Mr. Bowles became a poet in print in his twenty-seventh year--publishing in 1789 a very small volume in quarto, with the very modest title of "Fourteen Sonnets." His excellencies were not lost on the public; and in the same year appeared a second edition, with seven additional sonnets. "I had just entered on my seventeenth year," says Coleridge, in his "Biographia Literaria," "when the Sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty-one in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me by a schoolfellow [at Christ's Hospital] who had quitted us for the University. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions--as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author." Coleridge was always consistent in his admiration of Mr. Bowles. Charlotte Smith and Bowles, he says--writing in 1797--are they who first made the sonnet popular among the present generation of English readers; and in the same year in which this encomium was printed, his own volume of poetry contains "Sonnets attempted in the manner of Mr. Bowles." "My obligations to Mr. Bowles," he adds in another place, "were indeed important, and for radical good;" and that his approbation might not be confined to prose, he has said in verse: "My heart has thanked thee, Bowles, for those soft strains Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring." Mr. Bowles's sonnets were descriptive of his personal feelings; and the manly tenderness which pervades them was occasioned, he tells us, by the sudden death of a deserving young woman with whom "Sperabat longos, heu! ducere soles, Et fido acclinis consenuisse sinu." An eighth edition appeared in 1802; and a ninth and a tenth have since been demanded. While at Trinity--where he took his degree in 1792--Mr. Bowles obtained the Chancellor's prize for a Latin poem. On leaving the University he entered into holy orders, and was appointed to a curacy in Wiltshire; from which he was preferred to a living in Gloucestershire--and in 1803 to a canonry in Salisbury Cathedral. His next step was to the rectory of Bremhill in Wiltshire--to which he was presented by Archbishop Moore. Here he remained till his death--beloved by his parishioners and by all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance. A volume of his sermons ("Paulus Parochialis"), designed for country congregations, was published in 1826.