In this early satire Byron showed no personal animosity towards Southey; he introduced him merely as a too prolific and too eccentric scribbler, to be jeered at rather than hated. The fierce feud between the two men was of a later growth. Picking Southey as the leader of the romanticists, Byron treats Wordsworth as merely a “dull disciple,” silly in his choice of subjects and prosaic in his poetry, “the meanest object of the lowly group.” Perhaps the most striking defect in the satire levelled at this poet is the lack of any recognition of his ability, an omission all the more noticeable because Byron, in the last two cantos of _Childe Harold_, was influenced so strongly by Wordsworth’s conception of the relation between man and nature. Coleridge receives even less consideration. He is “the gentle Coleridge--to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear,” and is ridiculed mainly because of his _Lines to a Young Ass_, a poem which had previously excited the mirth of the _Simpliciad_.[94] The slashing manner in which the boy satirist disposes of his great contemporaries is almost unparalleled.[95] Byron’s satire on the Rev. Samuel Bowles (1762–1850) illustrates one phase of his veneration for Pope, and connects him with another Pope enthusiast, Gifford. In the _Baviad_ Gifford had gone out of his way to confront and refute Weston, who, in an article in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, had adduced evidence to prove that Pope’s moral character was not above reproach. Gifford, unable to dispute the validity of the facts, had contented himself with describing the critic as “canker’d Weston,” and terming him in a note “this nightman of literature.”[96] Bowles, whose early sonnets (1789) had attracted the admiration of Coleridge, published in 1807 an edition of Pope’s _Works_ in ten volumes, in which he followed Weston in not sparing the infirmities and mendacities of the great Augustan. The effect of this work on Byron was like that of Weston’s on Gifford, and the result was that Bowles was pilloried in _English Bards_ as “the wretch who did for hate what Mallet did for hire.” Nor did the quarrel end here. It grew eventually into a heated controversy between Bowles and Byron, carried on while the latter was in Italy, in the course of which Byron was provoked into calling Pope “the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence.”[97] So strongly did he feel on the matter that he wrote, even as late as 1821, concerning _English Bards_: “The part which I regret the least is that which regards Mr. Bowles, with reference to Pope.”[98] Byron’s exaltation of Pope was made a positive issue in the unreserved commendation which he gave to Campbell, Rogers, and Crabbe, all three of whom were, in most respects, firm in their allegiance to that master’s principles of poetry.