Bowles, WILLIAM LISLE, D.D.

Bowles, WILLIAM LISLE, D.D., poet, was born 24th September 1762, at King's Sutton, in Northamptonshire, where his father was vicar. Educated at Winchester School and at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1804 he became a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral and rector of Bremhill, in Wiltshire. Here he spent in easy circumstances the rest of his long life, dying at Salisbury, 7th April 1850. His earliest publication, Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots during a Journey (1789), was received with extraordinary favour; the contents of the little volume were fresh and natural, all the more charming because of the contrast they offered to the style of poetry which had long been in vogue. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey were among their enthusiastic admirers; and through his influence over them, Bowles may be looked on as the founder of a school of English poetry in which his own name was soon eclipsed by theirs. Of his subsequent poetical works (14 vols. 1789–1837) the longest is The Spirit of Discovery, and the best, perhaps, The Missionary. As a poet Bowles shows a fine appreciation of the beauties of nature, and pleases by the expression of pure and generous sentiment, as well as by the playfulness of fancy and perfect scholarly correctness; but he is deficient in vigour and depth. In 1807 he published an edition of Pope, and an opinion which he expressed on Pope's poetical merits led to a rather memorable controversy (1809–25) in which Campbell and Byron were his antagonists, and which turned chiefly upon the comparative value in poetry of images derived from nature and those derived from art. Of his prose writings may be mentioned a rather dry Life of Bishop Ken (2 vols. 1830). See the Memoir by Gilfillan prefixed to his collected poems (Edin. 1855).