showered Pamphlets with elaborate titles, which one may duly find, with their occasions and rejoinders, in the library of the British Museum. At last dust settled on the conflict, which, however, is itself not quite settled to the present day, and in fact never can be, because it depends on one of the root differences of poetical taste. However, it probably helped the wiser sort to take the _via media_, even such a Romantic as Hazlitt vindicating Pope’s possession of “the poetical point of view,” and did, for the same sort, a service to the general history of criticism by emphasising the above-mentioned difference. Bowles himself, if he had been less fussy, less verbose, less given to “duply and quadruply” on small controversial points, and more a man of the world and of humour, might not have made by any means a bad critic. As it was, he was right in the main. [Sidenote: _Byron._] We must, however, I suppose, say something, if only in this connection, of Byron as a critic. I do not think it necessary to say very much; and I shall not, as I could most easily do, concatenate here the innumerable contradictions of critical opinion in his _Letters_, which show that they were mere flashes of the moment, connected not merely by no critical theory but by no critical taste of any consistency, flings, “half-bricks” directed at dog or devil or divinity, according to the mood in which the “noble poet” chose to find himself. [Sidenote: _The_ Letter to Murray, _&c._] Let us confine ourselves to that unquestionably remarkable _Letter to John Murray_ on Bowles and Pope, which is admittedly his critical diploma-piece. There are of course very good things in it. Byron was a genius; and your genius will say genial things now and then, whatsoever subject he happens to be treating. But he cannot in the very least maintain himself at the critical point: he is like the ball in the fountain, mounting now and then gloriously on the summit of the column and catching the rays that it attracts and reflects, much more often lying wallowing in the basin. Never was such critical floundering. He blasphemes at one moment the “invariable principles of poetry,” about which the amiable but somewhat ineffectual Bowles prated; he affirms them at the next, by finding in his way, and blindly picking up, the secret of secrets, that the poet who _executes_ best is the highest, whatsoever his department; and he makes his affirmation valueless, by saying, almost before we have turned the page, that Lucretius is ruined by his ethics, and Pope saved by them. Even setting ethic against ethic, the proposition is at least disputable: but what on earth has Ethic to do with Execution, except that they both occur in the dictionary under E? There are other excellent things in the letter, and yet others the reverse of excellent; but I have not the least intention here of setting up a balance-sheet after the manner of Robinson Crusoe, of ranging Byron’s undoubtedly true, though not novel,