[Footnote 34: From the reply to Bowles. William L. Bowles, clergyman, poet and antiquarian, was born in 1762, and died in 1850. In 1806 he had issued an edition of Pope in ten volumes, to which was prefixt a sketch of the poet's life, with severe criticisms on his poetry. These criticisms gave rise to a controversy, famous in its time and long afterward, and to which Byron's article was a notable contribution.] [Footnote 35: Cape Colonna (anciently called Sunium) lies at the southeastern end of Attica and is a promontory.] [Footnote 36: The reference is to William Falconer, second mate of a ship in the Levantine trade, which was wrecked during a voyage from Alexandria to Venice. Falconer became a poet, and his work, "The Shipwreck," was founded on his own experience.] PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Born in 1792, drowned at Spezia, Italy, in 1822; educated at Eton and Oxford, being expelled from the latter for publishing a pamphlet on atheism; married Harriet Westbrook in 1811; met Mary Woolstonecraft in 1814, and went to live with her in Switzerland, abandoning Harriet; returned to England in 1815 and settled near Windsor Forest; joined Byron in Switzerland in 1816; in the same year, Harriet having drowned herself, he married Mary; his body consumed on a funeral pyre at Spezia in the presence of Leigh Hunt, Byron and Trelawny; published "Queen Mab" in 1813; "Alastor" in 1816; "Prometheus Unbound" in 1820; his works collected by his wife in 1830. I IN DEFENSE OF POETRY[37] The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.