One cannot imagine that John Bowle will ever receive a warmer tribute than he did recently in the great Barcelona edition of Don Quixote. There Francisco Rico writes: "Nos faltan palabras para alabar la tarea de don Juan (como gustaba llamarse ...), la documentacion, amplitud, exigencia, acierto y sobriedad de su comentario: con que nos contentaremos con decir que se halla en la raiz de todos los posteriores y que son abundantes las glosas que ningun cervantista parece haber querido llevar mas alla de donde las dejo Bowle" (Rico 1: ccxvi-ccxvii). It would be nice to think that Bowle had received some comparable recognition of his achievement in his own lifetime. After all, he repeatedly writes of what a wearisome labour it had often been to get through the reading necessary to enable him to write those three hundred pages of annotations and indices that accompany his edition of Don Quixote. So, when he had been at the task for several years, he writes to Thomas Percy in October 1777: "With my accustomed Perseverance I have toild, & turmoild thro El verdadero suceso de la famosa batalla de Roncesvalles, con la muerte de los doze Pares de Francia, por Fr. Garrido de Villena, en Toledo, 1583. 4to, Six and thirty as dull & tedious cantos as ever merited Fire, or perpetual Oblivion" (Percy-Bowle 49). And nearly three years earlier: "I have gone thro the dry desert of the many thousand lines of the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci, &, fortifyd with a proper share of Patience--Bowle was always strong on the subject of his patience and perseverance--have traversed the less fertile & more ungrateful soil of Alamanni in his Gyrone il Cortese: In both I have discoverd that Cervantes went this road before me." (2) Fortunately, Bowle did enjoy Ariosto. His list of works consulted in preparing his annotations contains well over 200 entries. When, in early 1776 or perhaps a little before, he discovered Sebastian de Covarrubias's Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espanola, he settled down to read the work right through and spent a month and more on it. (3) And yet the very labour that he put into all this research became the main object of a 300-page (and more) onslaught on him that finally put paid to any hopes he might have had of success for his edition in his own country. After he died, in 1788, a friend of many years wrote (as we shall see) that the impact of this attack certainly shortened Bowle's life.
