned to him in Poets’ Corner. I have often thought of erecting a monument to him at my own expense, in Westminster Abbey; and hope to do so yet. But he was a Catholic, and, what was worse, puzzled Tillotson and the Divines. That accounts for his not having any national monument. Milton, too, had very nearly been without a stone; and the mention of his name on the tomb of another was at one time considered a profanation to a church. The French, I am told, lock up Voltaire’s tomb. Will there never be an end to this bigotry? Will men never learn that every great poet is necessarily a religious man?—so at least Coleridge says.”
“Yes,” replied Shelley; “and he might maintain the converse,—that every truly religious man is a poet; meaning by poetry the power of communicating intense and impassioned impressions respecting man and Nature.”
- ↑ “I do remember thee, my Lord Biron,” &c.