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.
An odd freak of fancy led Byron to pose in English Bards as a watchful guardian of morality in literature, though even at that date he was the author of verses which are not altogether blameless. That he should upbraid Monk Lewis, Moore, and Strangford as “melodious advocates of lust” may well seem extraordinary to the reader who recalls the poem which Byron sent to Pigot, August 10, 1806, asking that it be printed separately as “improper for the perusal of ladies.”[99] The truth is that Byron was again treading in the steps of others. The virtuous but somewhat prurient Mathias, excited by Lewis’s novel Ambrosio, or the Monk (1795), which has given the writer notoriety and a nickname, had assailed the author in Pursuits of Literature,[100] and the supposed voluptuousness of the story had not escaped the notice of the Anti-Jacobin and Epics of the Ton. Byron had thus more than one precedent for his ironic reference to Lewis’s “chaste descriptions.” Moore’s Epistles, Odes, and other Poems (1806) had been censured by the Edinburgh Review in an article which described Moore as “the most licentious of modern versifiers.” All the Talents had questioned Moore’s morality, and Epics of the Ton had mentioned a writer who,
“Like Tommy Moore has scratch’d the itching throng,
And tickled matrons with a spicy song.”
Byron had been a delighted reader of the Irish poet and had been influenced by him in the more sentimental verses of Hours of Idleness; nevertheless he repeated the imputations of the other satirists in referring to him as
“Little! young Catullus of his day,
As sweet, but as immoral, as his lay.”
To Viscount Strangford (1780–1855), of whose translation of Camoëns he had formerly been very fond, Byron offered advice:
“Be warm, but pure; be amorous, but be chaste.”
In the same vein as this grave admonition are the remarks which the poet makes upon the Argyle Institution, founded by Colonel Greville as a resort for gambling and dancing. Digressing for a while without any logical reason, Byron proceeds to condemn social follies, especially those fostered by “blest retreats of infamy and ease.” The passage includes some lines on round dancing, which anticipate Byron’s attack on that amusement in his later satire, The Waltz.