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THOMAS
CAMPBELL

FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
The following Volumes are now ready: —
THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson.
ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton.
HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask.
JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES.
ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun.
THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie.
RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless.
SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson.
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden
Blaikie.
JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Lease.
TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT Smeaton.
FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond.
THE ' ' BLACKWOOD " GROUP. By Sir George Douglas.
NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood.
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsburt.
KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis A. Barb^
ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart.
JAMES THOMSON. By William Bayne.
MUNGO PARK. By T. Banks Maclachlan.
DAVID HUME. By Professor Calderwood.
WILLIAM DUNBAR. By OLIPHANT Smeaton.
SIR WILLIAM WALLACE. By Professor Murison,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. By Margaret Moves
Black.
THOMAS REID. By Professor Campbell Fraser.
POLLOK AND AYTOUN. By Rosaline Masson.
ADAM SMITH. By Hector C, Macpherson.
ANDREW MELVILLE. By WILLIAM MORISON.
JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER. By E, S. Haldane.
KING ROBERT THE BRUCE. By A. F. Murison.
JAMES HOGG. By Sir George Douglas.
THOMAS CAMPBELL. By J. Cuthbert Hadden.

THOMAS
CAMPBELL BY
JXUTHBERT
HADDEN ::
FAMOUS•SCOTS- •SERIES-

^^

PUBUSFTED BY I
CHARLES •5^<ilS
scribner's sons
^i?rr NEW YORK

^d^7 17
31

MY WIFE
WHO, BY HER QUIET HELPFULNESS AND
FAIR companionship, LIGHTENS FOR ME THE
BURDENS OF THE LITERARY LIFE,
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

PREFACE
Reviewing Seattle's Life of Campbell in the Quarterly
in 1 849, Lockhart expressed the hope that no one would
ever tell Campbell's story without making due acknow
ledgment to ' the best stay of his declining period.' He
would be a bold man who would think of doing so. As
well might one expect to write a life of Johnson with
out the aid of Boswell as expect to tell Campbell's story
without reference to Dr Beattie. In addition to my
acknowledgments to him, I have to express my in
debtedness to Mr Cyrus Redding's 'Reminiscences of
Thomas Campbell,' which, though badly put together,
yet contain a mass of valuable information about the
poet, especially in his more intimate relations. For the
rest I have made considerable use of Campbell's corre
spondence, and have, I trust, acquainted myself with
all the more important references made to him in con
temporary records, and in the writings of those who
knew him. To several of my personal friends, par
ticularly to Mr G. H. Ely, I am obliged for hints and
helpful suggestions, which I gratefully acknowledge.
J. C. H.
Edinburgh, October 1899.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
PAGE
ANCESTRY — BIRTH — SCHOOLDAYS .... 9

CHAPTER II
COLLEGE AND HIGHLAND TUTORSHIPS . . . 20
CHAPTER III
• THE PLEASURES OF HOPE ' . . , .36
CHAPTER IV
CONTINENTAL TRAVELS . . . . .51
CHAPTER V
WANDERINGS — MARRIAGE — SETTLEMENT IN LONDON . 66
CHAPTER VI
POETICAL WORK AND PROSE BOOKMAKING . . 85
CHAPTER VII
LECTURES AND TRAVELS ..... 99
CHAPTER VIII
CLOSING YEARS . . . . . .122
CHAPTER IX
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND PLACE AS A POET . I41

THOMAS CAMPBELL
CHAPTER I
ANCESTRY  BIRTH  SCHOOLDAYS
The Campbells, as everybody knows, can claim an
incredibly long descent. There is a Clan Campbell
Society, the chairman of which declared some years
ago that he possessed a pedigree carrying the family
back to the year 420, and no doubt there are en
thusiasts who can trace it to at least the time of the
Flood. The poet was not particular about his pedigree,
but the biographer of a Campbell would be doing less
than justice to his subject if he denied him that ell
of genealogy which Lockhart deemed the due of every
man who glories in being a Scot.
In the present case, fortunately for the biographer,
there is authoritative assistance at hand. The poet's
uncle, Robert Campbell, a political writer under
Walpole's administration, made a special study of the
genealogy of the Campbells ; and in his ' Life of the
most illustrious Prince John, Duke of Argyll,' he
has traced for us the descent of that particular branch
of the Clan to which the poet's family belonged. The
descent may be stated in a few words. Archibald
Campbell, lord and knight of Lochawe, was grandson
of Sir Neil, Chief of the Clan, and a celebrated con
temporary of Robert the Bruce. He died in 1360,
leaving three sonc, from one of whom, Iver, sprang
the Campbells in whom we are now interested. They
were known as the Campbells of Kirnan, an estate 9

lo FAMOUS SCOTS
lying in the pastoral vale of Glassary, in Argyllshire,
with which, through many generations, they became
identified as lairds and heritors, 'supporters of the
Reformation and elders in the Church.' In a privately
printed work dealing with the Clan Iver, the late
Principal Campbell of Aberdeen, who was distantly
related to the poet, gives a slightly different account
of the origin of the Kirnan Campbells, but the matter
need not be dwelt upon here. There is a suggestion,
scouted by Principal Campbell, that the poet believed
himself to be remotely connected with the great ducal
house of Argyll. In some lines written ' On receiving
a Seal with the Campbell Crest,' he speaks of himself
as having been blown, a scattered leaf from the feudal
tree, 'in Fortune's mutability'; and even Lady Char
lotte Campbell, a daughter of the ' illustrious Prince
John,' hails him as a clansman of her race, exclaiming
' How proudly do I call thee one of mine ! '
These, however, are speculations for the antiquary
rather than for the biographer. They are interesting
enough in their way, but the writer of a small volume
like the present cannot afford to be discursive ; and so,
leaving the arid regions of genealogy, we may be con
tent to begin with the poet's grandfather, Archibald
Campbell. He was the last to reside on the family
estate of Kirnan. Late in life he had taken a second
wife, a daughter of Stewart, the laird of Ascog. Be
fore her marriage the lady had lived much in the Low
lands, and now she said she could not live in the
Highlands : the solitude preyed upon her health and
spirits. Hence it came about that the laird of Kirnan
set up house in an old mansion in the Trunkmaker's
Row, off the Canongate of Edinburgh, where the
poet's father, the youngest of three sons, was born in
1 710. Beyond the interesting fact that he was educated
under the care of Robert Wodrow, the celebrated his-

THOMAS CAMPBELL ii
torian and preacher, from whose teaching he drew the
strict religious principles which regulated his life, we
hear nothing of the earlier years of Alexander Camp
bell. He went to America, and was in business for
some time at Falmouth, in Virginia. There he met
with the 5on of a Glasgow merchant, another Campbell,
to whom he was quite unrelated, and together the two
returned to Scotland to start in Glasgow as Virginia
traders. The new firm at first prospered in a high
degree, for Glasgow about the middle of the eighteenth
century was just touching the culminating point of her
commerce with the American colonies. Even as early
as 173s the Glasgow merchants had fifteen large vessels
engaged in the tobacco trade alone. But the outbreak
of the American War in 1775 put a speedy end to the
city's success in this direction. 'Some of the Virginia
lords,' says Dr Strang, ' ere long retired from the
trade, and others of them were ultimately ruined.
Business for a time was in fact paralysed, and a universal
cry of distress was heard throughout the town.'
Of course the Campbell firm suffered with the rest.
Beattie, who had access to the books, declares that
Alexander Campbell's personal loss could not have been
less than twenty thousand pounds. Whatever the sum
was, it represented practically the whole of Campbell's
savings. This was a serious blow to a man of sixty-
five, with ten surviving children and an eleventh child
expected. He set himself to retrieve his fortunes as best
he could, but he never recovered his position ; and we
are told that his family henceforward had to be brought
up on an income — partly derived from boarders — that
barely sufficed to purchase the common necessaries of
life. It was, however, in these days of declining for
tunes that the family was destined to receive its most
notable member. The eleventh and last child, antici
pated perhaps with misgiving, was Thomas Campbell,
who was born on the 27th of July 1777, his father

12 FAMOUS SCOTS
being then sixty-seven, and his mother some twenty-five
years less.^
It will be well to say here all that needs farther to be
said about the poet's parents. Alexander Campbell
belonged to a Scottish type now all but extinct — stolid,
meditative, somewhat dour, fond of theology and the
abstract sciences : leading the family devotions in ex
tempore prayer; regarding the Sunday sermon as
essential to salvation, and less concerned about the
amount of his income than about his honour and
integrity. As his son puts it :
Truth, standing on her solid square, from youth
He worshipped — stem, uncompromising truth.
That he was a man of character and intelligence is
clear from the fact that he numbered among his inti
mates such distinguished men as Adam Smith and Dr
Thomas Reid, the successive occupants of the Moral
Philosophy Chair at Glasgow. When Reid published
his ' Inquiry into the Human Mind,' he gave a copy
to Alexander Campbell, who read it and said he was
edified by it. 'I am glad you are pleased with it,'
remarked Reid; 'there are now at least two men in
Glasgow who understand my work — Alexander Camp
bell and myself.' He had the saving grace of humour,
too, this old Virginia trader, though, from a specimen
given, it was apparently not of a very brilliant kind.
Some of the boys were discussing the best colours for
a new suit of clothes. ' Lads,' said the father, whose
propensity for punning not even chagrin at the law's
' It may be convenient to set down in a note a list of Campbell's
brothers and sisters, with dates of birth and death. The details
are from the family Bible : Mary, 1757-1843 ; Isabella, 1758-1837 ;
Archibald, 1760-1830; Alexander, 1761-1826; John, 1763-1806;
Elizabeth, 1765- 1829; Daniel, 1 767-1 767 ; Robert, 1768- 1807;
James, 1770-1783 ; Daniel, 1773  ? Archibald and Robert went
to Virginia, and John to Demerara.

THOMAS CAMPBELL 13
delays could suppress, ' lads, if you wish to get a lasting
suit, get one like mine. I have a suit in the Court of
Chancery which has lasted thirty years, and I think it
will never wear out.' The worthy man lived to the
patriarchal age of ninety-one, dying in Edinburgh —
whither he had retired with his household three years
before — in 1801. In his last days 'my son Thomas'
was the main theme of his conversation.
Alexander Campbell had not married until he reached
his forty-sixth year, and then he chose the young sister
of his partner, an energetic girl of twenty-one. It must
have been from her that the son drew his poetic strain.
She is spoken of as 'an admirable manager and a
clever woman,' and, what is of more interest, ' a person
of much taste and refinement.' She brought to the
home the poetry in counterpoise to her husband's
philosophy. Like Leigh Hunt's mother, she was ' fond
of music, and a gentle singer in her way ' : her poet
son, as we shall find, was also fond of music, sang a
little, and was, in his earlier years at least, devoted to
the flute. To her children she was certainly not over-
indulgent ; indeed she is said to have been ' unneces
sarily severe or even harsh ' ; but the mother of so large
a family, with ordinary cares enhanced by the necessity
for practising petty economies, would have been an
angel if she had always been sweet and gracious. Be
tween her and her youngest boy there seems to have
been a particular affection, and when he began to
make some stir in the world, no one was more elated
with pardonable pride than she. There is a story told
of her having asked a shopman to address a parcel to
' Mrs Campbell, mother of the author of " The Plea
sures of Hope.'" She survived her husband for eleven
years, and died in Edinburgh in 18 12, at the age of
seventy-six. The house in which Campbell and his family resided
at the time of the poet's birth, was a little to the west

14 FAMOUS SCOTS
of High Street near the foot of Balmanno Brae, and in
the line of the present George Street. Beattie, writing
in 1849, speaks of it as having long since disappeared
under the march of civic improvement, and as a matter
of fact it was demolished in 1794 when George Street
was opened up. The Glasgow of 1777 was of course
a very different place from what it is to-day — very
different from what it was when Defoe could describe it
as 'one of the cleanest, most beautiful, and best-built
cities of Great Britain'; when Smollett, himself a
Glasgow youth, saw in it 'one of the prettiest towns
in Europe.' In 1777 Glasgow was only laying the
foundations of her commercial prosperity. She had, it
is true, established her tobacco trade with the American
plantations, and her sugar trade with the West Indies,
but her character as the seat of an ancient Church and
University had not been materially altered thereby.
Even in 1773, when Johnson, on his way back from the
Hebrides, had a look round her sights, he found learn
ing 'an object of wide importance, and the habit of
application much more general than in the neighbour
ing University of Edinburgh.' Trade and letters still
joined hands, so that Gibbon could not inappropriately
speak of Glasgow as ' the literary and commercial city,'
and one might still walk her streets without at every
corner being 'nosed,' to use De Quincey's phrase, by
something which reminded him of ' that detestable
commerce.' Whether Glasgow was altogether a meet
nurse for a poetic child may perhaps be doubted. The
time came when Campbell himself thought she was not.
The town, said he, has 'a cold, raw, wretchedly wet
climate, the very nursery of sore throats and chest
diseases.' Redding once chaffed him about it. ' Did
you ever see Wapping on a drizzling, wet, spring day ? '
he asked in reply. 'That is just the appearance of
Glasgow for three parts of the year.' But Glasgow was
not so bad as yet. She was still surrounded by the

THOMAS CAMPBELL 15
cornfields and the hedgerows and the orchards of
Lanarkshire, her few streets practically within a stone's
throw of the Cathedral and the College.
The youngest of their family, the son of the father's
old age, Thomas Campbell was naturally thought much
of by his parents. He had been baptized by, and indeed
named after, Dr Thomas Reid, and the old Virginia
merchant is said to have had a presentiment that he
would in some way or other do honour to his name and
country. What proud father has not thought the same?
That he was regarded as a precocious child goes without
saying. We are told that he uttered quaint, old-fashioned
remarks which were ' much too wise for his little curly
head'; and he was of so inquisitive a turn — but then
all children are inquisitive — that he found amusement
and information in everything that fell in his way. A
sister, nineteen years his senior, taught him his letters ;
and in 1785 he was handed over to the care of David
Allison, the scholarly master of the Grammar School.
Allison was a rigid disciplinarian of the good old type,
who seems to have whipped the dead languages into
his pupils with all the energy of Gil Bias' master.
Campbell remained under him for four years. He be
gan his studies in such earnest that he made himself
ill, and had to be removed to a cottage at Cathcart,
where for six weeks he was nursed by an aged 'webster'
and his wife.
No doubt the little holiday had its influence at the
time; it certainly had its influence in later life when,
after a visit to the ' green waving woods on the margin
of Cart,' he wrote his not unpleasing stanzas on this
scene of his early youth. In any case he left the country
cottage rather reluctantly, and returned to his lessons at
the Grammar School. He does not appear to have been
a particularly industrious student. He had certainly
an ambition to excel, and he was invariably at the top
of his class; but he made progress rather by fits and

1 6 FAMOUS SCOTS
starts than by steady, laborious plodding. In this re
spect, of course, he was only like a great many more
celebrities who have been dunces in the schoolroom.
Not that Campbell was in any sense a dunce. He was
especially enamoured of the classics ; so much so, in
deed, that, as Beattie gravely certifies, he 'could de
claim with great fluency at the evening fireside in the
language of Greece and Rome ' ; and some of the
translations which he made for Allison were considered
good enough to be printed by the enthusiastic bio
grapher. His love for Greek, in particular, was the
subject of much remark, both then and afterwards.
Redding says he could repeat thirty or forty Greek
verses applicable to any subject that might be under
discussion. Beattie, again, tells that Greek was his
' pride and solace ' all through Ufe ; and there is
good authority for saying that, even after he had
made a name as a poet, he wished to be considered
a Greek scholar first and a poet afterwards. That he
was quite sincere in the matter may be gathered from
the circumstance of his having in his last days given his
niece a series of daily lessons in the language of Homer,
' all in the Greek character and written with his own
hand.' Nevertheless, as a Grecian, the classical world
can as well do without Thomas Campbell as the Princi
pal at Louvain, in ' The Vicar of Wakefield,' found that
he could do without Greek itself.
With all his enthusiasm for the classics, Campbell
does not seem to have been anything less of a boy than
his fellows at the Grammar School. He loved Greek,
but he loved games too. There are tales of stone fights
with the Shettleston urchins, such as Scott has described
in his story of Green-breeks, and of strawberry raids
in suburban gardens which for days afterwards made
him restive under the pious literature prescribed by his
father. That he was indeed a very boy is shown by at
least one amusing anecdote. His mother had a cousin,

THOMAS CAMPBELL 17
an old bedridden lady, about whose frail tenure of life
she felt much anxiety. Every morning she would send
either Tom or his brother Daniel to ask ' how Mrs
Simpson was to-day.' One day Tom wanted to go on
a blackberry expedition ; his mother wanted him to
inquire, as usual, about ' this deil of an auld wife that
would neither die nor get better.' Daniel suggested
that there was no need to go : 'just say that she's better
or worse.' The boys continued to report in this way
for weeks and months, but finding that an unfavourable
bulletin only sent them back earlier next morning, they
agreed that the old lady should get better. One day
Tom announced that Mrs Simpson had quite recovered
— and a few hours later the funeral invitation arrived !
Campbell, in telling the story long after, says he was
much less pained by the cuffing he received from his
mother than by a few words from his father. The old
man ' never raised a hand to us, and I would advise
all fathers who would have their children to love their
memory to follow his example.' The wisdom is not
Solomonic, but that Campbell set much store by it
is quite evident from the frequent reference which
he makes in later life to his father's sparing of the
rod. Meanwhile he was giving indication of his literary
bent in the manner usual with youngsters. The
'magic of nature,' to quote his own words, had first
' breathed on his mind ' during his six weeks in the
country, and the result was a ' Poem on the Seasons,'
in which the conventional expression of the obvious
runs through some hundred lines or more. A year later,
that is to say in 1788, he wrote an elegy ' On the death
of a favourite parrot,' of which one can only remark
that it will at least bear comparison with the reputed
tribute of Master Samuel Johnson to his duck. Strange
to say among the last things which Campbell wrote were
some lines on a parrot, so that any one who is interested
B

1 8 FAMOUS SCOTS
enough can make a critical comparison between his
elegiac poems in youth and age.
But Campbell was doing better things than calling
upon Melpomene, the queen of tears, to attend his
' dirge of woe ' on account of poor Poll. Mr Allison
was in the habit of prescribing translations from the
classics into Enghsh, which might be either in prose or
in verse, as his pupils thought fit. Campbell chose
verse. He made translations from Anacreon, from
Virgil, from Horace, and from other Greek and Latin
writers, all with a fair measure of success, considering
his years. Indeed these verse translations are much
superior to his original efforts of the same and even of
later date. Beattie, who saw the manuscripts, remarked
upon the almost total absence of punctuation in them
all. It seems that Campbell regarded the art of point
ing as one of the mysteries, to which for many years he
paid as little attention as if he had been an eighteenth
century lawyer's clerk. Even as late as 'Theodoric'
(1824), he had to ask a literary friend to look after the
punctuation in the proofs.
There was, however, no printer's convenience to study
in these early days ; and the verse translations, punctu
ated or not, served their purpose, not only in bringing
prizes to the young student, but in contributing towards
the acquirement of that facility in verse-making which
helped to lay the foundation of his future fame. The
provoking thing was that his father did not approve of
making verses. Like Jack Lofty, he thought poetry ' a
pretty thing enough ' for one's wives and daughters, but
not for men who have to make their living in the world ;
and he would much rather have seen his son writing in
the sober prose of his beloved Doddridge and Sherlock
than after the manner of Dryden and Pope. ' Many a
sheet of nonsense have I beside me,' wrote Campbell in
1794, 'insomuch that when my father comes into my
room, he tells me I would be much better reading Locke

THOMAS CAMPBELL 19
than scribbling so. But Campbell believed that he had
been born a poet, and although he did not entirely
ignore his father's favourites, he kept thumbing his
Milton and other models, and informed the parent —
actually in verse too !^-that while philosophers and
sages are not without their influence on the stream of
life, it is after all the poet who
Refines its fountain springs.
The nobler passions of the soul.

CHAPTER II
COLLEGE AND HIGHLAND TUTORSHIPS
When Campbell said farewell to the Grammar School
prior to entering his name at College, it was observed of
him that no boy of his age had ever left more esteemed
by his classfellows or with better prospects at the Uni
versity. His first College session began in October
1 791. At that time the University was located in the
High Street, the classic Molendinar, as yet uncovered,
finding a way to the Clyde through its park and gardens.
Johnson thought it was 'without a sufficient share in
the magnificence of the place ' ; and not unlikely the
scarlet gowns worn by the students were in Campbell's
day pretty much what they were when Wesley reported
them 'very dirty, some very ragged, and all of coarse
cloth.' But there must have been something very
pleasant about the quaint old world life which was then
lived in and around the College Squares. Close upon
four hundred students used to gather about the time-
honoured courts, the windows of the professors' houses
looking down upon them from the north side ; and the
memories of many generations must have gone some
little way to atone for the lack of ' magnificence ' so
much deplored by the great Cham of literature.
The list of professors in 1791, when Campbell
entered, did not include any name of outstanding
note. His father's old friend, Dr Reid, now a veteran
of eighty-one, had retired, though he was still living
in the Professors' Court, and had been succeeded by
Professor Arthur, a scholar of respectable ability and

THOMAS CAMPBELL 21
varied acquirements, for whom Campbell expressed a
sincere admiration. The Greek class was taught by
Professor Young, a character of the Christopher North
and John Stuart Blackie type, 'a strangely beautiful
and radiant figure in the then grave and solemn group
of Glasgow professors.' William Richardson filled the
Humanity — in other words the Latin — Chair, and filled
it with some distinction too, in his curled wig, lace
ruffles, knee breeches and silk stockings. Richardson
was not of those who combine plain living with high
thinking. Dining out was his passion. It is told of
him that one evening, when the turtle soup was un
usually fine, he exclaimed, after repeated helpings, ' I
know there is gout in every spoonful, but I can't resist
it.' For all this, he was a good scholar and an expert
teacher, enjoying some repute as one of Mackenzie's
coadjutors in The Mirror ; a poet, too, and the author
of one or two books which were read in their day.
The Logic class was in the hands of Professor Jardine,
' the philosophic Jardine,' as Campbell calls him — ' a
most worthy, honest man, neither proud nor partial.'
Campbell says he could not boast of deriving any great
advantage from Jardine's class, but he 'found its em
ployment very agreeable ' nevertheless, and he seems
to have honestly liked the professor. The Law Chair
was occupied by Professor Millar, a violent democrat,
who, in the dark days of Toryism, ' did much in
Glasgow to inoculate Jeffrey and the academic Liberals
with zealous views of progress.' Campbell regarded him
as the ablest of all the professors; and although he was not
a regular student of law, he attended some of the lectures,
and was inclined to credit Millar with influencing his
views on what he termed the ascendency of freedom.
Such were the men under whose direction the poet
completed his education. Of fellow-students with
whom he was intimate it is not necessary to say much.
Perhaps the best known was Hamilton Paul, a jovial

2 2 FAMOUS SCOTS
youth with a talent for verse, who afterwards, when
minister of Broughton, narrowly escaped censure from
the Church courts for an attempt to palliate the short
comings of Burns by indiscreet allusions to his own
clerical brethren. Paul and Campbell were frequently
rivals in competing for academical rewards offered for
the best compositions in verse, and in one case at least
Campbell was beaten. It was Paul who founded the
College Debating Club, which usually met in his lodg
ings and occasionally continued its debates till mid
night ; and in some published recollections of the
Club's doings he bears testimony to Campbell's great
fluency as a speaker. Another fellow-student was
Gregory Watt, a son of the famous engineer. Camp
bell described him as ' unparalleled in his early talent
for eloquence,' as Uterally the most beautiful youth
he had ever seen ; and he declared afterwards that if
Watt had lived he must have made a brilliant figure in
the House of Commons. Then there was James
Thomson, a kindred genius, known familiarly as the
' Doctor,' with whom he formed a life-long friendship,
and to whom some of the most intimate of his letters
are addressed. It was to the order of this early friend
that two marble busts of the poet were executed by
Bailey, one of which he presented to Glasgow Uni
versity; and it was he who also commissioned the
well-known portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, which
accompanies most editions of Campbell's works. Un
fortunately, Campbell just missed Jeffrey, the 'great
little man,' who spent two happy years (1788-1790)
at the old College, and, like Campbell himself, was
subsequently made its Lord Rector.
Campbell's career at the University, allowing for
certain differences of detail, was very much what it had
been at the Grammar School. That is to say, he
fought shy of drudgery, put on a spurt now and again,
distinguished himself in the classics, wrote verse, and

THOMAS CAMPBELL 23
indulged freely in the customary frolics of the typical
student. He confessed in after life that he was much
more inclined to sport than study; and although he
admitted having carried away one or two prizes, he ad
mitted also that he was idle in some of the classes.
The fact remains notwithstanding, that he constantly
outstripped his competitors, who, as Beattie has it,
steadily plodded on in the rear, ' the very personifi
cations of industry.' In his first year he took one
prize for Latin and another for some English verses,
besides securing a bursary on Archbishop Leighton's
foundation. Next session he had more academical
honours. In the Logic class he received the eighth
prize for 'the best composition on various subjects,'
and was made an examiner of the exercises sent in by
the other students of the class — certainly a high com
pliment to a youth of his years. One of the essays,
on the subject of Sympathy, is printed by Beattie with
the Professor's note appended. From this note it
appears that the occult art of pointing was not the
only matter which required the attention of the student.
Professor Jardine might have passed over the amazing
statement that ' God has implanted in our nature an
emotion of pleasure on contemplating the sufferings
of a fellow-creature ' ; but it was impossible that he
should overlook such spellings as ' agreable,' ' sympa-
thyze,' and ' persuits.' Still, ' upon the whole,' said
Jardine, ' the exercise is good, and entitles the author
to much commendation.'
The Professor's verdict may be taken as a type of
Campbell's whole career at College : it was a case of
' much commendation' all through. At the close of
his third session he was awarded a prize for a poetical
'Essay on the Origin of Evil,' which, if we are to
credit his own statement, gave him a celebrity through
out the entire city, from the High Church down to the
bottom of the Saltmarket. The students, who spoke

2 4 FAMOUS SCOTS
of him as the Pope of Glasgow, even talked of it over
their oysters at Lucky MacAlpine's in the Trongate.
In the Greek class he took the first prize for a render
ing of certain passages from the 'Clouds' of Aris
tophanes, which Professor Young declared to be the
best essay that had ever been given in by a student at
the University. This was not bad for a youth of fifteen.
Hamilton Paul says that Campbell carried everything
before him in the matter of his 'unrivalled transla
tions,' until his fellow-students began to regard him as
a prodigy, and copy him as a model. In Gait's Auto
biography there is a story — he heads it ' A Twopenny
Effusion ' — to the effect that the students bore the cost
of printing an Ossianic poem of Campbell's which was
hawked about at twopence; but as Gait erroneously
says that Campbell published ' The Pleasures of Hope '
by subscription, we may regard the story as at least
doubtful. Campbell called Gait a ' dirty blackguard '
for retailing it.
But it was not alone by his proficiency in the classics
that Campbell compelled attention. At this time he
showed a turn for satire, of which he never afterwards
gave much evidence, and his lampoons upon characters
in the College and elsewhere were the theme of constant
merriment in the quadrangle. Beattie has a good deal
to say about these effusions, but if we may judge by a
sample which Redding has preserved, their cleverness
was better than their taste. It was legitimate enough,
perhaps, to rail at the length of an elderly city parson's
sermons, to make fun of his oft-recurring phrase, ' the
good old way ' ; but the worthy man, about to marry a
young wife, could hardly be expected to relish this kind
of thing : So for another Shunamite
He hunts the city day by day.
To warm his chilly veins at night
In the good old way.

THOMAS CAMPBELL 25
Adam Smith contended that it was the duty of a
poet to write like a gentleman. If as a student Camp
bell had always written like a gentleman, there would
have been less of that posthumous resentment of which
his biographer complains. Nevertheless, his popu
larity as a playful wit must have been very pleasant to
him at the time. 'What's Tom Campbell been say
ing ? ' was a common exclamation among the students
as they gathered of mornings round the stove in the
Logic classroom. And Tom Campbell, if he had been
saying nothing of particular note, would take his pencil
and write an impromptu on the white-washed wall.
Presently a ring would be formed round it, ' and the wit
and words passing from lip to lip generally threw the
class into a roar of laughter.' It is but right to say, how
ever, that these impromptus were invariably produced
with a view to something else than praise. The stove
was usually encircled by a body of stout, rollicking
Irish students, and Campbell found that the only sure
means of getting near it was by ' drafting the fire-
worshippers ' — in other words, by making them give
warmth in exchange for wit. One cold December
morning it was whispered that a libel on old Ireland
had been perpetrated on the wall. The Irishmen rushed
forth in a body, and while they read, apropos of a
passage they had just been studying in the class —
Vos, Hiberni, collocatis,
Summum bonum in — potatoes,
the young satirist had taken the best place at the
stove !
Campbell's third session at the University was eventful
in several respects. To begin with, it was then — in the
spring of 1793 — that he made that first visit to Edin
burgh to which he so often referred afterwards. It was
a time of intense political excitement. 'The French
Revolution,' to quote the poet's words, ' had everywhere

2 6 FAMOUS SCOTS
lighted up the contending spirits of democracy and aris
tocracy ' ; and being, in his own estimation, a competent
judge of politics, Campbell became a pronounced
democrat. Muir and Gerald were about to stand their
trial for high treason at Edinburgh, and Campbell
' longed insufferably ' to see them — to see Muir especi
ally, of whose accomplishments he had heard a ' magni
ficent account.' He had an aunt in Edinburgh ready
to welcome him ; and so, with a crown piece in his
pocket, he started for the capital, doing the forty-two
miles on foot. Next morning found him in court.
The trial was, he says, an era in his life. ' Hitherto I
had never known what public eloquence was, and I am
sure the Justiciary Scotch lords did not help me to a
conception of it, speaking, as they did, bad arguments
in broad Scotch. But the Lord Advocate's speech was
good— the speeches of Laing and Gillies were better;
and Gerald's speech annihilated the remembrances of
all the eloquence that had ever been heard within the
walls of that house.' In the opinion of eminent English
lawyers Gerald had not really been guilty of sedition,
and certainly Muir never uttered a sentence in favour
of reform stronger than Pitt himself had uttered. Never
theless, in spite of their solemn protests and their fervent
appeals to the jury, they were both sentenced to trans
portation, and were sent in irons to the hulks.
The trial and its sequel made a deep impression on
the young democrat. When he returned to Glasgow
he could think and speak of nothing else. His old
gaiety had quite deserted him, and instead of frolics
and flute-playing and ' auld farrant stories ' by the
fireside, there were tirades about ' the miserable pros
pects of society, the corrupt state of modern legislature,
the glory of ancient republics, and the wisdom of Solon
and Lycurgus.' Never, surely, was any philosopher of
fifteen so harassed by political cares and apprehensions.
But the gloomy fit did not last long. Campbell had to

THOMAS CAMPBELL 27
think of making a living for himself, and he began by
casting about for something to fill up his college vaca
tions. It does not appear that he went to the University
with any definite object in view, but the question of a
profession had long since become a pressing considera
tion. Naturally he looked first towards the Church,
but his father, unlike the majority of Scots parents
about that time, did not encourage him in the notion
of wagging his head in a pulpit ; and so, after toying with
theology — he studied Hebrew and wrote a hymn — he
turned his attention in other directions. He thought
of law, and spent some time in the office of a city
solicitor. Then he thought of business, and filled up
a summer recess in the counting-house of a Glasgow
merchant, 'busily employed at book-keeping and en
deavouring to improve this hand of mine.' Next he
tried medicine, but had to give it up because he could
not bear to witness the surgical operations. Finally he
fell back on the last resource of the University man
without a profession, and became a tutor. According
to Dr Holmes, the natural end of the tutor is to die of
starvation. Campbell's dread was that he would die
of dulness : he had engaged to go to the farthest end
of the Isle of Mull —
Where the Atlantic wave
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.
It turned out to be not quite so bad as he antici
pated, though, in truth, the reality proved much less
pleasant than the retrospect. In the meantime he had
a very sprightly journey from Glasgow in the company
of Joseph Finlayson, an old classfellow who was also
going to taste the bitterness of a Highland tutorship.
The pair started on the i8th of May 1795. At
Greenock they spent a long evening on the quay, ' for
economy's sake,' and distinguished themselves by saving

2 8 FAMOUS SCOTS
a boy from drowning. Campbell thought it pretty hard
that two such heroes should go supperless to bed ; so
they repaired to the inn, ate — according to their own
account — dish after dish of beefsteaks, and drank
tankards of ale that set them both singing and reciting
poetry like mad minstrels of the olden time. Next
day, leaving their trunks to be sent by land to Inverary,
they crossed the Frith of Clyde to Argyllshire, the
jolliest boys in the whole world. Campbell says he
had still a half-belief in Ossian, and an Ossianic interest
in the Gaelic people ; but this did not reconcile him to
the Highland beds, in which 'it was not safe to lay
yourself down without being troubled with cutaneous
sensations next morning.' Nor did the bill of fare at
the Highland inns please the travellers any better. It
lacked variety. Everywhere it was 'Skatan agas,
spuntat agas, usquebaugh ' — herrings and potatoes and
whisky. But the roaring streams, and the primroses,
and the ' chanting cuckoos ' made up for all the dis
comfort. Campbell, as he expresses it, felt a soul in
every muscle of his body, and his mind was filled with
the thought that he was now going to earn his bread by
his own labour.
The two young fellows parted at Inverary, and
Campbell went on by way of Oban to Mull, reaching
his destination after losing himself several times on the
island, the entire length of which he says he traversed.
His engagement was with a distant relative of his own,
a Mrs Campbell, a ' worthy, sensible ¦widow lady,' who
treated him with thoughtful sympathy and consideration.
What kind of tutor he made does not appear, but he
evidently had the best intentions and a humane regard
for his pupils. ' I never beat them,' he remarks,
' remembering how much I loved my father for having
never beaten me.'
We know very little about this part of Campbell's
career beyond what is told in his own letters. He

THOMAS CAMPBELL 29
expected to find in Mull 'a calm retreat for study and
the Muses,' and he was not disappointed. At first,
naturally enough, he felt very dejected. The house of
Sunipol, where he taught, is on the northern shore of
the island, from which a magnificent prospect of thirteen
of the Hebrides group, including Staffa and lona, can
be obtained. The scenery, on Campbell's own admis
sion, is ' marked by sublimity and the wild majesty of
nature,' but unhappily in bad weather — and there is
not much good weather in Mull — the island is ' only fit
for the haunts of the damned.' There was plenty to
feed the fancy of a poet ; and yet, ' God wot,' says
Campbell, ' I was better pleased to look on the kirk
steeples and whinstone causeways of Glasgow than on
all the eagles and wild deer of the Highlands.' His
trunk was some days late in arriving, and as there was
no writing paper in the island he was driven to the
expedient of scribbUng his thoughts on the wall of his
room ! However, he soon got reconciled to his forlorn
condition ; nay, in time he ' blessed the wild delight of
solitude.' He diverted himself by botanising, by slioot-
ing wild geese, and, poet like, by rowing about in the
moonlight ; and we hear of an excursion to Staffa and
lona which filled him with hitherto unexperienced
emotions of pleasure.
There is even a whisper of a little love affair. A
certain Caroline Fraser, a daughter of the minister of
Inverary, came to visit at Sunipol. She was, according
to Beattie, who knew her, a girl of ' radiant beauty,'
and Campbell, being himself well-favoured in the matter
of looks — he is described at this time as ' a fair and
beautiful boy, with pleasant and winning manners and
a mild and cheerful disposition' — it was only natural
that the pair should draw together. It was to this lady
that the poem in two parts, bearing her Christian name,
was addressed. The first part, beginning ' I'll bid the
hyacinth to blow,' was written in Mull; the second,

30 FAMOUS SCOTS
' Gem of the crimson-coloured even,' in the following
year, when the young tutor was frequently able to avail
himself of the hospitality of the 'adorable Miss Caro
line's ' family. Verses were also addressed to ' A Rural
Beauty in Mull,' but there is nothing to show that the
' young Maria ' thus celebrated was anything more than
a poetic creation. Of what may be called serious work
during the course of the Mull tutorship we do not hear
much. An Elegy, written in low spirits soon after he
landed, was highly praised by Dr Anderson, the editor
of the ' British Poets,' who predicted from it that
the author would become a great poet; but Campbell
showed himself a better critic when he characterised it as
' very humdrum indeed.' Many of his leisure hours were
filled up with translations of his favourite classics,
notably with what he calls his old comedy of the
' Clouds ' of Aristophanes, but of these it is unnecessary
to speak. The real effect of the Mull residence upon
his poetic product was not felt until later. It might
be too much to say that ' Lord Ullin's Daughter,'
' Lochiel,' and ' Glenara ' would never have been
written but for the author's sojourn in the Highlands,
but the imagery of these and other pieces is clearly
traceable to the promptings of island solitude ; and
much as Campbell disliked his isolation at the time,
it undoubtedly proved of the greatest poetic service to
him. Meanwhile, after five months of the wilderness,
the exile became irksome, and he returned to Glasgow,
glad to behold the kirk steeples and to feel his feet not
on the 'bent' of Mull, but on the pavement of his
native city.
Campbell now entered on his last session at the Uni
versity. There is no detailed account of his studies this
session, but he remarks himself, in his high-flown style,
that the winter was one in which his mind advanced
to a more expansive desire of knowledge than he had
ever before experienced. He mentions especially the

THOMAS CAMPBELL 31
lectures of Professor Millar on Heineccius and on
Roman Law. ' To say that Millar gave me liberal
opinions would be understating the obligation which
I either owed, or imagined I owed to him. He did
more. He made investigations into the principles of
justice and the rights and interests of society so capti
vating to me that I formed opinions for myself and
became an emancipated lover of truth.' The impulse
which Millar's lectures gave to his mind continued long
after he heard them. At the time, they seem to have
turned his thoughts very seriously towards the law as a
profession. ' Poetry itself, in my love of jurisprudence
and history,' he says, 'was almost forgotten. At that
period, had I possessed but a few hundred pounds to
have subsisted upon studying law, I believe I should
have bid adieu to the Muses and gone to the Bar ; but
I had no choice in the matter.' As it was, the Muses
during this session, and for some time after, appear to
have received but scant attention. For a whole year he
wrote nothing but the lines on Miss Broderick which
still retain a place among his published works, and the
two poems which gained him his parting prizes at the
University. The latter were, it is assumed, sketched out
in Mull. One was a translation from the ' Choephoroe,'
the other of a Chorus in the ' Medea ' of Euripides,
the only prize piece which he afterwards included among
his printed poems.
During the whole of this last session at the University
he supported himself by private tuition. Among other
pupils he had the future Lord Cunninghame of the
Court of Session, who indeed boarded with the Camp
bell family in order to have the benefit of reading
Greek with the son. Cunninghame says that Campbell
left on his mind a deep impression, not merely of his
abilities as a classical scholar, but of the elevation and
purity of his sentiments. He read much in Demosthenes
and Cicero, and enlarged on their eloquence and the

32 FAMOUS SCOTS
grandeur of their views. It was by these ancient models
that he tested the oratory of the moderns. He would
repeat with the greatest enthusiasm the most impas
sioned passages of Lord Chatham's speeches on behalf
of American freedom, and Burke's declamation against
Warren Hastings was often on his lips. He was firmly
convinced at this time that the rulers of the universe
were in league against mankind, but he looked forward
with some hope to the joyful day when the wrongs of
society would be vindicated, and freedom again assume
the ascendant. Lord Cunninghame draws a charming
picture of the fireside politicians, with Campbell at
their head, discussing the French Revolution, and de
fending their ultra-liberal opinions against the assaults
of outsiders. For his age the poet probably took the
world and the powers that be much too seriously ; but
his early political leanings are not without a certain
significance in view of his after interest in the cause of
liberty. His last session at the University ended, Campbell,
in June 1796, returned to Argyllshire, again as a tutor.
This time his engagement was at Downie, near Loch
gilphead. The house stood in a secluded spot on the
shore of that great arm of the sea known as the Sound
of Jura. The view to be obtained from its neighbour
hood made a wonderful combination of sea and moun
tain scenery ; but, like Sunipol, the place was altogether
too dull for the city-bred youth. Campbell speaks of
himself as living the life of a poor starling, caged in by
rocks and seas from the haunts of man ; as ' lying
dormant in a solitary nook of the world, where there is
nothing to chase the spleen,' and where the people
' seem to moulder away in sluggishness and deplorable
ignorance.' Still, it was not quite so bad as Mull.
For one thing, Inverary was comparatively near, and
Hamilton Paul was there, as well as the adorable
Caroline, to whose charms Paul, as appears from a

THOMAS CAMPBELL 33
poetical tribute, had also succumbed. Campbell, we
may be sure, was oftener at Inverary than his letters
show, for the ' Hebe of the West ' clearly had mag
netic powers of a quite unusual kind.
Paul has a lively account of the last day he spent
with his friend at Inverary. It was the occasion of a
'frugal dinner,' when two old college companions
joined the tutors around the table at the Inverary
Arms. ' Never,' says Paul, ' did schoolboy enjoy
an unexpected holiday more than Campbell. He
danced, sang, and capered, half frantic with joy.
Had he been only invested with the philabeg, he
would have exhibited a striking resemblance to little
Donald, leaping and dancing at a Highland wedding.'
The company had a delightful afternoon together, and
on the way home Campbell worked himself up into
a state of ecstacy. He 'recited poetry of his own
composition — some of which has never been printed
— and then, after a moment's pause, addressed me :
"Paul, you and I must go in search of adventures.
If you will personate Roderick Random, I will go
through the world with you as Strap." " Yes, Tom,"
said I, " I perceive what is to be the result : you are
to be a poet by profession." '
Campbell's greatest difficulty at present was to settle
upon any profession; but if his penchant for reciting
poetry in the open air could have made him a poet,
then indeed was his title clear. He told Scott some
years after this that he repeated the ' Cadzow Castle '
verses so often, stamping and shaking his head fero
ciously, while walking along the North Bridge of Edin
burgh, that all the coachmen knew him by tongue, and
quizzed him as he passed. The habit was mad enough
in Edinburgh ; in the Highlands it evidently suggested
something like lunacy. His successor in the tutorship
says that in Campbell's frequent walks along the shore
he was often observed by the natives to be ' in a state
c

34 FAMOUS SCOTS
of high and rapturous excitement,' of the cause and
tendency of which they formed very strange and incon
sistent ideas.
If the simple natives had suspected that the tutor was
in love, they might, without knowing their Shakespeare,
have paid less heed to these manifestations. Campbell
had told Paul some time before that a poet should have
only his muse for mistress ; but it was easier to preach
the precept than to practise it. It is in a letter to his
friend Thomson that we first hear of this amourette.
Speaking of a temporary brightening of his prospects,
he says : ' To console me still further (but Thomson, I
challenge your secrecy by all our former friendship), my
evening walks are sometimes accompanied by one who,
for a twelvemonth past, has won my purest but most
ardent affection. " Dear, precious name ! rest ever unreveal'd,
Nor pass these Ups in holy silence seal'd."
You may well imagine how the consoling words of such a
person warm my heart into ecstacy of a most delightful
kind. I say no more at present ; and, my friend, I rely
on your secrecy.' Campbell's secret has been kept, for
the identity of this particular Amanda has never been
disclosed. Can it have been the adorable Caroline her
self? Whoever she was, she had, if we may trust
Beattie, a very favourable influence in promoting
Campbell's appeals to the muse. Defeated in all other
prospects, he took refuge in ' the enchanted garden of
love,' and, in the interchange of mutual affection, found
compensation for all his disappointments.
But Campbell had his duties as a tutor to attend to.
His pupil was the future Sir William Napier of Milliken,
a great-great-grandson of the celebrated Napier of
Merchiston. He was now about eight years old, and
was living with his mother at Downie, his grandfather's
estate. His father. Colonel Napier, returned from the

THOMAS CAMPBELL 35
West Indies shortly after Campbell entered on his
engagement. Campbell describes him as 'a most
agreeable gentleman, with all the mildness of a scholar
and the majesty of a British Grenadier.' The Colonel
took an eager interest in the tutor's welfare, and did all
he could to settle him in some permanent employment.
' He has,' says Campbell to Thomson, ' been active to
consult, to advise, to recommend me, with warmth and
success, and that to friends of the first rank.' With a
local physician he united to obtain for him a favourable
situation in the office of a leading Edinburgh lawyer,
but unfortunately a combination of circumstances baffled
the poet's aims in this direction ; and, the term of his
engagement having expired, he returned once more to
Glasgow, in a state of the greatest concern about his
future. 'I will,' he declared, with that unnecessary
rhetoric to which he was prone, 'I will maintain my
independence by lessening my wants, if I should live
upon a barren heath.'

CHAPTER III
' THE PLEASURES OF HOPE '
Campbell was now at his wit's end about a profession.
With whatever intention he had gone to the University,
he had at last become alive to the stern fact that the
University had done nothing for him in regard to a
livelihood. 'What,' he wanted to know, 'have all
these academical honours procured for me ? ' He was
dissatisfied with himself for his admitted lack of resource ;
he was dissatisfied with his friends for their apathetic
indifference. But something had clearly to be done,
and after sundry ineffectual efforts to reach a solid
standing ground, he again turned his attention to the
law. 'That is the line which he means to pursue,'
wrote his sister Elizabeth, ' and what I think nature has
just fitted him for. He is a fine public speaker and I
have no doubt will make a figure at the Bar.' His idea
now was to combine law with literature. Let him once
get into a lawyer's office and he would have no fear of
working his way without the expense of entrance fees.
He would write for the leading periodicals and establish
a magazine. He had, besides, one or two translations
from the classics nearly ready for the press, and for these
surely some publisher, he told himself, would be willing
to pay.
In this optimistic mood he went off to Edinburgh,
the home of literature and law, where he arrived in
May, 1797. His old pupil. Lord Cuninghame, was
now preparing for the Bar, and to him Campbell applied
for aid in finding employment. The employment was
36

THOMAS CAMPBELL 37
found, not in a law office — for Campbell had no regular
training as a law clerk to recommend him — but in the
Register House, where the University honours' man
was set to the humble tasks of a copying clerk. A few
weeks of extract making proved enough for him, and
he threw up the situation for one slightly more comfort
able, though not much better as to pay, in the office of
a Mr Bain Whytt. There he remained, sucking susten
ance through a quill, until Dr Anderson brought him
forth to put him on the road to renown.
Campbell was introduced to Anderson by Mr Hugh
Park, then a teacher in Glasgow, who had roused an
interest in the poetical clerk by showing a copy of the
elegy written in Mull. Miss Anderson was present at
the first meeting, and Beattie subsequently obtained
from her some recollections of the occasion. She re
marked specially upon Campbell's good looks. His
face, she said, was beautiful, and ' the pensive air which
hung so gracefully over his youthful features gave a
melancholy interest to his manner which was extremely
touching.' This description, it may be observed, is in
part corroborated from other quarters. The Rev. Dr
Wardlaw, who had been one of Campbell's classfellows
at Glasgow, said that though he was comparatively small
in stature his features were handsome and prepossessing,
and were characterised by an inteUigent animation and
a cheerful openness all the more noticeable that they
gave place when he was not pleased to 'a gravity
approaching to sternness.' Another friend speaks of
him as an ardent, enthusiastic boy, much younger in
appearance than in years. Unfortunately there is no
portrait of him at this early age.
Dr Anderson took a fervent interest in the pensive
youth. He knew everybody worth knowing, and
through him Campbell soon found his way into the
best literary society of the capital. Scott, Jeffrey,
Dugald Stewart, Lord Brougham, Henry Mackenzie,

38 FAMOUS SCOTS
the 'Man of Feeling,' George Thomson, the corre
spondent of Burns — these and others, in addition to the
friends he had made on former visits, were now or later
among the circle of his acquaintances. At a private
house he met that ' pompous ass,' the Earl of Buchan,
and apparently had the bad manners to quiz him upon
his oddities. It was at this time, too, that he was
introduced to John Leyden, with whom he afterwards
so notoriously fell out. There are two explanations of
the quarrel. According to the first, Leyden had spread
a report that, in despair at his prospects, Campbell was
seen one day rushing frantically along Princes Street on
the way to destroy himself. This foolish story was
revived after Campbell's death ; very likely it was quite
unfounded. The other version of the affair is to the
effect that Campbell, by his association with certain
infidel youths who had started a publication called the
Clerical Review, allowed it to be inferred that some of
his intimate friends, including Anderson and Leyden,
were in sympathy with the unsettling tendencies of the
new journal. There was no reason why anybody should
draw such an inference; and, in any case, the ex
planation is unsatisfactory inasmuch as the quarrel
was evidently of Campbell's, not of Leyden's making.
Whatever be the solution — and it is not a matter of
importance — there was certainly no love lost between
Leyden and his somewhat prim junior. Campbell
seldom mentions Leyden's name without a sneer. In
a letter of 1803 he says : ' London has been visited in
one month by John Leyden and the influenza. They
are both raging with great violence.' And again — the
versatile Borderer had just taken a surgeon's diploma
— ' Leyden has gone at last to diminish the population
of India.' Nevertheless, as we shall learn later on,
Campbell knew very well how to value the critical
opinion of John Leyden — when it was in his favour.
But Dr Anderson did more for Campbell than present

THOMAS CAMPBELL 39
him to his literary circle. Campbell, though he pro
claimed his dislike of another tutorship, had expressed
his willingness to accept almost any kind of literary
work. Anderson accordingly introduced him to Mun-
dell, the publisher, and the result was an offer of twenty
guineas for an abridged edition of Bryan Edwards'
'West Indies.' This was not only Campbell's first
undertaking for the press, but the first of his many
pieces of literary task-work. He was now anticipating
very much the later experience of Carlyle, who also
tried the law in Edinburgh, and became a bookseller's
hack when that ' bog-pool of disgust ' proved impos
sible. But there the parallel ends.
Campbell went back to Glasgow, walking the distance
as usual, to finish his abridgment. His mind was still
exercised about the future. Anything in the law beyond
the most laborious plodding he had seen to be quite out
of his reach. ' I have fairly tried the business of an
attorney,' he wrote, ' and upon my conscience it is the
most accursed of all professions. Such meanness, such
toil, such contemptible modes of peculation were never
moulded into one profession. ... It is true there are
many emoluments; but I declare to God that I can
hardly spend with a safe conscience the little sum I
made during my residence in Edinburgh.' This, of
course, is not to be taken seriously : it is merely the
petulant cry of a spoilt and conceited youth. Campbell
confessed afterwards that at this time fame was every
thing to him. So far as at present appeared he was as
likely to achieve fame as to extract sunbeams from
cucumbers, and when he miscalled the lawyers as rogues
and vagabonds he was only giving voice to his chagrin.
But youth is not easily dismayed. It was at this
moment that, having saved a little money, Campbell
gaily proposed to start a magazine. He invited some of
his college familiars to join with him, declaring that he
would undertake, if need be, three-fourths of the letter-

40 FAMOUS SCOTS
press himself. 'We shall,' he remarked, 'set all the
magazine scribblers at defiance — nay, hold them even in
profound contempt.' But his friends were not so
sanguine about sharing the favours of a ' discerning
public,' and the magazine project, like so many other
projects, fell to the ground. It shows the desperate
frame of mind into which Campbell had sunk, that, in
spite of his recent ' malediction upon the law and all its
branches,' he still professed himself an amateur of the
Bar. He tells Anderson that his leisure hours are
employed on Godwin and the ' Corpus Juris.' The
latter he had always regarded as a somniferous volume,
but now he finds that there is something really amusing
as well as improving in the book. It certainly does not
seem a suitable work for stimulating the imagination of
a poet, but Campbell was only playing with circumstances
after all. Even yet he may have had some idea that the
' Corpus Juris ' would prove professionally useful.
In the meantime he went on with his abridgment,
and wrote a few verses. Among the latter was 'The
Wounded Hussar,' a lyric suggested by an incident in
one of the recent battles on the Danube. This ballad,
now entirely forgotten, attained an extraordinary popu
larity. It had been published only a few weeks when all
Glasgow was ringing with it. Subsequently it found its
way to London, where it was sung on the streets and
encored in the theatres. It seemed as if the fame for
which the author hungered was to be his at last, but
curiously enough, in this case he would have none of it.
' That accursed song,' he would say, and forbid his
friends to mention ' The Wounded Hussar ' again in
his presence. About this time also he wrote his ' Lines
on revisiting Cathcart,' besides a 'Dirge of Wallace,'
which he sensibly excluded from his collected works
as being too rhapsodical, though it was often printed
against his wish in the Galignani editions.
Kfaving finished his work for Mundell, Campbell

THOMAS CAMPBELL 41
returned to Edinburgh in the autumn of 1797. What
his plans now were is not very clear, though from the
fact that he spoke to his parents about following him
when his circumstances permitted, it is evident that he
had made up his mind to reside permanently in the
capital. At present his prospects were as gloomy as
ever. Mundell had promised him some employment for
the winter, and a further slight engagement on a con
templated geographical work seemed probable. At the
best, however, these were but feeble supports; the
booksellers — who, he enquired, could depend on them ?
Some time before this he had, as we have seen, tried
medicine and surgery and failed; now, as a sort of
forlorn hope, he again betook himself to the study of
chemistry and anatomy. That, too, was soon aban
doned, and he fell back once more on the dernier resort
of a tutorship. By and by his younger brother Robert
sent him a pressing invitation to come out to Virginia,
and he decided to quit Scotland in the spring of 1798.
But here again his design was defeated; his elder
brother in Demerara wisely interposed his experienced
advice against it, and Campbell's oft-expressed desire to
see the land of Washington was never realised.
In all these shifting plans and projects one discerns
thus early what proved the chief defect in Campbell's
character — that irresolution and that caprice which were
so largely to blame for many of the vexations and dis
appointments of his later life. No doubt to some
extent his friends were responsible for his unsteadiness
of purpose. He was the Benjamin of his family,
petted and pampered, applauded for his little clever
nesses, and encouraged in his belief that he had been
cut out for something great. Had he been alone in
the world, and absolutely penniless, he would have had
to exert himself to some purpose. As it was, he never
stuck at an honest calling long enough to know what he
could do at it; but having tried many things peT-

42 FAMOUS SCOTS
functorily, and failed in them, he at length derived
inspiration from his empty pocket, braced himself to
what after all was most congenial to him, and in a
sense, like Silas Wegg, ' dropped into poetry.'
Speaking afterwards of this period, he says : ' I lived
in the Scottish metropolis by instructing pupils in Greek
and Latin. In that vocation I made a comfortable
livelihood as long as I was industrious. But " The
Pleasures of Hope " came over me. I took long walks
about Arthur's Seat, conning over my own (as I thought)
magnificent lines ; and as my " Pleasures of Hope " got
on, my pupils fell off.' Here we have the first inti
mation that Campbell was actually working upon the
poem by which he made his grand entry on the stage
of public life. But the subject had engaged his
thoughts long before this. So far back as 1795, when
slaving as a tutor in Mull, he had asked his friend
Hamilton Paul to send him ' some lines consolatory to
a hermit.' Paul replied with a set of verses on 'The
Pleasures of Solitude,' adding : ' We have now three
" Pleasures" by first-rate men of genius — " The Pleasures
of Imagination," "The Pleasures of Memory," and
"The Pleasures of Solitude." Let us cherish "The
Pleasures of Hope " that we may soon meet in Alma
Mater.' The subject thus playfully suggested dwelt in Camp
bell's mind; and although there is nothing to show
that he at once began the composition of the poem,
there is every reason to believe that some parts of it
had been at least drafted during his two periods of exile
in the Highlands. At any rate, in his ' dusky lodging '
in Rose Street he now set to work upon it in earnest ;
and by the close of 1798 it was being shown to his
private circle as practically ready for the press. Camp
bell's intention appears to have been to publish it by
subscription, and on that understanding a friend gave
!i>im ;^is to pay for the printing. Dr Anderson, how-

THOMAS CAMPBELL 43
ever, intervened ; and after he had discussed the merits
of the poem with Mundell, the latter bought the entire
copyright, as the note of agreement has it, 'for two
hundred copies of the book in quires.' This would
mean something over ;^So, the volume having been
published at six shiUings. At the time Campbell prob
ably thought the bargain fair enough, but he naturally
took a different view of the case after some thousands
of copies of the poem had been sold. It was, he said
towards the end of his life, worth an annuity of ;^20o,
but he added that he must not forget how for two or
three years the publishers gave him ;^So for every new
edition. When we recall the fact that for 'Paradise
Lost' Milton got exactly ;^io, we must regard Camp
bell as having been unusually well paid.
After being subjected to a great deal of correction,
mainly at the instigation of Anderson, to whom it was
dedicated, ' The Pleasures of Hope ' was published on
the 29th of April, 1799, when the poet was twenty-one
years and nine months old. It had been announced as
in the press some time before, and there was now a brisk
demand for copies, four editions being called for in the
first year. So early a success had only a near parallel in
the case of Byron, who awoke to find himself famous at
twenty-four. The author, it was remarked, had suddenly
emerged like a star from his obscurity, and had thrown
a brilliant light over the literary horizon of his country.
His poem was quoted as ' an epitome of sound morals,
inculcating by lofty examples the practice of every
domestic virtue, and conveying the most instructive
lessons in the most harmonious language.' One critic
said it gave fair promise of his rivalling some of the
greatest poets of modern times; another critic com
mended it for its sublimity of conception, its boldness
of imagery, its vigour of language and its manliness of
sentiment. And so they swelled the chorus, to the
same tune of extravagant eulogy.

44 FAMOUS SCOTS
Much of the success of the poem was no doubt due
to the circumstance^ that it touched with such sympathy
on the burning questions of the hour. If, as Stevenson
remarks, the poet is to speak efficaciously, he must say
what is already in his hearer's mind. This Campbell
did, as perhaps no English poet had done before.
The French Revolution, the partition of Poland, the
abolition of negro-slavery — these had set the passion for
freedom burning in many breasts, and 'The Pleasures
of Hope ' gave at once vigorous and feeling expression
to the doctrine of the universal brotherhood of man.
Moreover, the moment was favourable in that there were
so few rivals in the field. Burns had been dead for three
years, and Rogers might now be said to stand alone in
the front rank. Crabbe, suffering under domestic sorrow,
had been all but silent since his ' Village ' appeared in
1783 ; Cowper was sunk in hopeless insanity. Neither
Wordsworth nor Coleridge, both older than Campbell,
had secured a following; Scott had printed but a few
translations from the German. Byron was at school,
Moore at college ; Hogg had not spoken, and Southey's
fame was still to make. There could hardly have been
a stronger case of ^Qfelix opportunitate.
It is not easy at this time of day to approach ' The
Pleasures of Hope ' without a want of sympathy, if not
an absolute prejudice, resulting from a whole century
of poetical development. The ideals, the standards of
Campbell's day, have wholly altered ; were indeed passing
away even in his own time. The little volume of
' Lyrical Ballads,' published only a few months before
Campbell's poem, sounded, as it has been expressed, the
clarion-call of the new poetry. The manner thus intro
duced by Wordsworth and Coleridge completely changed
the critical standpoint ; and it is perfectly safe to say that
any poem which appeared to-day with the opening Une
of 'The Pleasures of Hope' — 'At summer eve, when
heaven's ethereal boiv' — would meet with very severe

THOMAS CAMPBELL 45
treatment at the hands of the critics, if indeed the critics
condescended to notice it at all.
Further, too much stress must not be laid on the
fact, already referred to, and always so carefully stated
by the school editors, that the poem met with a pheno
menal success on its first appearance. In literature
popularity bears no strict proportion to merit. Neither
Keats nor Shelley nor Wordsworth was ever ' popular ' ;
of 'The Christian,' we are given to understand, a
hundred copies were sold for every one of ' Richard
Feverel.' The popularity of ' The Pleasures of Hope '
might easily have been foretold by any one reading it
before publication, not for any poetic excellence it
possessed — though it was not without poetic excellence
— but because it accorded so well with the prevalent
moods and opinions of a large section of the public at
the time. Given certain vulgar ideas, the power of
fluent and forcible expression, and no great depth of
thought or subtlety of imagination, and the breath of
popular applause may generally be counted upon.
In poets youth, when not a virtue, is at least an
extenuating circumstance. Campbell was very young
when he wrote ' The Pleasures of Hope.' At an age
when an Englishman is midway in his University course,
and perhaps thinking of competing for the Newdigate,
Campbell had finished his college career, won all the
possible honours, and got himself accepted at his own
valuation as 'demnition clever.' He was only a boy,
a clever boy, with boyish enthusiasms, boyish crudities
of thought, and, it must be confessed, a boyish weak
ness for fine-sounding words. His poem was not the
spontaneous fruit of his imagination. There was no
inward compulsion to poetic utterance as in the case of
other poets who wrote at an equally early age. The
clever boy was moping, without definite aims, when his
friend's suggestion conjured up a vision of Thomas
Campbell admitted to the company of Mark Akenside

46 FAMOUS SCOTS
and Samuel Rogers. True, these names were not the
brightest in the poetical galaxy, and it might perhaps
have been better for Campbell if he had schooled him
self by a diligent study of Milton and Spenser. But
there was the goal, and there was the motive, and he set
about his poem.
Undoubtedly he made the most of what could easily
have proved a barren theme. The construction of the
poem is certainly loose ; part does not follow part in
any inevitable order. But in a didactic poem this is
perhaps an advantage, for, with all its defects, one can
read ' The Pleasures of Hope ' without the fatigue that
accompanies a reading of ' The Pleasures of Imagina
tion.' To analyse the poem would be superfluous. It
faithfully reflected the common thought of the time, and
assuredly does not, as Beattie said it did, give illumina
tion to ' every succeeding age.' It will be sufficient to
point out a few of its literary qualities with a view to an
appreciation of Campbell's place as a poet.
And first it must be remarked that Campbell was
subdued to the vicious theory of a poetical diction. To
him a rainbow was an ' ethereal bow,' a musket a
' glittering tube,' a star a ' pensile orb,' a cottage a
'rustic dome.' It was a principle with him and his
school that the ordinary name of a thing, the natural
way of saying a thing, must necessarily be unpoetic.
This comes out equally in his letters. When he refers
to a railway train it is as 'a chariot of fire.' Instead
of saying : ' I went to the club with his Lordship,' he
must say : ' Thither with his Lordship I accordingly
repaired.' When he wishes to speak of a thing being
' changed ' into another, he says it is ' transported to
the identity of that other thing. In 'The Pleasures
of Hope ' this characteristic was no doubt due in some
cases to the exigence of rhyme, which probably accounts
also for the so-called obscurity of certain of his lines.
For he is not really obscure ; his stream is too shallow

THOMAS CAMPBELL 47
for obscurity. On that point it is curious to note how
even Wordsworth was misled. Perhaps it may be worth
while to quote what he says :
Campbell's ' Pleasures of Hope ' has been strangely overrated.
Its fine words and sounding lines please the generality of readers,
who never stop to ask themselves the meaning of a passage. The
lines — Where Andes, giant of the western star.
With meteor standard to the wind unfurled.
Looks from his throne of clouds o'er half the world,
are sheer nonsense — nothing more than a poetical indigestion.
What has a giant to do with a star ? What is a meteor standard ?
But it is useless to inquire what such stuff means. Once at my
house Professor Wilson, having spoken of these lines with great
admiration, a very sensible and accomplished lady, who happened
to be present, begged him to explain to her their meaning. He
was extremely indignant, and taking down 'The Pleasures of
Hope ' from a shelf, read the lines aloud, and declared they were
splendid. ' Well, sir,' said the lady, ' but what do they mean ? '
Dashing down the book on the floor, he exclaimed in his broad
Scotch accent, ' I'll be daumed if I can tell.'
The explanation is, however, simple enough. Camp
bell obviously meant ' firmament ' or ' hemisphere,' but
wanting a rhyme to 'afar,' he put the part for the
whole, and said 'western star.' This is not exactly
obscurity ; but for the fact that Campbell was always so
careful to polish his verse we should call it clumsiness.
In his management of the heroic couplet, Campbell
was eminently successful. With the monosyllabic rhyme
the lines naturally end rather monotonously with a snap
as it were : enjambement is not frequent ; the verse has
nothing of that freedom and fluidity in which Chaucer
and Keats are sworn brothers. But Campbell varies
the position of the pause more frequently than Pope,
and he actually excels Pope in respect of rhyme ; for,
with all his correctness. Pope was an indifferent rhym-
ster. Apart from his imperfect rhymes, which are

48 FAMOUS SCOTS
sufficiently numerous, one finds in Pope whole blocks
of six or eight lines ending in intolerable assonances.
Campbell is never guilty of this fault ; and even in the
smaller sin of harping over much on the same rhyme,
he is no worse than Pope. Further, he is very deft in
' suiting the sound to the sense.' Many lines might be
quoted which are full of such music as springs from a
varied succession of vowel sounds linked by alliterative
consonants. In bringing sounding names into his
verse, too, he is as expert as Goldsmith himself. Oona-
laska, Seriswattee, Kosciusko — these are names to
conjure with. And if 'rapture' does duty too often
for ardent emotion of all kinds, if ' tumultuous ' comes
too trippingly off the pen when an epithet is required —
well, let us remember again that he was very young.
The poem was at least a credit to his years. Vigour,
variety, pleasant description, sincere rhetoric, youthful
fervour and high spirits account in the main for its
popularity. Its concrete illustrations, its little genre
scenes, saved it from the fate of most didactic poems
on abstract themes. The homely interior, the returned
wanderer, the cradle, the faithful dog — these appealed
to the average man ; and the political aUusions struck
the right note for the times. But who reads it now ?
Before the publication of ' The Pleasures of Hope '
Campbell was practically a nonentity ; after that event
he became a Uterary lion. His experience was that of
Burns over again on a smaller scale ; indeed some of
the distinguished men who had hailed Burns' arrival
in the capital were still alive to give their acclamations
to Campbell, whom they may not unlikely have regarded
as a possible successor. Scott invited him to dinner
and proposed his health amid a strong muster of his
Uterary friends. Dr Gregory — whose name has sur
vived in connection with what Stevenson calls 'our
good old Scotch medicine' — discovered his poem on
Mundell's counter fresh from the printer, and at once

THOMAS CAMPBELL 49
sought him out. Everybody wanted to meet him ; and
invitations poured in upon him until, like Sterne after
the publication of 'Tristram Shandy,' he found him
self deep in social engagements for months ahead.
How he bore it all we have no means of knowing.
Thirty years later he speaks of himself as being at this
time ' a young, shrinking, bashful creature,' though he
is honest enough to add that he had a very high opinion
of himself and his powers. Probably the right measure
of his timidity was taken by the lady who described
him as ' swaggering about ' in a Suwarrow jacket.
With the exception of ' Gilderoy,' Campbell does not
seem to have written anything during the remainder of
1799. He conceived the idea of a poem on 'the
patriot Tell,' but notwithstanding that the subject must
have been exactly to his liking he never utilised it.
Another idea which occurred to him also failed of
fruition, although references continue to be made to it in
his correspondence for some time. This was a poem to
be caUed 'The Queen of the North,' in which — with
Edinburgh as the locale — such themes as the independ
ence of Scotland and the achievements of her great
men were to be employed to revive the old spirit of
freedom. In the meantime, while these projects were
passing through his mind, a new edition of ' The
Pleasures of Hope ' had been called for, and with
Mundell's additional payment of ;^so in his pocket,
Campbell decided to make a tour in Germany.
The objects to be gained by this pilgrimage were per-
fectiy plain to him. He would acquire another language,
and he would enlarge his views of society. In the con
versation of his travelled friends he could detect the
advantages of intercourse with the foreigner, and in
travelling, as they had travelled, he hoped to rid him
self of the imputation that ' home-keeping youths have
ever homely wits.' In spite of his recent poetic perform
ance, he felt that he was still a raw youth, who would
D

so FAMOUS SCOTS
make but a poor figure in a company of London wits ;
and although he expected to be stared at for his awkward
ness and ridiculed for his broken German, yet, to be
' uncaged from the insipid scenes of life,' to ' see the
wonders of the world abroad,' to make first-hand
acquaintance with that literature, so prominently repre
sented by Goethe, which was then rising like a star on
the intellectual world — all this he regarded as a compen
sation for greater evils than his friends could suggest or
his fears imagine.
For one must not forget that the contemplated tour
was not without some risks. The year 1800 was not
exactly the time that one who valued above all things his
personal comfort, perhaps even his personal liberty,
would have chosen for a continental holiday. The long
wars of the French Revolution had been in progress
for some time, and Napoleon had just begun to make
himself famous. England was at war with France;
France was at war with Austria, and Russia had formed
a coaUtion with Sweden and Denmark against England.
In short, Europe was at the time in such a state of mUi-
tary unrest that no one knew what a day or an hour
might bring forth. But CampbeU, Uving at home at
ease, thought very lightly of the hazards of war. He
was tired of his ' dully sluggardised ' existence, without
definite aim or ambition ; and so, in the beginning of
June, he walked down to Leith, and, with a sheaf of
introductions in his pocket, set sail for Hamburg.

CHAPTER IV
CONTINENTAL TRAVELS
Campbell's intention had been to proceed from Harwich
after a week's visit to London, but, on mature reflection,
he decided that the 'modern Babel' must wait.
Some months later he realised that he had made a
mistake. 'It is a sad want not to be able to tell
foreigners anything of London,' he then wrote; 'I
have blushed for shame when the ladies asked me
questions about it.' This, however, was a point he had
not foreseen, and his immediate reasons for delaying
the London visit were both frank and amusing. On
the eve of his departure he explains to Thomson that he
had resisted the seductions of the great city because his
finances were not equal to both London and Germany,
and Germany he would on no account forego. More
over, he knew his own nature too well. New sights
and new acquaintances would have dismissed the little
industry he possessed, and would have soon reduced
him to the fettered state of a bookseller's fag. There
was still another consideration. He was not fitted for
shining in a London company just yet. When he had
added to the number of his books, he might think of
making his deb&t, but for the present he would not run
the risk of ridicule on account of his northern brogue and
his ' braw Scotch boos.' And then comes this curious
announcement : ' In reality my fixed intention on
returning from Germany is to set up a course of lectures
on the Belles Lettres. I had some thoughts of lecturing
in Edinburgh, but cannot think of remaining any longer

52 FAMOUS SCOTS
in one place. If London should not offer encourage
ment, I mean to try DubUn. I think this a respectable
profession, as the showman of the bear and monkey
said when he gave his name to the commissioners of
the income tax as an "itinerant lecturer on natural
history."' The last sentence suggests — though it is
impossible to be sure, for Campbell's jokes were rather
heavy-handed — that he threw out this idea in jest. If
he was serious, it is another indication of his habit of
easily adopting new professions, of which we may learn
more in the sequel.
Campbell had a cordial reception from the British
residents in Hamburg. He met KJopstock, and pre
sented him with a copy of ' The Pleasures of Hope.'
He describes the poet as ' a mild, civil old man,' one of
the first really great men in the world of letters he ever
knew, and adds that his only intercourse with him was
in Latin, with which language he made his way tolerably
well among the French and Germans, and still better
among the Hungarians. How long he remained in
Hamburg is not certain : as we shall see presently, he
had arrived at Ratisbon in time to witness the startling
military events of July. The political excitement was
now at its height. Several of the Bavarian towns were
in the hands of the French, and the upper valley of the
Danube was under military government. 'Everything
here,' says Campbell, writing soon after his arrival, 'is
whisper, surmise, and suspense. If war breaks out, the
bridge over the Danube is expected to be blown up.
You may guess what a devil of a splutter twenty-four
large arches will make flying miles high in the air and
coming down like falUng planets to crush the town ! . . .
Ratisbon will be shivered to atoms ; and as no warning is
expected, the inhabitants may be buried under the ruins.'
To be thus plunged, as it were, into the thick of the
fray was hardly a pleasant experience for the British
pilgrim. The richest fields of Europe desolated by con-

THOMAS CAMPBELL 53
tending troops; peasants driven from their homes to
starve and beg in the streets ; horses dying of hunger,
and men dying of their wounds — such were the 'dreadful
novelties ' that Campbell had come from Edinburgh to
see. He describes the whole thing very vividly in
letters to his eldest brother. The following refers
particularly to the action which gave the French posses
sion of Ratisbon. He says :
I got down to the seat of war some weeks before the summer
armistice, and indulged in what you call the criminal curiosity of
witnessing blood and desolation. Never shall time efface from my
memory the recollection of that hour of astonishment when I stood
with the good iponks of St James' to overlook a charge of Klenau's
cavalry upon the French under Grenier. We saw the fire given and
returned, and heard distinctly the sound of French pas de charge
collecting the lines to attack in close column. After three hours
awaiting the issue of a severe action, a park of artillery was opened
just beneath the walls of the monastery, and several drivers that
were stationed there to convey the wounded in spring waggons
were killed in our sight.
In some notes relating to the same period he remarks
that, in point of impressions, this formed the most im
portant epoch in his Ufe ; but he adds that his recol
lections of seeing men strewn dead on the field, or what
was worse, seeing them dying, were so horrible, that he
studiously endeavoured to banish them from his memory
There were, however, scenes of peace as well as of
war. Some Hamburg friends had given him letters of
introduction to the venerable Abbot Arbuthnot, of the
Benedictine Scots College, under whose protection it was
believed that he would have special opportunities for
study and observation ; and the hospitaUty of the
monks now 'amused' him, as he puts it, into such
tranquillity as was possible in that perilous time. The
'splendour and sublimity' of the Catholic Church
service, notably the music, also affected him with all
the attraction of novelty. But these things were at best

54 FAMOUS SCOTS
only alleviations. Campbell had already begun to suffer
from Johnson's demon of hypochondria, and when the
novelty of his surroundings had worn off, he felt him
self in the worst imaginable pUght of the stranger in a
strange land. The following programme of his day's
doings affords a hint of his wretchedness :
I rise at seven — thanks to the flies that forbid me to sleep — and
after returning thanks to God for prolonging my miserable existence
at Ratisbon, I put on a pair of boots and pantaloons, and study
with open windows, and half-naked, till ten o'clock. I then chew
a crust of bread, and eat a plum for breakfast. At 1 1 my farles-
vous-Fran(ais steps in with his formal periwig and still more formal
bow. I chatter a jargon of Latin and French to him — ^for he has
no English — and study again from 12 till i : dine and read English
or Greek till 2, and then take an afternoon walk. Under a burning
sun I then expose my feeble carcase in a walk round the cursed
walls, or traverse the wood where the Rothmantels or ' Red Cloaks '
and Hussars amused us at cut-and-thrust before the city was taken.
Sometimes I venture to the heights where the last kick-up was
seen, when the poor Austrians were driven across the Danube.
The Convent I seldom visit : we always get upon politics, and that
is a cursed subject.
So indeed it seemed. It was, however, Campbell's
own fault. The brotherhood of the Schotten Kirche^
had welcomed him very heartily on his arrival ; but they
were Jacobites, and he was so indiscreet as to make
open avowal of his Republican opinions. The result
was unpleasant enough. One of the monks denounced
him for his poUtical heresies ; others regarded him with
ill-concealed suspicion and distrust. A countryman of
his own, who bore the conventual name of Father
Boniface, had recommended him to an unsuitable lodg
ing at the house of a friend, and CampbeU complained
that he had been robbed there. Father Boniface met
^ As these sheets are passing through the press, Mr W. K.
Leask reminds me of Aytoun's visit to the Scottish Monastery as
recorded in the ' Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers.' And of course
the reference in ' Redgauntlet ' is well known.

THOMAS CAMPBELL 55
the complaint with abuse, and 'spoke to me once or
twice,' says CampbeU, 'in a manner rather strange.'
One night the Father dogged him into the refectory
and attacked him with the most blackguardly scurrility.
'I never,' writes Campbell, 'found myself so com
pletely carried away by indignation. I flew at the
scoundrel and would have soon rewarded his insolence
had not the others interposed.' After an experience like
this, it was only natural that he should declaim against
the ' lazy, loathsome, ignorant, ill-bred ' monks, whose
society he had at first found so agreeable ! The only
one for whom he entertained a lasting regard was Dr
Arbuthnot, whom he describes as ' the most command
ing figure he ever beheld,' and to whom he unmistak
ably aUudes in ' The Ritter Bann,' one of his later poems.
Being unable either to advance or retreat, and not
knowing what to do with himself amid the gloom and
excitement caused by the presence of two hostile
armies, Campbell appears to have sunk into some
thing like blank despair. ' Oh, God ! ' he exclaims
in a letter, ' when the dull dusk of evening comes on,
when the melancholy bell caUs to vespers, I find my
self a poor solitary being, dumb from the want of heart
to speak, and deaf to all that is said from a want of
interest to hear.' About the future he feels an in
security and a dread which baffle all his efforts to
form a scheme or resolution. Low-minded people
suspect him, and debate about his character, and
wonder what he can be doing in Ratisbon. He can
not settle himself to literary work of any kind. He
sits down resolved to compose in spite of uncertainty
and uneasiness, and looks helplessly for hours together
at the paper before him.
Campbell's letters of this period make indeed most
doleful reading. They are addressed, for the most part,
to John Richardson, a young Edinburgh lawyer who
enjoyed familiar intercourse with Scott and other dii

5 6 FAMOUS SCOTS
majores of the capital. Richardson had promised to
join him in Germany, and when Campbell is not voic
ing his woes, he is planning schemes for Richardson
and himself when at length they are free to start on a
tour. With economy he thinks they might visit every
corner of Germany, travel three thousand miles, stop
at convenient stages for a few days at a time, and be
' masters of all the geographical knowledge worth
learning ' for ;^3o a-piece. They will require nothing
in the way of baggage but 'a stick fitted as an um
brella — a nice contrivance very common here — with a
fine Holland shirt in one pocket, our stockings and
silk breeches in the other, and a few cravats wrapped
in clean paper in the crowns of our hats.' At country
inns they can have bed and supper for half-a-crown,
coffee for sixpence, and bread and beer for twopence.
As for books, Campbell will always manage to carry
enough in his pockets for evening amusement; but
Richardson must 'bring, for God's sake, Shakespeare
and a few British classics.' A striking idea occurs to
him in one of his sportive moods. ' Without degrading
our characters in the least, we might have some articles
from Britain and dispose of them to immense advan
tage. The merchants here are greedy and blind to
their interests : they sell little because they sell so high.
Their general profit is two hundred per cent.' The
spectacle of Thomas Campbell hawking British goods
round the German Empire would have been sufficiently
diverting; but of course it was only another of his
ponderous pleasantries.
Nevertheless, there was good reason for his being
anxious about making a little money. His funds
were fast giving out, and at present he did not quite
see how he was to replenish his purse. He makes
constant complaint about the uncertainty of remit
tances, and in one letter strikes his hand on his ' sad
heart' as he thinks of himself starving far from home

THOMAS CAMPBELL 57
and friends. However, matters mended a little for a
time: his spirits revived, he found himself able to
work again ; and the armistice having been renewed,
he made various interesting excursions into the in
terior, getting as far as Munich, and returning by the
valley of the Iser. 'I remember,' he says, speaking
of these excursions in a letter quoted by Washington
Irving, 'I remember how little I valued the art of
painting before I got into the heart of such impressive
scenes ; but in Germany I would have given anything
to have possessed an art capable of conveying ideas
inaccessible to speech and writing. Some particular
scenes were indeed rather overcharged with that degree
of the terrific which oversteps the sublime ; and I own
my flesh yet creeps at the recollection of spring-waggons
and hospitals. But the sight of Ingolstadt in ruins or
Hohenlinden covered with fire, seven miles in circum
ference, were spectacles never to be forgotten.'
The reference to Hohenlinden here is somewhat
puzzling. According to Beattie, Campbell left Ratisbon
in the beginning of October, and went by way of Leipsic
to Altona, where he remained until his return to England.
He was certainly at Altona in the beginning of Novem
ber, for his letters then begin to date from thence. But
the battle of Hohenlinden was not fought until the 3rd
of December, and it is therefore clear that Campbell,
unless he made a journey of which we have no trace,
could not have seen Hohenlinden ' covered with fire.'
Beattie suggests that in the passage just quoted Hohen
linden may be a slip for Landshut on the Iser, Leip-
heim, near Gunzberg, or Donauwert, where battles and
conflagrations took place during the summer campaign,
the effects of which Campbell may have witnessed after
his arrival on the Danube. He says that he often heard
the poet refer to ' the sight of Ingolstadt in ruins,' but
he never once heard him describe the field of Hohen
linden. Of course if he visited Munich at the time

5 8 FAMOUS SCOTS
mentioned he may have made a cursory survey of the
village ; but until after the battle, traveUers never
thought of going out of their way to see Hohenlinden.
It is a pity that there should be any dubiety upon this
matter, for our interest in Campbell's stirring Unes would
have been heightened by the knowledge that he had
been an eye-witness of the events which they describe.
The armistice which had been renewed at Hohen
linden on the 28th of September was for forty-five days.
As the time for its termination approached Campbell
thought it wise, in view of a resumption of hostUities,
to secure his passports, and escape from Ratisbon.
There was another determining point : his funds were
now almost exhausted, and he wanted to be nearer
home. He decided to go to Hamburg, whence, if re
mittances did not arrive, he could take passage for
Leith. Of his journey from Ratisbon we hear practi
cally nothing, though in one of his letters he gives an
indication of his route by mentioning such towns as
Nuremberg, Bamberg, Weimar, Jena, Leipsic, Halle,
Brunswick, and Lunenburg. In his previous journey
to Ratisbon in July he seems to have followed the
course of the Elbe to Dresden, and thence proceeded
through Zwickau, Bayreuth, and Amberg to the seat of
war on the Danube; so that now he was, as he says,
' master of all to be seen ' in a very considerable part of
the country.
When he reached Hamburg he found a letter awaiting
him from Richardson announcing that a ' blessed double
edition ' of ' The Pleasures of Hope ' had been thrown
off, thus entitling him to ;^5o, according to the under
standing with Mundell. Relieved of all his pecuniary
anxiety in this unexpected fashion, Campbell resolved
to remain abroad for the winter. He took up his
quarters at Altona, a town near Hamburg, which he
describes as the pleasantest place in all Germany. His
letters begin to show a more cheerful spirit. He has

THOMAS CAMPBELL 59
the prospect of ' useful and agreeable acquaintance, and
a winter of useful activity,' and his portfolio, hitherto a
chaos, is soon to be filled with ' monsters and wonders
sufficient to match the pages of Bruce himself.' One
of the new acquaintances promised to prove of sub
stantial advantage to him. A gentleman of family pre
paring for a tour along the lower Danube, required a
traveUing companion, and having been introduced to
Campbell, he offered him ;^ioo a year to accompany
him and direct his studies. There was to be nothing
like a formal tutorship ; the poet was merely to make
himself a ' respectable friend and useful companion.'
Campbell professed to be at this time, like Burns, sorely
touchable on the score of independence, but a man who
has to content himself, as Campbell had now to do,
with two meals a day, must find it convenient to swallow
his pride occasionally ; and Campbell, after a great deal
of epistolary fuss about it, accepted the gentleman's
offer. Unfortunately the agreement was never carried out.
Beattie's curt intimation is that ' sudden and important
changes ' took place in the views and circumstances of
the anticipated patron. We get, however, an inkling of
the real state of the case from a letter of Campbell's to
Dr Anderson, written from London some months later
— a letter which does equal honour to the poet's kind-
heartedness and modesty. Speaking of his well-inten
tioned friend he says :
That valuable and high-spirited young man was humbled — after a
struggle which concealed misfortunes — to reveal his situation and in
sickness to receive assistance from one whose advancement and re-
establishment in life he had planned but a few weeks before, when
no reverse of fortune was dreaded. His situation required more
than my resources were adequate to impart, but still it prevented
his feelings being deeply wounded by addressing strangers. I did
not regret my own share of the hardships, but I acknowledge that
in those days of darkness and distress I had hardly spirit to write a

6o FAMOUS SCOTS
single letter. I have often left the sick-bed of my friend for a room
of my own which wanted the heat of a fire in the month of January,
and on the borders of Denmark.
The failure of this enterprise was obviously a great dis
appointment to Campbell. The prospects of the tour
had seemed to him peculiarly enticing, and he never
ceased to deplore the necessity which led to its being
abandoned. Another acquaintance made at this time happily bore
some fruit. A certain Anthony M'Cann, ' a brave
United Irishman,' had, with other unfortunate fellow-
countrymen who were engaged in the Rebellion of 1798,
taken refuge on the banks of the Elbe. Campbell fell
in with him and his fellow exiles, and passed a good
part of his leisure in their society. The literary result
was that pathetic if somewhat overrated song, ' The
Exile of Erin,' which Campbell wrote after one evening
finding Tony M'Cann more than usually depressed.
Many years later an absurd claim to the authorship of
this song was raised on behalf of an Irishman named
Nugent, whose sister swore to having seen it in her
brother's handwriting before the date of Campbell's con
tinental visit. Campbell was naturally pained by the
accusation, but he produced irrefragable proofs of his
title to the song ; and although the charge of plagiarism
was revived after his death, there is not the slightest
ground for doubting his authorship. The subject is
fully dealt with by Beattie, but to discuss it nowadays
would be altogether superfluous.
Before leaving home, Campbell had entered into an
agreement with Mr Perry of the Morning Chronicle to
send him something for his columns, and ' The Exile of
Erin ' was published by him on the 28th of January 1801.
In a prefatory note the author expressed the hope that the
song might induce ParUament to ' extend their benevol
ence to those unfortunate men, whom delusion and
error have doomed to exile, but who sigh for a return to

THOMAS CAMPBELL 6i
their native homes.' Campbell's sympathy with the
Irish exiles appears to have been as strong as his
sympathy with the Poles. He adopted as his seal a
shamrock with the motto ' Erin-go-Bragh,' and his
enthusiasm was so flamboyant that on his arrival in
Edinburgh he was actually in some danger of being im
prisoned for conspiring with General Moreau in Austria
and with the Irish in Hamburg to land a French army
in Ireland ! Campbell might well be astonished at the
idea of ' a boy like me ' conspiring against the British
Empire. Subsequently he made vaUant efforts to
obtain leave for M'Cann to return home. These efforts
were unsuccessful, but he lived to see the exile
established in Hamburg, through a fortunate marriage,
as one of its wealthiest citizens.
During his residence at Altona, Campbell, when not
engaged in composition, seems to have busied himself
chiefly in trying to plumb the depths of German
philosophy. He says — and he is 'almost ashamed to
confess it' — that for twelve consecutive weeks he did
nothing but study Kant. Distrusting his own imperfect
acquaintance v/ith German, he took a disciple of the
master through his philosophy, but found nothing to
reward the labour. His metaphysics, he remarked,
were mere innovations upon the received meaning of
words, and conveyed no more instruction than the writ
ings of Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas. Of German
philosophy in general Campbell entertained a very poor
opinion. The language in his view was much richer in
the field of Belles Lettres ; and he claimed to have got
more good from reading Schiller, Wieland, and Biirger
than from any of the severer studies which he under
took at this time. Wieland he regarded with especial
favour : he could not conceive ' a more perfect poet.'
Of Goethe and Lessing, strangely enough, he makes
practically no mention.
These details about Campbell's doings are gathered

62 FAMOUS SCOTS
mainly from his letters to Richardson. He was still
looking forward eagerly to the arrival of his friend ; and
when he wrote it was generally with the object of keep
ing his enthusiasm awake by glowing descriptions of
Hungary, which he characterised as a 'poetical para
dise,' the country ' worthy of our best research,' all the
rest of Germany being only so much ' vulgar knowledge.'
Campbell's well-laid schemes were, however, destined to
be upset, and in a way which he evidently never antici
pated. A great poUtical crisis was at hand. England
had determined to detach Denmark from the coalition
by force of arms, and on the 1 2 th of March the British
fleet left Yarmouth Roads for the Sound. Altona
being on the Danish shore was no longer eUgible as a
residence for English subjects, and Campbell, having
already had more than enough of the pomp and cir
cumstance of war, resolved to return home. He took
a berth in the Royal George, bound for Leith, and the
vessel dropped slowly down the river to Gluckstadt, in
front of the Danish batteries. The passage proved
very tedious, and in the end, instead of getting to Leith,
the Royal George was spied by a Danish privateer
and chased into Yarmouth. This was early in April,
and on the 7th of the month Campbell arrived in
London, where, through the good graces of Perry, he
was at once made free of the best Uterary society of the
day. In connection with the continental sojourn thus
hurriedly terminated, it remains now to consider the
literary product of the nine months' absence from
home. Like many another poet, Campbell wiU be
remembered, if he is remembered at all, by his shorter
pieces; and it is interesting to note that of these the
best were written or at any rate conceived on alien
soil. The ' Exile of Erin ' has already been mentioned.
'Hohenlinden' did not appear until 1802, but there
is every reason for believing that it was at least outlined

THOMAS CAMPBELL 63
shortly after the date of the occurrences which it so
vividly pictures. Gait tells an amusing story of its
rejection by a Greenock newspaper as not being ' up to
the editor's standard'; but it took the fancy of Sir
Walter Scott. When Washington Irving was at Abbots-
ford in 1 8 1 7, Scott observed to him : • And there's that
glorious little poem, too, of "Hohenlinden"; after he
[Campbell] had written it he did not seem to think
much of it, but considered some of it d  d drum and
trumpet lines. I got him to recite it to me, and I
believe that the delight I felt and expressed had an
effect in inducing him to print it.' The anecdote
related by Scott in connection with Leyden is well-
known. Campbell and Leyden, as we have seen, had
quarreUed. When Scott repeated ' Hohenlinden ' to
Leyden, the latter said : ' Dash it, man, tell the fellow
I hate him, but, dash it, he has written the finest verses
that have been published these fifty years.' Scott did
not fail to deliver the message. '"Tell Leyden,' said
Campbell, ' that I detest him, but that I know the value
of his critical approbation.'
Curiously enough, Carlyle, quoting in 1814 a poem
of Leyden's on the victory of Wellington at Assaye,
remarks that 'if there is anything in existence that
surpasses this it must be " Hohenlinden " — but
what's Uke " Hohenlinden " ? ' Leyden's verses in
truth read somewhat tamely, but Carlyle's criticism
of poetry was not to be depended upon, especiaUy
at this early date, when he preferred Campbell
to either Byron or Scott. His impassioned liking
for 'HohenUnden' was, however, well justified by its
merits. It has been described as the only representa
tion of a modern battle which possesses either interest
or sublimity. SubUmity is a word of which we are not
particularly fond in these days, perhaps because it was
so freely used by critics a hundred years ago. We
prefer simplicity; and it is surely the simplicity of

64 FAMOUS SCOTS
' Hohenlinden ' which mainly accounts for its effect.
Each stanza is a picture — not a finished etching, but
rather an ' impression ' ; no delicate shades of colour,
but broad strokes of red and black on white. No word
is wasted, no scene is elaborated ; and if what is de
picted is all pretty obvious — well, blood is red, and
gunpowder is sulphurous, and there is little room for
invention. To call it great art would be absurd ; it is
excellent scene-painting.
Next to 'Hohenlinden' among the pieces of this
period must be placed ' Ye Mariners of England ' and
' The Soldier's Dream.' The first was written at Altona
when rumours of England's intention to break up the
coaUtion began to spread. It was printed by Perry
above the signature of ' Amator Patriae,' with an intima
tion that it was avowedly an imitation of the seventeenth
century sea-song, 'Ye Mariners of England,' which
Campbell used to sing at musical soirees in Edinburgh.
It is one of the most stirring of his war pieces. 'The
Soldier's Dream,' beginning 'Our bugles sang truce,'
was not given to the public until the spring of 1804,
but it is generally believed to have been written at
Altona, and in any case it was inspired by the events
which the poet witnessed during his residence at Ratis
bon. Several other pieces were composed or revised
at this time, but they are of Uttle importance. Byron
declared that the ' Lines on leaving a Scene in Bavaria '
were ' perfectly magnificent,' but the praise is grotesquely
extravagant. The lines certainly bear traces of genuine
feeling, but the piece as a whole is obscure and un
finished. The famous ' Battie of the Baltic ' was not published
until 1809, but as it was suggested to Campbell by the
sight of the Danish batteries as he sailed past them on
his way home from Hamburg, it will be convenient to
deal with it here. The subject of the poem is known in
history as the Battle of Copenhagen, which was fought

THOMAS CAMPBELL 65
on the 2nd of April 1801. CampbeU sent a first draft
of it to Scott in 1805. This draft consisted of twenty-
seven stanzas, while the published version has only eight.
It has been remarked that if the original form had been
adhered to, 'The Battle of the Baltic' might have
become a popular baUad for a time and then been
forgotten, whereas, in its condensed form, it is one of
the finest and most enduring war-songs in the language.
Its metre, which the Edinburgh Review thought 'strange
and unfortunate,' is really one of its merits. The lines of
unequal length relieve it of monotony ; the sharp, short
final line of each stanza being indeed an excellent
invention. The poem has defects in plenty, which have
been often enough pointed out: not a stanza would
pass muster to-day; but it would be ungracious to
criticise too severely one of the few vigorous battle
pieces we have.

CHAPTER V
WANDERINGS  MARRIAGE  SETTLEMENT IN LONDON
During his sojourn on the Continent Campbell had
suffered incredible hardships, hardships such as he
hesitated to divulge even to his friends. Now he was
to experience an agreeable change — a transition from
' the tedium of cold and gloomy evenings, unconsoled
by the comforts of life, and from the barbarity of savages
(where an Englishman was not sure of his life) to the
elegant society of London and pleasures of every descrip
tion.' He appears to have landed with little more than
the Scotsman's proverbial half-crown in his pocket, but
Perry, a Scot Uke himself, proved the friend in need.
' I will be all that you could wish me to be,' he said,
and he kept his word. Calling upon him one day,
Campbell was shown a letter from Lord HoUand, in
viting him to dine at the King of Clubs, a survival of
the institution where Johnson used to lay down his
little senate laws. ' Thither with his lordship,' says
Campbell, writing in 1837, 'I accordingly repaired, and
it was an era in my life. There I met, in all their glory
and feather, Mackintosh, Rogers, the Smiths, Sydney,
and others. In the retrospect of a long life I know no
man whose acuteness of intellect gave me a higher idea of
human nature than Mackintosh; and without disparaging
his benevolence — for he had an excellent heart — I may
say that I never saw a man who so reconciled me to
hereditary artistocracy like the benignant Lord Holland.'
Of Lady HoUand, CampbeU had an equally high opinion.
She was, he said, a 'formidable woman, cleverer by
66

THOMAS CAMPBELL 67
several degrees than Buonaparte,' whose name, it is
interesting to note, occurs again and again in his letters.
Among the other friends he made at this time were
Dr Burney and Sir John Moore, Mrs Inchbald and
Mrs Barbauld, J. P. Kemble, and Mrs Siddons. From
a man so notoriously proud and reserved as Kemble
he says he looked for little notice ; but Kemble's be
haviour at their first meeting undeceived him. ' He
spoke with me in another room, and, with a grace
more enchanting than the favour itself, presented me
with the freedom of Drury Lane Theatre. His manner
was so expressive of dignified benevolence that I
thought myself transported to the identity of Horatio,
with my friend Hamlet giving me a welcome.' Kemble's
condescending kindness he ill-requited in 181 7 with a
set of wordy, inflated 'valedictory stanzas,' in which
he displayed all his poetical apparatus of 'conscious
bosoms,' 'classic dome,' 'supernal Ught,' and so forth.
Mrs Siddons he describes as a woman of the first order,
who sang some airs of her own composition with in
comparable sweetness. In Rogers he found ' one of
the most refined characters, whose manners and writing
may be said to correspond.' Everybody and every
thing, in fact, delighted him ; the pains of the past
were forgotten, and the future began to look brighter
than it had ever done before.
Unfortunately, just as he had got into this happy
state of mind, he was startled by the news of his
father's death. He had heard nothing of the old
man's illness, and bitterly reproached himself for hav
ing left him in his last days. It was, however, some
comfort to him to learn that Dr Anderson had watched
at his bedside, and, when all was over, had seen his
remains laid reverently in the cemetery of St John's
Chapel. He died as he had lived, pious and placid,
full of religious hope as of years. Campbell went
home to console his mother and sisters, and to set

68 FAMOUS SCOTS
their affairs in order. His father's annuity from the
Glasgow Merchants' Society died with him ; the sisters
were good-looking but valetudinarian, and Campbell
could only promise that if a new edition of 'The
Pleasures of Hope' succeeded he would furnish a
house in which they might keep boarders and teach
school. Once in the house, he told them, they would
have to trust in Providence.
The prospect certainly did not look promising, either
for Campbell or his dependents. A thousand subscribers
were required to make an edition of ' The Pleasures of
Hope ' safe and profitable, and as that number was not
to be obtained in the north, Campbell was advised to
go to London to canvass a larger public. MeanwhUe
he had to make both ends meet, and in default of pre
cise information we must surmise that he turned out a
deal of joyless, uncongenial work. Nor, with all his
industry, did he succeed in reUeving his straitened
circumstances. The whole year was one of great
privation, when the common necessaries of Ufe were
being sold at an exorbitant price, and 'meal-mob'
rioters were parading the streets and breaking into the
bakers' shops. People who had much more substantial
resources than Campbell felt the temporary embarrass
ment. What Campbell should have done it would not
be easy to say ; what he did do it would be quite easy
to censure. In spite of all his fine friends, for all the
lavish promises of Perry and others, he was misguided
enough to borrow money — on ' Judaic terms ' — with, of
course, the inevitable result. Beattie does not mention
the sum borrowed, but he says it was nearly doubled
by enormous interest, and could only be repaid by
excessive application. Campbell was always notori
ously careless in money matters, and even the concern
he naturaUy felt as a devoted son and brother can
hardly excuse the imprudence with which he added to
his obligations at this period. But prudence, as Cole-

THOMAS CAMPBELL 69
ridge once pointed out, is not usually a plant of poetic
growth. In the midst of all his cares and anxieties, CampbeU
found some solace in the society of such literary and
other friends as the Rev. Archibald Alison — the ' Man
of Taste' — Professor Dugald Stewart, Lord Jeffrey,
Dr Anderson, and the family of Grahames, of whom
the author of 'The Sabbath' was the best known
member. The fact of his having been at the seat of
war gave his conversation a peculiar interest, and his
pilgrimage generally was regarded as a subject of no
little curiosity. His old pupil. Lord Cunninghame,
remarks upon the change which his continental visit
had evidently effected in his view of public affairs and
the accepted order of things at home. Whatever youth
ful, hot-headed Republican notions he may have in
dulged before he went abroad, we gather that he had
come back considerably sobered down, and now he
deigned to express — he was stUl very young ! — a decided
preference for the British Constitution.
But literature was after all of more importance to
him than politics. Such plans as he had formed at
this time he freely discussed with Sir Walter Scott,
from whom he received much encouragement and good
advice. Lord Minto was another friend who proved of
value. Minto had just returned from Vienna, where
he had been acting as Envoy Extraordinary, and with
the view perhaps of hearing his version of recent events
in Germany, he invited the poet to his house at Castle
Minto, some forty-five miles from Edinburgh. The
visit turned out in every way agreeable, and when
Campbell left, it was with the understanding that he
would join Lord Minto in London in the course of the
parliamentary session. A London visit promised many
advantages, among them the opportunity of securing
subscribers for the new edition of 'The Pleasures of
Hope,' and Campbell returned to Edinburgh to make

70 FAMOUS SCOTS
his preparations. He travelled overland, spending a
few days in Liverpool with Currie, the biographer of
Burns, and while there convulsing his friends by the
nervousness he displayed on horseback. When he
reached London he found that Minto had prepared a
' poet's room ' for him at his house in Hanover Square,
and there he took up his residence for the season,
giving, it is understood, occasional service as secretary
in return for the hospitality.
He says he found Minto's conversation very in
structive, but Minto was a Tory of the Burke school,
which CampbeU regarded as inimical to political pro
gress. Campbell naively remarks in one of his letters
that at an early period of their acquaintance they had
a discussion on the subject of politics, when he thought
of giving Minto his political confession of faith. If it
should not meet with Minto's approval, then the intimacy
might end. Campbell does not appear to have re
hearsed his whole political creed, but he went so far
as to tell Minto that he was a Republican, and that
his opinion of the practicability of a Republican form
of government had not been materially affected by all
that had happened in the French Revolution. Lord
Minto was much too sensible a man to disturb himself
about the poUtical views of his overweening young
guest, which, with a gentle sarcasm apparently un
observed by the poet, he set down as 'candid errors
of judgment.' Still, there must have been some Uvely
debates around the table now and again. The corre
spondence makes special mention of Touissant, the negro
chieftain of San Domingo, as a subject of frequent
wrangling. Campbell looked upon Touissant as a
second Kosciusko, while Minto could only dweU upon
the horrors that were likely to follow upon his achieve
ments in the cause of so-called freedom.
But these heated discussions were confined mainly
to the morning hours. Campbell's chief concerns lay

THOMAS CAMPBELL 71
in other directions. Lord Minto left him very much
master of his own time, and his Uterary friendships
were now revived and extended at Perry's table, at the
King of Clubs, and elsewhere. Minto introduced him
to Wyndham, whom he describes as ' a Moloch among
the faUen war-makers,' to Lord Malmesbury and Lord
Pelham — ' plain, affable men ' — and to others. He
met Malthus, whose theories he cordially supported,
and found him 'most ingenious and pleasant, very
sensible and good.' He was much flattered by the
friendly notice of Mrs Siddons, and when the Kembles
admitted him to their family circle, he announced in a
burst of flunkeyism that he had attained the acme of his
ambitions. With Telford the engineer, one of his
Edinburgh patrons, and a genuine if not very judicious
lover of poetry, he spent many of his leisure hours.
Telford was intimate with the Secretary of State, and
in one of his letters he hints to Alison that he may take
some steps to direct the Minister's practical attention
to the ' young Pope.'
Whether Telford carried out his intention does not
appear ; but at any rate there was no patronising of the
young Pope, who continued to occupy his poet's room,
and presently began to tell his friends in the north that
he ardently longed to get away from his present scene
of 'hurry and absurdity,' to the refined and select
society of Edinburgh. Many young feUows in his
position would have counted themselves lucky at being
housed in such distinguished quarters; but Campbell
was in a low state of health at the time, and that doubt
less accounted for his aggravated fits of despondency.
In any case he had his wish about returning to Edin
burgh. At the close of the parliamentary session
Minto started for Scotland, taking CampbeU with him,
and by the end of June he had exchanged his poet's
room for the much humbler abode of his mother and.
sisters in Alison Square;.

72 FAMOUS SCOTS
During this second visit to London he seems to have
written very Uttle, but what he did write has retained at
least a certain school-book popularity. There was
'Hohenlinden,' finished at this time, and of which we
have already spoken, and there was ' Lochiel's Warn
ing,' a 'furious war prophecy,' in the composition of
which he says he became greatly agitated and excited.
' Lochiel,' like ' Hohenlinden,' had been intended for
the new edition of his poems, but, at the unexplained
request of his friends, both pieces were printed anony
mously and dedicated to Alison. Both had run the
gauntlet of private criticism before being submitted to
the pubUc. When the rough draft of ' Lochiel ' was
handed to Minto — who with Currie and other friends
criticised several successive drafts — ^he made some ob
jection to the ' vulgarity ' of hanging, and this objection
was supported later on when the manuscript was passed
about in Edinburgh. But CampbeU was determined to
show how his hero might swing with sufficient dignity
in a good cause; and his objectors were silenced
when he demonstrated to them that Lochiel had a
brother who actually suffered death by means of the
rope. Of course his friends were not all so hypercritical as
Minto. When he read ' Lochiel ' to Mrs Dugald Stewart,
she laid her hand on his head with the remark that it
would bear another wreath of laurel yet. CampbeU
said this made a stronger impression upon him than if
she had spoken in a strain of the loftiest laudation;
nay, he declared it to have been one of the principal
incidents in his life that gave him confidence in his own
powers. Telford was even more enthusiastic. 'I am
absolutely vain of Thomas CampbeU,' he says in a
letter to AUson. ' There never was anything like him
— ^he is the very spirit of Parnassus. Have you seen
his " Lochiel " ? He will surpass everything ancient or
piodern — your Pindars, your Drydens, and your Grays.

THOMAS CAMPBELL 73
I expect nothing short of a Scotch Milton, a Shake
speare, or something more than either.'
To transcribe such stuff is really a tax on the
biographer's patience. It was in this atmosphere of
foolish adulation that Campbell spent those very years
when a young man most needs the tonic air of rigorous
criticism. Such coddling and cossetting never yet made
a poet. Nothing that Campbell ever did justifies a
panegyric like that just quoted; least of all is it justified
by ' Lochiel's Warning,' a bit of first-rate fustian which
would assuredly be forgotten but for its ' Coming events
cast their shadows before,' and a certain rhetorical
fluency, which — with its convenient length — make it a
favourite with teachers of elocution. CampbeU told
Minto that he was tempted to throw the poem away in
vexation at his inability to perfect it, and Scott himself
had to insist on his retaining what were considered its
finest lines. A writer, above all a poet, ought surely to
know — as Tennyson, as Stevenson knew — when he has
done a good thing ; when he does not know, his friends
are ill-advised in keeping his effusions from the flames.
Scott, with his usual generosity, called the idea of the
line quoted above a 'noble thought, nobly expressed.'
The thought is SchiUer's ; and whatever ' nobiUty ' there
may be in the expression is spoilt in a great measure by
the jingle of the first line of the couplet —
'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore.
Even if this were not the case, its cachet of nobility
could hardly survive the ridiculous story told by Beattie.
Campbell, according to this circumstantial tale, was at
Minto. He had gone early to bed and was reflecting
on the Wizard's warning when he fell asleep. During
the night he suddenly awoke repeating : ' Events to
come cast their shadows before.' It was the very image
(or which he had been waiting a week.

74 FAMOUS SCOTS
He rang the bell more than once with increased force. At last,
surprised and annoyed by so unseasonable a peal, the servant
appeared. The poet was sitting with one foot on the bed and the
other on the floor, with an air of mixed impatience and inspiration.
' Sir, are you ill? ' inquired the servant. ' 111 I never better in my
life. Leave the candle and oblige me with a cup of tea as soon as
possible.' He then started to his feet, seized hold of the pen, and
wrote down the ' happy thought,' but as he wrote changed the
words ' events to come ' into ' coming events,' as it now stands in
the text.
This is not exactly a case of mons parturit murem ; it is
more like the woman in the parable who beat up all her
friends to rejoice with her in the discovery of her
trinket ; still more Uke the proud bantam who disturbs
the whole neighbourhood for joy that a chick has been
egged into the world. It would be difficult indeed to
find a more striking example of much ado about nothing.
Sometime during the month of August Campbell had
an intimation from Lord Minto that he was coming to
Edinburgh, and would expect the poet to accompany
him when he went south. Minto came, and Campbell
left with him. In a letter to Scott CampbeU says he
must make the stay a short one, because he has arranged
to take lessons in drawing from Nasmyth, but of that
scheme nothing further is heard. Redding avers that
Campbell could not use a pencil in the delineation of the
simplest natural object, and instances an attempt to
draw a cat which looked very Uke a crocodile. On the
way to Minto the party halted at Melrose to aUow
Campbell to inspect the Abbey, with which he says he
was pleased to enthusiasm. Scotland in the eleventh
century, he exclaims sarcastically, could erect the Abbey
of Melrose, and in the nineteenth could not finish the
College of Edinburgh. He comments upon the fine,
wild, yet Ught outline of its architecture, and says his
mind was filled with romance at beholding ' in the very
form and ornaments of the pile, proofs of its forest origin

THOMAS CAMPBELL 75
that lead us back to the darkest of Gothic ages.' When
they arrived at Minto they were welcomed by Scott,
among other visitors ; and CampbeU retired early to
spend the evening with Hawkins' Life of Johnson, in
which he found 'some valuable stuff in the midst of
superabundant nonsense.'
On the whole, he does not seem to have been very
happy at Minto during this visit. Lord Minto's polite
ness, he tells Alison, only twitches him with the sin of
ingratitude for not being more contented under his
hospitable roof. But a lord's house, fashionable
strangers, luxuriously-furnished saloons, and winding
galleries where he can hardly find his own room, make
him as wretched as he can be, ' without being a tutor.
Everyone, it is true, treats him civilly ; the servants are
assiduous in setting him right when he loses his way ;
but degraded as he is to a state of second childhood
in this ' new world,' it would be insulting his fallen
dignity to smile hysterically and pretend to be happy.
AU of which is sheer fudge — nothing more than the
splenetic utterance of an enfant gati.
Happily, Campbell had business at home, and there
was no reason why he should sit by the waters of Minto
and sigh when he thought of Edinburgh. The new
edition of his poems was now in the press, and he
returned to the capital to revise the proofs. While he
was thus engaged, other work of a less agreeable kind
divided his attention. An Edinburgh bookseller had
commissioned him to prepare ' The Annals of Great
Britain,' a sort of continuation of Smollett, which
he contracted to finish in three volumes octavo, at
;^ioo per volume. The work was to be 'anonymous
and consequently inglorious ' — a labour, in fact, ' little
superior to compilation, and more connected with profit
than reputation.' It was a distinct drop for the author
of ' The Pleasures of Hope,' and he knew it. Indeed,
such was his sensitiveness on the point that he bound

76 FAMOUS SCOTS
his employer to secrecy, and tried to hide the fact from
even his most intimate friends. One cannot help com
paring this behaviour with that of Tennyson ; CampbeU
falling, even in his own estimation, below his very
moderate level, deliberately doing work of which he
was ashamed ; Tennyson, perhaps going to the other
extreme, sacrificing his worldly happiness and, it is
to be feared, in part the health of the woman he
loved, to the pursuit of his ideals. But Tennyson was
a poet. ' The Annals of Great Britain ' was not published until
some years after this, but the book may be dismissed at
once. It was little more than a dry catalogue of events
chronologically arranged, a mere piece of journeyman's
work done to turn a penny, without accuracy of informa
tion or the slightest regard for style. CampbeU told Minto
that the publisher did not desire that he should make
the work more than passable, and it is barely passable.
It is quite forgotten now; indeed, a writer in Eraser's
Magazine for November 1844 declares that even then
the most intelligent bookseller in London was unaware
of its existence. Redding says that the author's own
library was innocent of a copy.
While Campbell was hammering away at this
perfunctory performance in Edinburgh, some whisper
of honours and independence awaiting him in London
seems to have reached his ears. It was only a whisper,
but the time had clearly come when he must make up
his mind once for all about the future. By his own
admission, poetry had now deserted him; he had lost
both the faculty and the inclination for writing it. DuU
prose, he saw, must henceforward be his stand-by. As
a market for dull prose, London undoubtedly ranked
before Edinburgh ; and so he took the plunge, though
he had no fixed engagement in London, no actual
business there except to superintend the printing of his
poems. It was a bold venture, but in the end it

THOMAS CAMPBELL 77
probably turned out as well as any other venture would
have done.
On the way south he was again the guest of Currie at
Liverpool, where he remained 'drinking with this one
and dining with that one' for ten days. Then he visited
the pottery district of Staffordshire, where an old college
friend was employed. It was his first real experience of
the 'chaos of smoke,' and he did not like it. The
country, he remarked, for all its furnaces, was not a
' hot-bed of letters,' though he had met with a character
who enjoyed a reputation for learning by carrying a
Greek Testament to church. The people were a heavy,
plodding, unrefined race, but they had good hearts, and
what was just as important, they gave good dinners.
'These honest folks showed me all the symptoms of
their affection that could be represented by the symbols
of meat and drink, and if ale, wine, bacon, and pudding
could have made up a stranger's paradise I should have
found it among the Potteries.' One untoward thing
happened : Campbell lost his wig. For it should have
been mentioned that just before he left Edinburgh,
finding that his hair was getting alarmingly thin, he had
adopted the peruke, which he continued to wear for the
rest of his life. A bewigged poet of twenty-five must
have been a somewhat singular spectacle in those days,
but CampbeU made up for the antiquated head-gear by
a notable spruceness in other ways. He wore a blue
coat witb bright, gUt buttons, a white waistcoat and
cravat, buff nankeens and white stockings, with shoes
and silver buckles — a perfect scheme of colour.
In this gay attire, though ' agonised ' by the want of
his wig, he arrived in London on the 7 th of March
(1802). Telford at once took charge of him by making
him his guest at the Salopian Hotel, Charing Cross.
Of Telford's admiration for Campbell as a poet we have
already learnt something ; his opinion of Campbell as a
man was apparently not quite so enthusiastic. Nothing

78 FAMOUS SCOTS
is recorded of Campbell's conduct during the former
visits to London, but what are we to infer from the fact
that Telford and Alison now united to 'advise and
remonstrate with the young poet, at a moment when he
was again surrounded by all the seductive allurements of
a great capital ' ? AUson sent him a letter of paternal
counsel for the regulation of his life and studies ; and
Telford confided to Alison that he had asked Campbell
to live with him in order to have him constantly in
check. If Campbell really had any leaning towards
social or other extravagances, it was promptly counter
acted by an event of which we shall have to speak
presently. Meanwhile, Telford does not appear to have helped
him much by introducing him to 'all sorts of novelty.'
In fact, if we may beUeve himself, CampbeU did not
take at all kindly to London and its ways. Life there
is ' absolutely a burning fever ' ; he hates its unnatural
and crowded society ; it robs him of both health and
composure. He cannot settle himself to anything ; he
has one eternal round of invitations, and has got into
a style of living which suits neither his purse nor his
inclination. Sleep has become a stranger to him ;
every morning finds him with a headache. Study and
composition are out of the question. He sits ' under
the ear-crashing influence of ten thousand chariot
wheels ' ; when night comes on he has no solace but
his pipe, and he drops into bed like an old sinner
dropping into the grave.
Campbell was very likely homesick, but his corre
spondence and the evidence of his intimates put it
beyond doubt that he was not cut out for society.
Indeed he expressly admits it himself. Fashionable
folks, he exclaims in one of his letters, have a slang
of talk among themselves as unintelUgible to ordinary
mortals as the lingo of the gipsies, and perhaps not so
amusing if one did understand it. A man of his lowly

THOMAS CAMPBELL 79
breeding feels in their company something of what
Burke calls proud humility, or rather humble contempt.
As for conversation with these minions of le beau monde,
he says it is not worth courting since their minds are
not so much filled as dilated. This was another of
Campbell's many foolish utterances of the kind. It
must have been made in a fit of spleen, for Campbell,
Uke Burns, could dinner very comfortably with a lord
when the meeting was likely to favour his own interests.
Johnson declared of Charing Cross that the full tide
of human existence was there, but Campbell had
nothing of Johnson's affection for the streets. He
objected to the noise because it made conversation
impossible, or at least difficult. Hence it was that,
' the roaring vortex ' having proved unendurable to him,
he now changed his quarters to a dingy den of his own
at 61 South Molton Street. Here he went on pre
paring the ' Annals ' and the new edition of his poems,
toiUng with the stolid regularity of the mill-horse for
ten hours a day. The new edition of the poems was
published in the beginning of June, when his spirits
had sunk to 'the very ground-floor of despondency.'
It was a handsome quarto, and the printing, in the
author's opinion, was so well done that, except one
splendid book from Paris, dedicated to 'that villain
Buonaparte,' there was nothing finer in Europe. It
was really the seventh edition of ' The Pleasures of
Hope,' but it contained several engravings and some
altogether new pieces, among which, in addition to
' Lochiel ' and ' Hohenlinden,' were the once bepraised
' Lines on Visiting a Scene in Argyllshire ' (the old
family estate of Kirnan), and ' The Beech Tree's Peti
tion.' In the course of some pleasantry at the house of
Rogers, Campbell once remarked that marriage in nine
cases out of ten looks like madness. His own case was
clearly not the tenth, at any rate from a prudential point

8o FAMOUS SCOTS
of view. The sale of his new volume had given a
temporary fiUip to his exchequer, and with the pro
verbial rashness of his class, he began to think of taking
a wife. His reasons were certainly more substantial
than his finances. He says that without a home of his
own he found it impossible to keep to his work. When
he lived alone in lodgings he became so melancholy
that for whole days together he did nothing, and could
not even stir out of doors. In the company of a
certain lady he had found for the first time in his Ufe
a ' perpetual serenity of mind,' and now he was deter
mined to hazard everything for such a prize. It was
a big hazard, and he foresaw the objections. His
infatuation, he remarks to Currie, will inevitably set
many an empty head a-shaking. But happiness and
prosperity do not, in his view, depend upon frigid
maxims; and the strong motive he will now have to
exertion he regards as ' worth uncounted thousands '
for encountering the ills of existence.
The lady for whom Campbell thus braved the un
certain future was a daughter of his maternal cousin,
Mr Robert Sinclair, who had been a wealthy Greenock
merchant and magistrate, and was now, after having
suffered some financial reverses, Uving retired in
London. She bore 'the romantic name of Matilda,'
and is described by Campbell as a beautiful, Uvely,
and lady-like woman, who could make the best cup of
Mocha in the world. Beattie remarks upon the Spanish
cast of her features : her complexion was dark, her
figure spare, graceful, and below the middle height,
and when she smiled her eyes gave an expression of
tender melancholy to her face. Like Campbell, she
had been abroad, and it is said that at the Paris Opera
she attracted great attention in her favourite head-dress
of turban and feathers. The Turkish Ambassador, who
was in a neighbouring box, declared that he had seen
nothing so beautiful in Europe. We have learned that

THOMAS CAMPBELL Si
Campbell himself was handsome, but Mr Sinclair
naturally did not regard good looks as a guarantee of
an assured income, and he stoutiy opposed the match.
The prospective husband was not, however, to be put
off by taUc about the precarious profits of Uterature.
When was he likely to be in a better position to marry ?
He had few or no debts ; the subscriptions to his quarto
were stiU coming in ; the ' Annals ' was to bring him
;^3oo ; and at that very moment he had a fifty pound
note in his desk.
Mr Sinclair remained unmoved by this recital of
wealth, but finding that his daughter's health was suffer
ing, he waived his objections, and arrangements were
made for the marriage to take place at once. Campbell
now adopted every means in his power to make money.
He wrote to his friend Richardson, requesting him to
take prompt measures for levying contributions among
the Edinburgh booksellers, the stockholders of the
new edition. ' In the name of Providence,' he demands
in desperation, ' how much can you scrape out of my
books in Edinburgh? If you can dispose of a hun
dred volumes at fifteen shiUings each, it will raise me
;^75. I shall require ;^25 to bring me down to Scot
land . . . and under ;65o I cannot furnish a house,
which, at all events, I am determined to do.' This
request was made only nine days before the marriage,
which was celebrated at St Margaret's, Westminster, on the
loth of October 1803 — not September, as Beattie and
Campbell himself have it. After a short honeymoon
trip, the pair returned to town and settled down in
Pimlico, where the father-in-law had considerately fur
nished a suite of rooms for them.
Campbell's idea had been to make his home in some
'cottage retreat' near Edinburgh. He did not want
society or callers; he wanted to be sober and indus
trious; therefore he would live in the country if he
should have to go ten miles in search of a box. He

82 FAMOUS SCOTS
dwells lovingly on this prospect in letters to his friends ;
but although he did not abandon the notion for some
time, it never came to anything. As a matter of fact,
his new responsibiUties led to engagements which prac
tically chained him to London ; to say nothing of the
circumstance that he had joined the Volunteers, in view
of the threatened invasion of which he sung. More
over, he had got into some trouble with his Edinburgh
publisher, and probably he felt that his presence in or
near the capital would only add to his personal annoy
ance. How different his after life might have been had
he carried out his original intention, it is useless to
speculate. As it was, he had not been long married when
financial difficulties began to bear heavily upon him.
He started badly by borrowing money from one of his
sisters ; later on he borrowed ;^s 5 from Currie ; and
finally he had to ask a loan of ;^5o from Scott. A
man of really independent spirit, such as Campbell
professed to be, would have felt all this very galling,
but there is nothing to indicate that Campbell ex
perienced more than a momentary sense of shame at
the position in which he had placed himself. By and
by we find him confessing to Currie that he doubted
whether he had ever been a poet at aU, so grovelUng
and so parsimonious had he become : ' I have grown a
great scrub, you would hardly believe how avaricious.'
To explain the necessity for these unpoetic borrowings
would be somewhat difficult. It certainly did not arise
from idleness or want of work. CampbeU was con
stantly being offered literary employment, and he had
by this time formed a profitable engagement with The
Star. In November he describes himself as an ex
ceedingly busy man, habitually contented, and working
twelve hours a day for those depending on him. ' I am
scribble, scribble, scribbling for that monosyllable which
cannot be wanted — bread, not fame.' But the scrib-

THOMAS CAMPBELL 83
bling, it may be presumed, did not furnish him with
much ready cash, and the current household expenses
had to be provided for. By this time there were debts,
too. Bensley, the printer, pressed him for a bill of _;^i 00 ;
he owed one bookseller ^^30, and he had an account
of ;^2 5 for his Volunteer uniform and accoutrements,
which were to have cost originally only ;£^io.
Campbell seldom writes a letter without referring to
these sordid concerns ; but, on the other hand, he just
as often speaks of his newly-found felicity by his own
fireside. Never, he says, did a more contented couple
sit in their Lilliputian parlour. Matilda sews beside
him all day, and except to receive such visitors as can
not be denied, they remain without interruption at their
respective tasks. In course of time the Lilliputian
parlour was brightened by a new arrival. The poet's
first child, Thomas Telford — so called in compliment
to the engineer, who afterwards paid for it in a hand
some legacy — was born on July ist, 1804. In notifying
Currie of the event he grows quite eloquent over the
' little inestimable accession ' to his happiness, and
asserts his belief that ' lovelier babe was never smiled
upon by the light of heaven.' In view of what occurred
later, the following reads somewhat pathetically : ' Oh
that I were sure he would live to the days when I
could take him on my knee and feel the strong plump
ness of childhood waxing into vigorous youth ! My
poor boy I shall I have the ecstacy of teaching him
thoughts, and knowledge, and reciprocity of love to
me ? It is bold to venture into futurity so far. At pre
sent his lovely little face is a comfort to me.' Well was
it for Thomas CampbeU that the future of his boy lay
only in his imagination !
In the meantime, having begun to give hostages to
fortune, he felt that he must make still greater efforts
towards securing a settled income. This year he had
been offered a lucrative professorship in the University

84 FAMOUS SCOTS
of Wilna, but although he declared his readiness to take
any situation that offered certain support, he hesitated
about the offer because of the decided way in which he
had spoken against Russia in ' The Pleasures of Hope.'
He had no fancy for being sent to Siberia, and so, after
carefully considering the matter, he declined to go
to Wilna. It was at this time that, under the feeling
of his responsibility as a parent, he conceived the
idea of his ' Specimens of the British Poets.' He
desired to haul in from the bookselling tribe as
many engagements as possible, of such a kind as
would cost little labour and bring in a big profit.
The 'Specimens,' he thought, would answer to that
description ; and he suggests to Currie that some Liver
pool bookseller might embark ;^5oo in the undertaking
and make ;^iooo. Find the man, he says, in effect,
to Currie. Although Currie should ruin him by the
undertaking, it would only be ruining a bookseUer, and
doing a benefit to a friend ! That was one way in
which Campbell proposed to meet his increased re
sponsibilities. Another way was by removing his
residence to the suburbs. At Pimlico, visitors, as he
expresses it, haunted him like fiends and ate up his
time like moths. To escape them, as well as to be
out of the reach of 'family interference' (this was
rather ungracious after the father-in-law's furnishing !),
he took a house at Sydenham, and in the November
of 1804 he was ' safe at last in his duke domum.'

CHAPTER VI
POETICAL WORK AND PROSE BOOKMAKING
In 1 804 Sydenham was a country viUage so primitive
in its arrangements that its water was brought on carts,
and cost two shillings a barrel. It had a common upon
which the matter-of-fact Matilda thought she might keep
pigs, and a lovely country, still untouched by the hand
of the jerry-builder, lay all around it. ' I have,' says
Campbell, describing his situation, 'a whole field to
expatiate over undisturbed : none of your hedged
roads and London out-of-town villages about me, but
"ample space (sic) and verge enough" to compose a
whole tragedy unmolested.' The house, which he had
leased for twenty-one years at an annual rent of forty
guineas, consisted of six rooms, with an attic storey
which he converted into a working ' den ' for himself.
Altogether it was a charming home for a literary man,
and Campbell ought to have been contented and happy.
His London friends came to see him on Sundays, and
among his neighbours he found many sincere friends,
notwithstanding Lockhart's superfine sneers about ' sub
urban blue-stockings, weary wives, idle widows, and in
voluntary nuns.'
Unhappily, the old moodiness and discontent returned
upon him. He had work, but work which he despised.
He was fairly paid, but though Mrs Campbell was a
' notable economist,' there was always apparently some
difficulty in getting the financial belt to meet. Camp
bell himself was, as we have learned, hopelessly incap
able in money matters; indeed, he affirmed that he
«s

86 FAMOUS SCOTS
was usuaUy ready to shoot himself when he came to
the subject of cash accounts. He had settled at Syden
ham with his nose just above water. Currie had ad
vanced him ;^55, and Gregory Watt, his early college
friend, who died about this time, had left him a legacy
of ;^ioo; but the furnishing and the flitting had
swallowed it all up, and a 'Judaic loan' besides.
His main source of income at this date was from the
quarto edition of his poems, and the sale of that was
beginning to flag. It is true he had his four guineas
a week from the Star; but out of this he had to pay
for a conveyance to take him to town daily. We must
remember, besides, that he had two estabUshments to
provide for, his mother's at Edinburgh, as well as his
own at Sydenham ; and in those times, when war prices
ruled, the cost of living was excessively high. But all
this does not quite explain the perpetual trouble about
money — does not explain how it should have been
necessary for Lady Holland to send a 'munificent
present' to save him from a debtor's lodging in the
King's Bench.
Campbell was not the man to bear poverty in un
complaining silence. His letters of this period are
filled with plaints, whinings, regrets, impUcit accusa
tions against Providence of dealing unfairly with one
who had been made for so much better things. He
chafes at the necessity for yoking himself to the irk
some tasks of the literary drudge, tasks that require
Uttle more than the labour of penmanship. He de
plores that his Helicon has dried up ; he has no poetry
in his brain, he tells Scott, and inspiration is a stranger
to him from extreme apprehension about the future.
The only art now left to him, he sadly confesses, is the
art of sitting for so many hours a day at his desk.
The result of all this work and worry and disappoint
ment was soon seen on his health. His anxiety to be
up in the morning kept him awake at night, and he

THOMAS CAMPBELL 87
became a victim to insomnia. He sought relief in
laudanum, which, while procuring him sleep, only in
creased his constitutional tendency to mope. He
began to think he was dying, and even wished him
self dead. There is something, he remarked to
Richardson in 1805, in one's internal sensations that
tells more certainly of disorder than the diagnosis of
the doctors, and those sensations he was undoubtedly
conscious of feeling. The thought of the consumma
tion comforted him rather than otherwise, though he
shuddered at the 'dreadful and melancholy idea' of
leaving his wife and family unprovided for — 'as it is
not impossible they may soon be.' Of course things
were not nearly so bad as this. Campbell was certainly
not well, and his financial affairs, thanks mainly to his
own mismanagement, were not in a prosperous state ;
but his ailments and embarrassments were clearly aggra
vated by his morbid imagination. It was nothing more
serious than a case of liver and amour propre. If, like
Scott after the great crash, he had cheerfully and
resolutely confronted his circumstances, the ailments
and embarrassments, if they had not vanished entirely,
would infallibly have assumed a less threatening aspect.
But that, after all, is only to say that Thomas Campbell
should have been — not Thomas Campbell but some
body else.
He would require to be indeed an enthusiastic
biographer who should write with any zest of Camp
bell's literary labours during these years. Great
writers have often enough been great hacks, but
seldom has a man of Campbell's poetical promise
descended to such dull drudgery as that to which he
had now betaken himself. He continued to toil at
the ' Annals ' ; he wrote papers for the Philosophical
Magazine, he translated foreign correspondence for
the Star, and, in brief, gave himself up almost entirely
to the ' inglorious employment ' of anonymous writing

88 FAMOUS SCOTS
and compilation. He wrote on every imaginable
subject, including even agriculture, on the knowledge
of which he says he was more than once complimented
by farmers, though Lockhart cruelly remarks that he
probably could not tell barley from lavender. Politics,
too, he tried, but therein was found wanting. He had
no real acquaintance with the political questions of the
time, nor did he possess the journalistic faculty in any
degree. Before he finally left the Morning Chronicle,
his connection with which had continued, he was doing
little but writing pieces to fill up the poets' corner, and
even these were sometimes so poor that Perry declined
to insert them.
What Campbell always wanted — what indeed he made
no secret of wanting — was some project which would
mean light labour and long returns. Early in 1806 he
had become acquainted with John Murray, the pub
lisher, at whose literary parties he was afterwards a
frequent guest, and the possibilities of the connection
had at once presented themselves. The first hint of these
possibilities is revealed in some correspondence which
now took place about a new journal that Murray evidently
intended Campbell to edit. The details of the scheme
were being discussed when there was some talk about
an Athenaum being started, and Campbell pleads with
Murray not to be discouraged by the beat of the rival's
drum. ' Supposing,' he exclaims, ' we had an hundred
AthencBums to confront us, is it not worth our whUe to
make a great effort?' The correspondence certainly
shows that Campbell was anxious enough to make the
effort ; but the proposal dropped entirely out of sight,
and he had to set his brains to work in the evolution
of other schemes.
Several ideas occurred to him. He thought of trans
lating a 'tolerable poem,' French or German, of from
six to ten thousand lines, and he begged Scott to advise
him about the choice. He cogitated upon a collection

THOMAS CAMPBELL 89
of Irish music, but found that Moore had anticipated
him. He had considerable correspondence with Scott
and others about the proposed ' Specimens of the British
Poets,' in which project Scott and he had, unknown to
each other, coincided, but that too had to be given up,
at any rate for the present. This scheme, as Lockhart
teUs us, was first suggested by Scott to Constable, who
heartily supported it. By and by it was discovered
that Cadell & Davies and some other London pub
lishers had a similar plan on foot, and were now, after
having failed with Sir James Mackintosh, negotiating
with Campbell about the biographical introductions.
Scott proposed that the Edinburgh and London houses
should join hands in the venture, and that the editorial
duties should be divided between himself and Campbell
To this both Cadell and Campbell readily assented, but
the design as originally sketched ultimately fell to the
ground, because the booksellers decUned to admit
certain works upon which the editors insisted.
Such, in brief, is the history of the undertaking which
was to have united in one ' superb work ' the names of
Scott and Campbell. It is unnecessary to dwell further
on it, unless, perhaps, to note that Campbell's notori
ously rabid opinions of publishers seem to have had their
origin in the negotiations. Everybody has heard how
he once toasted Napoleon because he had ordered a
bookseller to be shot ! The booksellers, he remarks to
Scott, are the greatest ravens on earth, liberal enough
as booksellers go, but still 'ravens, croakers, suckers of
innocent blood and living men's brains.' They ' pledge
one another in authors' skulls, the publisher always
taking the lion's share.' Dependence upon these
'cunning ones' he finds to be so humiUating — they
are so prone to insult all but the prosperous and inde
pendent — that he secretly determines to have in future
as little to do with them as possible. He is no match
for them : they know the low state of his finances, and

90 FAMOUS SCOTS
take advantage of him accordingly. Murray is ' a very
excellent and gentleman-like man — albeit a bookseller —
the only gentleman, except Constable, in the trade.'
And much more to the same effect. There was really
nothing in the correspondence about the ' Specimens '
which should have led Campbell thus to traduce a body
of men upon whom he was so dependent, and by whom,
with hardly a single exception, he was always honour
ably and even generously treated. He asked too much
for his work — ;^iooo was his figure — the booksellers
thought they could not afford so much, and they said
so. It was Campbell himself who was at fault. He
took absurdly high ground — boasted, in fact, of taking
high ground — and talked of ;^iooo as quite a perqui
site. In short, he had as little personal justification for
UbelUng the bookseUers as Byron had for comparing
them with Barabbas.
Defeated in his design for the British poets, Camp
bell now went about whimpering that he had no
hopes of an agreeable undertaking, unless Scott could
hit upon some plan which would admit of their joining
hands in the editorship. Longman & Rees had
engaged him to edit a small collection of specimens of
Scottish poetry, with a glossary and notices of two or
three lives, but that he regarded as 'a most pitiful
thing.' Scott had no suggestion to make, and Camp
bell, fretting over his prospects and his frustrated hopes
— or as Beattie hints, neglecting his food — again fell ill.
A second son, whom he named Alison, after his old
Edinburgh friend, had been born to him in June 1805,
but the jubUation over the event was short-lived. He
became, in fact, more moody and disconsolate than
ever. He described himself as a wreck, and looked
forward to his sleepless nights being ' quieted soon and
everlastingly.' Even the daily journey to town proved
too much for him, and he took a temporary lodging in
Pimlico, going to Sydenham only on Sundays. By and

THOMAS CAMPBELL 91
by he recovered himself a little. Medical skill did
something, but improved finances did more. In a
letter to Scott, dated October 2, 1805, we find this
curt but pregnant postscript : ' His Majesty has been
pleased to confer a pension of ;^2oo a year upon me.
GOD SAVE THE KING.' Campbell says the ' bounti
ful allowance ' was obtained through several influences,
but he mentions Charles Fox (who liked him because he
was ' so right about Virgil '), Lord Holland and Lord
Minto as being specially active in the matter.
It was insinuated that the pension came as a reward
for writing a series of newspaper articles in defence of
the Grenville administration, but this was certainly not
the case. Campbell was no political writer, no
'scribbler for a party.' Among his many faults it
cannot be laid to his charge that he sold his principles
for pay. In 1824, mercenary as he was, he declined
_;^ioo a year from a certain society because to take the
money meant ' canting and time-serving.' We need
therefore have no hesitation in accepting his assurance
that he received the present grant 'purely and ex
clusively as an act of literary patronage.' There is
perhaps a suspicion of the poseur in his palaver about
the ' mortification ' which his pride had suffered in the
matter, but beyond that, there seems to be no reason
for casting doubts on his political honesty.
The new accession of fortune was not princely, but
it must have helped Campbell very considerably. De
ducting office fees, duties, etc., the allowance amounted
to something like ^168 per annum, and that sum he
enjoyed for close upon forty years. He says that his
physicians — who were surely Job's comforters aU — told
him he must regard it as the only barrier between him
and premature dissolution; and he speaks about
making it ' do ' in the cheapest corner of England.
His friends, however, were by this time thoroughly
alive to the necessity, which indeed should never have

92 FAMOUS SCOTS
existed, of doing something to put his finances on a
satisfactory basis, and to this end the publication of
another subscription edition of his poems was arranged.
Campbell indulged in his usual idle talk about ' mortifica
tion' at having again to ask support in this way, but
his friends wisely kept the matter in their own hands and
paid no heed to his maunderings.
At the same time some impatience was not unnatur
ally being felt with Campbell. Francis Horner, a
judicious acquaintance upon whom he afterwards wrote
an unfinished elegy, was giving himself no end of
trouble over the new edition, and this is the way he
writes to Richardson. Speaking of a permanent fund
as a motive to economy he says :
You must teach him [Campbell], to consider this subscription as
an exertion which cannot with propriety, nor even perhaps with
success, be tried another time ; and that from this time he must
look forward to a plan of income and expense wholly depending
upon himself and most strictly adjusted. He gets four guineas a
week for translating foreign gazettes at the Star office ; it is not
quite the best employment for a man of genius, but it occupies him
only four hours of the morning, and the pa3rment ought to go a
great length in defi-aying his annual expenses. Yon will be able
to convey to Campbell these views of his situation and others that
will easily occur to you : none of us are entitled to use so much
freedom with him.
One can read a good deal between the lines here.
Campbell, as he mildly puts it himself, was never ' over
head and ears in love with working ' ; he preferred his
friends to work for him. Some years before this he
looked to them to get him a Government situation,
' unshackled by conditional service ' ; and even now,
with his pension running, and much as he prated about
his pride, he ' trusts in God ' that it will be followed up
by an appointment of ' some emolument ' in one of the
Government offices. It was clearly an object with him
to have his affairs made easy by outsiders. Nor was

THOMAS CAMPBELL 93
this aU. There is no doubt that he had, temporarily at
least, given way to convivial habits which his well-
wishers could not but regard with regret. He admits
as much himself, and Beattie only seeks to hide the fact
by speaking in his solemn, periphrastic way about ' the
social pleasures of the evening ' and a ' too-easy compli
ance' with the solicitations of company. In these
circumstances, it was only natural that Campbell's
friends should desire to impress upon him the necessity
of guiding his affairs with greater circumspection so as
to depend more upon himself. MeanwhUe they went
on collecting subscribers' names for the new edition,
and Campbell returned to Sydenham to continue his
work on the 'Annals' and think about something less
irksome and more remunerative.
It was at this juncture that Murray considerately
came to his aid. Though the original scheme of the
British Poets had fallen through, Campbell had by no
means given up the idea of a work of the kind; and
now, having discussed the plan with Murray, it was
arranged between them that the undertaking should go
on. Murray was naturally anxious that Scott's name
should be connected with the editorship, but Scott,
although he at first agreed to co-operate, ultimately
found it necessary to restrict himself to works more
exclusively his own, and Campbell was accordingly left
to proceed alone.
In the summer of 1807 his labours were interrupted
by a visit to the Isle of Wight. His old complaint had
returned, and he was advised to try a change of air and
scene. He left London in the beginning of June, but
the change did not prove successful. The demon of
insomnia still haunted him, and the ennui of the
place became so intolerable that he was driven to act as
reader to the ladies in the boarding-house where he
stayed ! What, he cries, must Siberia be when Ryde is
so bad ! By August he was at Sydenham again, only to

94 FAMOUS SCOTS
find his ' abhorred sleeplessness returning fast and in-
veterately.' He had written very Uttle poetry for some
time, and such as he did write — the tribute to Sir John
Moore, for example — is, like the Greek mentioned by
PaUet, not worth repeating. He was now engaged
almost solely upon 'Gertrude of Wyoming,' but his
head was ' constantly confused,' and the poem was often
laid aside for weeks at a time. Still, the manuscript
advanced, and by Christmas the greater part of it was
complete enough for reading to a private circle of
friends. ' Gertrude ' finaUy appeared, after a long process of
polishing, alteration and addition, in April 1809. Some
time before its pubUcation CampbeU wrote that he had
no fear as to its reception ; only let him have it out,
and, like Sterne, he cared not a curse what the critics
might say. The critics were in the main favourable.
Jeffrey had already seen the proofs, and had written a
long letter to the author, pointing out certain ' dangerous
faults,' but commending the poem for its ' great beauty
and great tenderness and fancy ' ; and on the same day
that the poem was published, the Edinburgh Review
appeared with an article in which the editor rejoiced
' once more to see a polished and pathetic poem in the
old style of English pathos and poetry.' Its merits, he
said, ' consist chiefly in the feeUng and tenderness of
the whole delineation, and the taste and delicacy with
which all the subordinate parts are made to contribute
to the general effect.' At the same time he found the
story confused, some passages were uninteUigible, and
there was a laborious effort at emphasis and condensa
tion which had led to ' constraint and obscurity of the
diction.' The Quarterly reviewer, none other than Sir
Walter Scott, was more severe upon its blemishes. He
complained of the ' indistinctness ' of the narrative, of
the numerous blanks which were left to be filled up by
the imagination of the reader, of its occasional ambiguity

THOMAS CAMPBELL 95
and abruptness. Its excellences were, however, gener
ously admitted ; and in fact, on the whole, the Quarterly
said as much in its favour as could be expected. In
those days party spirit led to incredible freaks of literary
criticism ; and it was only Scott's magnanimity that
could have allowed him to forgive Campbell's Whig
politics for the sake of his poetry. Curiously enough,
considering their intimacy, Campbell did not know that
Scott was his reviewer, though he was not very wide
of the mark when he spoke of the writer as ' a candid
and sensible man,' who 'reviews like a gentleman, a
Christian, and a scholar.' Of other contemporary criti
cisms we need not speak. The poet's friends were of
course blindly eulogistic. Alison was ' deUghted and
conquered,' and Telford, with his characteristic bombast,
anticipated such applause from the public as would
drive the author frantic !
' Gertrude,' as has more than once been pointed out,
was the first poem of any length by a British writer the
scene of which was laid in America, and in it Campbell
is the first European to introduce his readers to the
romance of the virgin forests and Red Indian warriors.
The subject may have occurred to him when transcrib
ing a passage in his own ' Annals,' in which reference is
made to the massacre of Wyoming, although there is
possibly something in Beattie's suggestion that he got
the idea from reading Lafontaine's story of ' Barneck
and Saldorf,' published in 1804. Campbell, however,
as we know, had a keen personal interest in America.
His father had lived there ; three of his brothers were
there now. ' If I were not a Scotsman,' he once re
marked, ' I should like to be an American.' No doubt
the scenery of Pennsylvania had been often described to
him in letters from the other side.
But these are points that do not greatly concern us
now. Nor is it necessary to enter into any minute
criticism of the poem. Campbell himself preferred it

96 FAMOUS SCOTS
to ' The Pleasures of Hope ' (' I mean,' he said, ' to
ground my claims to future notice on it'), while
Hazlitt regarded it as his 'principal performance.'
With neither opinion does the popular verdict agree.
Perhaps it may be that while ' Gertrude ' is, as Lock
hart said, a more equal and better sustained effort than
' The Pleasures of Hope,' it contains fewer passages
which bear detaching from the context. For one thing
the poet had a story to tell in ' Gertrude,' and he was
eminently unskiUed in the management of poetic narra
tive. ' I was always,' he remarks to Scott, ' a dead bad
hand at teUing a story.' In ' Gertrude ' he cannot keep
to his story; the construction of the entire poem is
loose and incoherent. Even the love scenes, which,
as Hazlitt says, breathe a balmy voluptuousness of senti
ment, are generaUy broken off in the middle. Then
he was unwise in adopting the Spenserian stanza. It
was quite alien to his style ; even Thomson, living long
before the romantic revival, managed it more sympa
thetically than Campbell. The necessities of the rhyme
led Campbell to invert his sentences unduly, to tag his
lines for the mere sake of the rhyme, and to use affected
archaisms with a quite extraordinary clumsiness. Any
thing more unlike the sweet, easy, graceful compactness
of Spenser could scarcely be imagined.
Nor are the characters of the poem altogether suc
cessful ; indeed, with the single exception of the Indian,
they are mere shadows. Gertrude herself makes a
pretty portrait ; but as HazUtt has remarked, she cannot
for a moment compare with Wordsworth's Ruth, the
true infant of the woods and child-nature. Brant,
again, who so warmly espoused the cause of the
Mohawks during the War of the American Revolution,
is but a faint reality. CampbeU fancied that he had
drawn a true picture of the partisan, but as Brant's son
afterwards proved to him, the picture was purely im
aginary. The main function of the Indian chief is

THOMAS CAMPBELL 97
apparently to give local colour to the poem, though it
must be aUowed that he stands out boldly among its
other characters. Hazlitt comments upon his erratic
appearances, remarking that he vanishes and comes
back, after long intervals, in the nick of time, without
any known reason but the convenience of the author
and the astonishment of the reader. On the other
hand, the death-song of the savage which closes the
poem, is one of the best things that the author ever
wrote. Byron declared that ' Gertrude ' was notoriously full
of grossly false scenery ; that it had ' no more locaUty
with Pennsylvania than with Penmanmaur.' But that
was an obvious exaggeration. There is better ground
for the complaint about Campbell's errors in natural
history as exhibited in the poem — about his having con
ferred on Pennsylvania the aloe and the palm, the
flamingo and the panther. The probability is that he
knew as much about natural history as Goldsmith,
whose friends declared that he could not tell the dif
ference between any two sorts of barndoor fowl until
they had been cooked. Once in the New Monthly,
when a contributor spoke of the rarity of seeing the
cuckoo, Campbell added a correcting note to say that
he had himself ' seen whole fields blue with cuckoos ' !
But even Shakespeare has lions in the forest of Arden,
and Goldsmith makes the tiger howl in North America.
There is no need to insist upon absolute accuracy in
such matters. One would gladly notice instead the real
merits of the poem, which, however, are not so readily
discovered. Hazlitt spoke enthusiastically of passages
of so rare and ripe a beauty that they exceed all praise.
But we have changed our poetical point of view since
Hazlitt's day ; and the most that can now be said for
' Gertrude,' is that it is a third-rate poem containing a
few first-rate lines. It is practically dead, and can
never be called back to Ufe.

98 FAMOUS SCOTS
' Gertrude ' was favourably received by the public,
and particularly by the Whig party, to whose leaders
Campbell was personally known, and with most of whom
he was closely intimate. It was edited in America by
Washington Irving in 1 8 1 o, and was highly praised on
the other side — a fact which at least suggests that its
local scenery was not so false as Byron declared it to be.
The first edition was a quarto ; a second in 1 2 mo was
called for within the year. The quarto edition included
some of the better known short pieces, such as 'Ye
Mariners,' ' The Battie of the Baltic,' ' Lochiel,' ' Lord
Ullin's Daughter,' and ' Glenara,' the latter founded on
a wild and romantic story of which Joanna BaiUie
afterwards made use in her 'Family Legend.' The
second edition contained the once-familiar ' O'Connor's
Child,' a rather touching piece suggested by the flower
popularly known as ' Love Lies Bleeding.' Many years
after this — in 1836 — the Dublin people desired to give
Campbell a public dinner as the author of ' O'Connor's
ChUd ' and ' The Exile of Erin,' but CampbeU never
set foot on the Emerald Isle.

CHAPTER VII
LECTURES AND TRAVELS
Having got ' Gertrude ' off his hands, Campbell returned
to his literary carpentering. He was now in his thirty-
third year, and had produced the two long poems and
the short pieces upon which his fame, such as it is, rests.
Were it not for his lines on ' The Last Man,' it would
have been much better for his reputation had he never
again put pen to paper. It was a remark of Scott's
that he had broken out at once, like the Irish rebels, a
hundred thousand strong. But unfortunately he had
no sustaining power ; he could not keep up the attack.
His imaginative faculty, never robust, decayed much
earlier than that of any other poet who ever gave like
promise ; and we have the sorry spectacle of a man
still under forty living in the shadow of a reputation
made when he was little more than out of his teens.
One says it regretfully, but it is the sober truth that
Campbell became now a greater hack than ever. He
declared in the frankest possible manner that he did not
mean to think of poetry any more ; he meant to make
money, a desire which was very near his heart all along.
He had been working fourteen hours a day for some time,
but the weak flesh began to complain, and four hours
had to be cut off. In 1810 he lost his youngest chUd,
Alison, and overwhelmed himself with grief. Before
he had recovered from the shock his mother passed
away in Edinburgh. She had been suffering from
paralysis, and so far as we can learn Campbell had
nothing more touching to say of her death than to
99

loo FAMOUS SCOTS
express his 'sincere acquiescence' in the dispensation
of Providence.
One or two little incidents helped to revive his spirits
after the snapping of these sacred ties. He had been
presented to the Princess of Wales by Lady Charlotte
Campbell, who thoughtfully, as he teUs a correspondent
— but why thoughtfuUy ? — kept the Princess from mak
ing an ' irruption ' into his house. The Princess sum
moned him to Blackheath, where he had the felicity of
dancing a reel with her, and thus 'attained the summit
of human elevation.' An onlooker remarked upon this
performance that Campbell had ' the neat national trip,'
but we have no other evidence of his dancing accom
plishments. Campbell was delighted with himself; but
he soon discovered that his good luck in making a royal
acquaintance might prove embarrassing. He had un
thinkingly remarked to the Princess that he loved operas
to distraction. ' Then why don't you go to them ? ' she
inquired. Campbell made some excuse about the ex
pense, and next day a ticket for the season arrived.
' God help me ! ' he says, in recounting the incident,
' this is loving operas to distraction. I shall be obliged
to live in London a month to attend the opera-house —
all for telling one little fib.'
As a matter of fact, Campbell had now something
more serious to think about than attending the Opera.
He had been engaged, at his own suggestion, to give a
course of lectures on Poetry at the Royal Institution, the
fee to be one hundred guineas for the course. When
Scott heard of the undertaking he expressed the hope
that CampbeU would read with fire and feeUng, and not
attempt to correct his Scots accent. But CampbeU did
not agree with Scott on the latter point. He tells
AUson that he has taken great pains with his voice and
pronunciation, and has laboured hard to get rid of his
Caledonianisms. Sydney Smith, he says, patronised him
more than he liked about the lectures, and gave him

THOMAS CAMPBELL loi
what, in CampbeU's case, was clearly a wise hint against
joking. In truth he seems to have had more than
enough of advice from his friends, but he went his own
way, and he was amply justified by the result.
The first lecture, delivered on the 24th of AprU
1 81 2, proved a great success. According to a con
temporary account, the hall was crowded, and the
'eloquent illustrations' of the lecturer received the
warmest praise. Campbell says his own expectations
were more than realised, though he had been so far
from a state of composure that he playfully threatened
to divorce his wife if she attended ! At the close of
the lecture distinguished listeners pressed around him
with compliments. ' Byron, who has now come out so
splendidly, told me he heard Bland the poet say, " I
have had more portable ideas given me in the last
quarter of an hour than I ever imbibed in the same
portion of time." Archdeacon Nares fidgetted about
and said: "that's new; at least quite new to »z«."' And
so on. Campbell's friends were less critical than kind.
The modern reader of his lectures will not find any
thing so new as Nares found, nor anything so very
portable as Bland carried away. The lectures form a
sort of chronological, though necessarily imperfect,
sketch of the whole history of poetry, from that of the
Bible down to the songs of Burns. The scheme was
magnificent, but it was too vast for one man, especially
for a man of Campbell's flighty humour, and he broke
away from it before he had well begun. What he has
to say about Hebrew and Greek verse is of some value,
but generally speaking the thought and the criticism are
quite commonplace. Madame de Stael, it is true, told
CampbeU that, with the exception of Burke's writings
there was nothing in EngUsh so striking as these
lectures. But then it was Madame de Stael who
solemnly declared that she had read a certain part of
' The Pleasures of Hope ' twenty times, and always with

102 FAMOUS SCOTS
the pleasure of the first reading! She must have
known how weU praise agreed with the poet. A
second course of lectures was delivered at the same
institution in 1813, but of these it is not necessary to
say more than that, in the conventional language of the
day, they were ' applauded to the echo.'
Towards the close of 1813 CampbeU's health got
' sadly crazy ' again, and he went to Brighton for sea
bathing. There he soon found his lost appetite : the
fish, he wrote, was delicious, and the Ubrary quite a
pleasant lounge with the added luxury of music. He
caUed upon Disraeli, 'a good modest man,' and was
invited to dine with him. He was also introduced to
the venerable Herschel and his son, the one 'a great,
simple, good old man,' the other ' a prodigy in science
and fond of poetry, but very unassuming.' The
astronomer seemed to him Uke 'a supernatural intelU-
gence,' and when he parted with him he felt ' elevated
and overcome.' In such lofty language does CampbeU
intimate his very simple pleasures and experiences.
But the Brighton hoUday was only the prelude to one
much longer and much more interesting. During the
short-lived peace of 1802 CampbeU had often expressed
a wish to visit the scenes of the Revolution and above
all the Louvre ; and now that the abdication of Buona
parte, the capture of Paris, and the presence of the
aUied armies had drawn thousands of EngUsh subjects
to the French capital, he resolved to carry out the long-
cherished plan. On the 26th of August 1 8 1 4, he was
writing from Dieppe, where one of the rabble called
after him : ' Va-t'-en Anglais ! vous cherchez nous
faire perir de faim.' On the way to Paris he halted for
two days at Rouen, where he found his brother Daniel
— ' poor as ever ' — with whom he had parted at Ham
burg in 1 800. Landing in Paris, he met Mrs Siddons,
and in her company visited the Louvre and the Elysian
Fields, which he held to be as contemptible in com-

THOMAS CAMPBELL 103
parison to Hyde Park and the Green Park as the French
public squares and buildings are superior to those of
London. At the Louvre, where he spent four hours daily, he
grandiloquently says he was struck dumb with emotion,
his heart palpitated, and his eyes fiUed with tears at the
sight of that 'immortal youth,' the Belvidere Apollo.
Next to the Louvre in interest, he mentions the Jardin
des Plantes, 'a sight worth travelling to see.' The
Pantheon he describes as ' a magnificent place,' adding
that the vaults of Voltaire and Rousseau are the only
cleanly things he has seen in Paris ; so neat and tidy
that they remind him rather of a comfortable EngUsh
pantry than of anything of an awe-inspiring nature.
Versailles is 'very splendid indeed,' but the palace is
' not large enough for the basis, and the trees are
clipped with horrible formality.' He is not lost in
admiration of the French women. 'There are two
sorts of them — the aquiline, or rather nut-cracker faces,
and the broad faces; both are ugly.' On the other
hand, he finds that the handsomest Englishmen are
inferior to the really handsome Frenchmen. The
Englishman always looks very John Bullish ; and
nothing that the French say flatters him so much as
when they declare that they would not take him for
un Anglois. The Opera he describes as ' a set of silly
things, but with some exquisite music'; the French
acting in tragedy he does not reUsh, but their comic
acting is perfection. Of notable people whom he met he
mentions the elder Schlegel, Humboldt, Cuvier, Denon
the Egyptian traveller — ' a very pleasing person ' — and
the Duke of WeUington. To the latter he was introduced
merely as ' Mr Campbell,' and the Duke afterwards told
Madame de Stael that he ' thought it was one of the
thousands of that name from the same country ; he did
not know it was the Thomas.' Schlegel he describes as
a very uncommon man, learned and ingenious, but a

104 FAMOUS SCOTS
visionary and a mystic. He and Humboldt, 'after
much entreaty,' made him repeat 'Lochiel.' When
Schlegel came to England, he was generally Campbell's
guest, and the two, notwithstanding that their characters
and tastes were so dissimilar, appear to have entertained
a sincere regard for each other.
After a two months' stay in Paris, CampbeU returned
to England, with, as Beattie pompously phrases it, a rich
and varied fund of materials for reflection. He found
his work much in arrear, and had just begun to make
some headway with it when the unlooked-for intelUgence
reached him that by the death of his Highland cousin,
MacArthur Stewart of Ascog, he had faUen heir to a
legacy of nearly ;^5ooo. The wiU described him as
'author of "The Pleasures of Hope"'; but it was not
for the honours of authorship that he was rewarded.
'Littie Tommy, the poet,' said the testator, 'ought to
have a legacy because he was so kind as to give his
mother sixty pounds yearly out of his income.'
Stewart died at the end of March 1815, and by the
middle of AprU CampbeU was in Edinburgh— whither
he had gone to look after his interests — feeling 'as
blythe as if the devil were dead.' After seeing his old
friends in the capital, he went to Kinniel on a visit to
Dugald Stewart, and then, taking the Canal boat from
Falkirk, set out for Glasgow, where he made a round of
his relations. He spent a very happy time altogether,
and when he returned to Sydenham, it was, as he
thought, to look out on a future of prosperity and com
parative ease. A few days after his arrival, Waterioo
decided the fate of Europe, and for a time he did
nothing but speak and write of the prodigies of British
valour performed on that field. Some tributary stanzas
written to the tune of 'The British Grenadiers' show
that while he did not fancy being taken for an English
man in Paris, he was very proud to appear as a John
BuU jingo at home.

THOMAS CAMPBELL 105
Under his improved prospects he seems to have had
some difficulty in settling down to his old literary tasks.
We hear of him working again at the eternal 'Specimens,'
but otherwise his pen seems to have lain idle. The
American heir was coming over in August to take
possession of the Ascog estates; and Campbell hoped
to reap some additional pecuniary advantages for himself
and his sisters. The heir was a cousin of the poet and
a brother of the Attorney-General for Virginia. Beattie
suggests that if Campbell's elder brother had been aware
of the law which rendered aliens to the Crown of Great
Britain incapable of inheriting entailed property, and
had made up his title as the nearest heir, he might
have been proprietor of the old estates, which were
afterwards sold for _;£'78,ooo. But no such luck was
to befall the Campbell family. The heir came into
possession, and neither Campbell nor his sisters benefited
further by his stroke of fortune. Campbell reported that
he was an amiable gentleman, but, so far as he could
see, was not inclined to be generous. Very likely he
considered that Campbell had been well provided for
already. At any rate the poet had to content himself,
as he might well do, with his pension and his legacy and
continue his literary cobbling as before.
His interests now became somewhat more varied.
His surviving son had been sent to school, but having
had to be removed on account of his health, Campbell
set to teach the boy himself. He got up at six every
morning and by seven was hammering Greek and
Latin into the youth's head. It was all nonsense,
he declared, but in his son's interests he dared not
act up to his theory, which was to leave Greek and
Latin, and instruct him in 'other things.' In
Campbell's view it was a vestige of barbarism that
' learning ' only means, in its common acceptation, a
knowledge of the dead languages and mathematics.
Later on he speaks of his intention to drill the lad in

io6 FAMOUS SCOTS
•epistolary habits,' but this intention he was, alas!
never able to realise.
While the Greek and Latin lessons were going on,
some of Campbell's friends were busy with plans for his
benefit. Scott, avowedly anxious to have his personal
society, proposed that he should allow himself to be
engineered — it was a delicate matter of supplanting an
inefficient professor — into the Rhetoric Chair in Edin
burgh University. The post was a tempting one, worth
from ;^4oo to ;^5oo a year ; but nothing is left to show
how Campbell took the suggestion. In 1834 he was
again urged to appear as a candidate for an Edinburgh
professorship, but declined because he expected to live
only ten years longer, and it would take him half that
time to prepare his lectures. It is not unlikely that he
would have regarded the present proposal with favour,
but his thoughts were immediately turned in a different
direction by the disinterested action of another friend.
The Royal Institution had just been opened in Liver
pool, and Roscoe was anxious that CampbeU should
give a dozen lectures there. Some preUminary hitch
occurred about the fee, but this was got over, and
Campbell ultimately drew no less a sum than ^^340
from the course. Considering that the lectures were
practicaUy those already delivered at the Royal Insti
tution of London, he might compliment himself on
being remarkably well paid ; yet it is said that when he
was afterwards pressed to deliver a second course at
Liverpool, presumably on the same terms, he declined.
Campbell made his appearance in Liverpool at the
end of October 1818. The lecture-room, wrote one of
the listeners some thirty years later, was ' crowded by
the ilite of the neighbourhood.' The lecturer's prose
' was declared to be more poetic than his poetry ; his
glowing imagination gave a double charm to those
passages from the poets which he cited as illustrations.
The effect and animation of his eye, his figure, his

THOMAS CAMPBELL 107
voice, in reciting these passages are still vividly remem
bered.' From Liverpool he went on to Birmingham,
where he received _;^ioo for repeating the lectures there.
At Birmingham 'it pleased fate that Thomas should
take the measles,' and Campbell himself had to get
blisters applied to his chest to relieve his breathing.
Under the circumstances he could not be expected to
visit much ; but he was introduced to Miss Edgeworth,
who captivated him by the unassuming simplicity of her
manner, and he ' met L — d [Lloyd], the quondam
partner of L — b [Lamb] in poetry — an innocent
creature, but imagines everybody dead.' He called
upon Gregory Watt's father — the James Watt — with
whom, though he was then eighty-three, he says he
spent one of the most amusing days he ever had with
a man of science and a stranger to his own pursuits.
Suggestions had reached him from Glasgow and
Edinburgh that he should deliver his lectures in these
towns, but although, with his usual facility, he had
come to think that lecturing was likely to be his metier,
at present he literally had not a voice to exert without
imminent hazard. And there was another danger. ' I
know well,' he says, ' what would happen from the
hospitality of Glasgow or Edinburgh. ... I should
enjoy the hospitality to the prejudice of my health.
For though I now abstain habitually from even the
ordinary indulgence in eating and taking wine, yet the
excitement of speaking always hurts me.' And so,
partly to avoid the conviviality which Dickens and
Thackeray enjoyed later as lecturers in Edinburgh and
Glasgow, Campbell declined the invitations from the
north, and went home to Sydenham.
While he was absent on this literary tour, the long-
delayed ' Specimens of the British Poets ' — Miss Mit-
ford makes very merry over the time spent on the work
— had at length been pubUshed in seven octavo volumes.
It proved only a moderate success. The plan was well

io8 FAMOUS SCOTS
conceived, but Campbell committed the initial mistake
of deciding to print, not the best specimens of his
authors, but only such pieces mainly as had not been
printed by EUis and by Headley. Of Sir Philip Sidney,
for example, he says : ' Mr EUis has exhausted the best
specimens of his poetry; I have only offered a few
short ones.' The absurdity of this procedure need not be
pointed out. People do not go to a book of specimens
for examples of a writer in his second-best manner.
They want the cream of a poet, not, as Campbell has
too often given them, the skimmed milk of his genius.
But the work was faulty on other grounds. Its
biographical and bibliographical information was noto
riously incorrect and imperfect. Campbell had no taste
for the drudgery of antiquarian research : not in his Une,
he boldly announced, was the labour of trying to discover
the number of Milton's house in Bunhill Fields. His
facts as a natural consequence were never to be de
pended upon. In the 'Specimens' the inaccuracies
are more than usually abundant, and would, even if
the work were otherwise satisfactory, entirely discount
its value. ' Read Campbell's Poets,' said Byron in his
Journal; 'marked the errors of Tom for correction.'
Again : 'Came home — read. Corrected Tom Campbell's
slips of the pen.' Some of Tom's errors were, no doubt,
mere slips ; but more were clearly attributable to ignor
ance and laziness. If, for example, he had been at the
trouble to take his Shakespeare from the shelf he would
never have been guUty of such a misquotation as the
following ; To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet.
The work absolutely bristles with errors of this kind.
Of the introductory essay and the prefatory notices of the
various writers it is possible to speak somewhat more
favourably. The essay, though written in an affected

THOMAS CAMPBELL 109
style, is still worth reading, especially the portions
dealing with Milton and Pope. The lives, again, are
marked by a fair appreciation of the powers of the
respective poets, from the point of view of the old
school; and although there is nothing subtle in the
criticisms, there is welcome evidence of that sympathetic
spirit which loves poetry for its own sake. This is the
most that can be said for a work which Lockhart un
accountably eulogised as ' not unworthy to be handed
down with the classical verse of its author.' No second
edition of it was called for before 1841, when Campbell
had some difference with Murray about its revision.
Murray's original agreement with Campbell had been for
_;^5oo, but when the work was completed he doubled
that sum and added books to the value of ;^2oo which
Campbell had borrowed. This munificent generosity
Campbell rewarded by refusing to correct his own errors,
though he was offered a handsome sum to do so ; and
the result was that he had to submit to the ' Specimens '
being silently revised by another hand. The incident,
which is not a little damaging to Campbell's character,
proves again that Campbell was treated by the book
sellers far more liberally than he deserved.
Having disposed of the 'Specimens,' he was free to
look about for other work. At the beginning of 1820
he tells a friend that he has a new poem on the anvil,
with several small ones lying by, and only waits until he
has enough for a volume to publish them. He is to
lecture again at the Royal Institution in the Spring, and
as both his feUow-lecturers have been knighted, he thinks
it not unlikely that he will be knighted too. On the
whole he was in excellent spirits ; and the necessity for
unremitting toil having been removed, he began to
arrange for a holiday. This time he decided to revisit
Germany, and having let his house furnished for a year,
and concluded his lecture course, he embarked with his
family for Holland in the end of May.

no FAMOUS SCOTS
Landing at Rotterdam, with the view of which from
the Maas he was 'much captivated,' he proceeded by
the Hague and Leyden to Haarlem, where he was
'transported' with the famous organ in the Cathedral.
From Amsterdam he wrote to say that the faces of the
people were as unromantic as the face of their country,
but he was pleased to see their houses ' so painted and
cleaned' that poverty could have no possible terrors
for them. At Bonn he renewed his acquaintance with
Schlegel, who on this occasion bored him sadly.
Schlegel, it seems, was ludicrously fond of showing off
his EngUsh. He thought he understood EngUsh poUtics,
too, and pestered Campbell with his crude speculations
about England's impending bankruptcy and the misery
of her lower orders. ' I had no notion,' says Campbell,
' that a great man could ever grow so wearisome.'
Leaving his son, now in his sixteenth year, with Pro
fessor Kapp, who was to board and instruct him for ,£^
a month, he went to Frankfort, visiting on the way the
Rolandseck, where he wrote his ' Roland the Brave.'
At Frankfort he had daUy lessons in German from a
Carthusian monk, who was rather surprised at his
strange plan of overcoming the difficulties of the
language by dint of Greek. At Ratisbon he revived
many memories. Of the twelve monks whom he had
known at the Scots College in 1800, only two were now
alive ; but their successors were ' very liberal of their
beer, and it is by no means contemptible.' When he
got to Vienna — where he read Hebrew with a Jewish
poet named Cohen — he found that his fame had pre
ceded him. His arrival was publicly announced, transla
tions of ' Ye Mariners' and the Kirnan ' Lines' appeared
in one of the leading journals, and invitations showered
in upon him from the best people in the capital. He
met a large number of the Polish nobiUty, who crowded
about him with affectionate zeal. He forgot all his
sorrows listening to the organ in St Stephen's. The

THOMAS CAMPBELL ni
theatres he found tiresome. The actors indeed were
good, but what could they make of such a language?
From Vienna he returned to Bonn through Bavaria.
He was now impatient to be home ; and, having trans
ferred his son to the care of Dr Meyer, he bade fare
well to his friends, and was in London by the end of
November. Before leaving for the Continent he had entered into
an agreement with Colburn for editing the New Monthly
Magazine for three years, from January 182 1. He was
to have ;£5oo per annum, and was to furnish annually
six contributions in prose and six in verse. Campbell
had not shown any special fitness for the duties of an
editor, but he knew the value of his own name, which,
indeed, was probably the reason of Colburn's applying
to him. He had, as Patmore says, the most extensive
and the most unquestioned reputation of the writers of
the day, and the proprietor's judgment was soon proved
by the unprecedented popularity of the magazine.
Campbell certainly showed some zeal at the start. He
got together a very efficient staff of contributors, with
Mr Cyrus Redding as his sub-editor. Moreover, in
order to be near the office he decided to exchange his
Sydenham house for one in town, and he took private
lodgings in Margaret Street until a permanent residence
could be found. There, shutting himself up from out
side society, he ' received and consulted with his friends,
cultivated acquaintance with literary men of all parties,
answered correspondents, pretended to read contribu
tions, wrote new and revised old papers, and, in short,
identified his own reputation and interests with those of
the magazine.' The New Monthly, for the time being,
became the record of his literary life.
With all this show of work, Campbell, by every
account, proved a very unsatisfactory editor, though no
more unsatisfactory than Bulwer Lytton and Theodore
Hook who succeeded him. Allowing for the probable

112 FAMOUS SCOTS
exaggeration of his own importance as sub-editor, there
is enough in Redding's reminiscences to show that he
found his position difficult enough. Campbell had so
little acquaintance with periodical Uterature that he
declares he never saw a number of the New Monthly
until Colburn put one into his hands ! He gave no
attention to the topics of the day, and his knowledge
of current Uterature was so Umited that contributors
often foisted on him articles which they had furtively
abstracted from contemporary writers. Of method he
had none. His papers lay about in hopeless confusion,
and if he wanted to get rid of them for the time, he
would jumble them into a heap, or cram them into a
drawer. Articles sent by contributors would be placed
over his books on the shelves, slip down behind and lie
forgotten. He always shied at the perusal of manu
scripts, and he kept the printer continually waiting for
' copy.' Talfourd says he would balance contending
epithets for a fortnight, and stop the press for a week to
determine the value of a comma. In short, he was the
very worst imaginable kind of editor, especially from the
contributor's point of view. Nevertheless, he soon
drew a strong brigade of writers around him — among
them HazUtt, Talfourd, Horace Smith, and Henry
Roscoe — and placing implicit confidence in their work,
he made his editorship a snug sinecure. ' Tom Camp
bell,' said Scott, ' had much in his power. A man at
the head of a magazine may do much for young men,
but Campbell did nothing, more from indolence, I
fancy, than disincUnation or a bad heart.' That was
the true word ; Campbell, to use the expressive term of
his countrymen, simply could not be ' fashed.'
WhUe things were proceeding thus in the editorial
sanctum a painful crisis was approaching in Campbell's
domestic affairs. He had not long returned from the
Continent when reports of his son began to give him
uneasiness. Thomas, he says, talks of going to sea.

THOMAS CAMPBELL 113
which indicates that he is not disposed to do much
good on land. Early in the spring of 182 1 the youth
turned up in London. He had been transferred from
Bonn to Amiens, but disliking the place and the people,
he had run away from his instructor. Campbell was
greatly affected by his unexpected arrival, but Tony
M'Cann, who was in the house, proposed to celebrate
the event by kiUing the fatted calf ! In the autumn the
boy was sent to a school at Poplar, at a cost to his
father of ,^^120 per annum, but he had not been many
weeks there when symptoms, the meaning of which had
hitherto been mistaken, became so pronounced that he
had to be removed to an asylum. It is a distressing
subject, and there is no need to go into details. Young
Campbell was ultimately placed under the care of Dr
Matthew Allen at High Beech, Essex. There he
chiefly remained until three months after his father's
death in 1 844, when he was liberated by the verdict of
a jury declaring him to be of sound mind. The taint
of insanity clearly came from the mother's side. One
of her sisters had been deranged for many years before
her death ; and indeed it has been hinted that Mrs
Campbell herself suffered from some ' mental alienation '
during her last days. A writer in Hogg's Weekly In
structor for April 12, 1845, expressly says so. He
seems to have known Campbell, but his statement, so
far as can be ascertained, is uncorroborated.
In 1822 Campbell removed to a small house of his
own at 10 West Seymour Street — a 'beautiful creation,'
with ' the most amiable curtains, the sweetest of carpets,
the most accomplished chairs, and a highly interesting
set of tongs and fenders.' Here he wrote one of his
best things and one of his worst. 'The Last Man'
was pubUshed in the New Monthly in 1823. GUfiUan
calls it the most Christian of all CampbeU's strains. It
is, in fact, one of the most striking of his shorter pro
ductions. The same idea was used by Byron in his
H

114 FAMOUS SCOTS
' Darkness,' and this led to some controversy as to
which of the two poets had been guilty of stealing from
the other. Campbell maintained that he had many
years before mentioned to Byron his intention of writing
the poem, and there is no reason to doubt his word.
Of course the idea of one man, the last of his race,
remaining when all else has been destroyed, is quite an
obvious one ; and in any case Campbell treated it in a
manner altogether different from Byron, of whose daring
misanthropy he was completely innocent.
It has been said that at West Seymour Street Camp
bell also wrote one of his worst poems. This was his
' Theodric,' not 'Theodoric,' as it is constantly mis
spelled. He seems to have been engaged on it early
in 1823 ; but he confesses that so far from being in a
poetic mood he is barely competent for the dull duty
of editorship. It is well to remember this in judging
the poem. He had begun it at a time when horrible
dreams of his son being tortured by asylum attendants
disturbed his rest ; he had finished it with the ob
streperous youth temporarily at home — outrageous,
dogged, and disagreeable, ' excessively anxious to con
vince us how very cordially he hates both his mother
and me.' He knew that ' Theodric ' had faults, but he
regarded these as so little detrimental that he believed
when it recovered from the first buzz of criticism it
would attain a steady popularity. It appeared in
November 1824, but the popularity which Campbell
anticipated never came to it. 'I am very glad,' he
says, ' that Jeffrey is going to review me, for I think he
has the stuff in him to understand " Theodric." ' But
neither Jeffrey nor anybody else understood ' Theodric ' ;
certainly nobody appreciated it. The wits at Holland
House disowned it ; the Quarterly called it ' an un
worthy publication ' ; and friend joined foe in the
chorus of condemnation. An anonymous punster
referred to it as the ' odd trick ' of the season ; and its

THOMAS CAMPBELL 115
excessively overdone alUterations (such as ' Heights
browsed by the bounding bouquetin ') were made the
subject of scornful hUarity. The poem, in truth, was a
sad failure, and the universal censure with which it met
was thoroughly deserved. Campbell had 'attempted
to imitate the natural simplicity and homely familiarity
of the style of Crabbe and Wordsworth,' and had only
succeeded in becoming elaborately tame and feeble.
Just before the publication of 'Theodric,' he had
paid a short visit to Cheltenham for his health's sake ;
now he went to Lord Spencer's at Althorp, 'a most
beautiful Castle of Indolence,' tempted by the hope of
seeing books which he could not see elsewhere. He
reaUy wanted to study, yet he capriciously complained
that after breakfast the company, including his Lordship,
went off to shoot and left him alone ! In short, he was
no sooner at Althorp than he wished himself home again.
When he returned to town, in January 1825, it was to
take part in what he afterwards called the only import
ant event in his career. This was the founding of the
London University, the idea of which he appears to
have conceived during his recent intercourse with the
Professors of Bonn. The scheme was discussed at
various private and public conferences during the spring
and summer, and the financial basis of the undertaking
being apparently assured, Campbell proceeded to Berlin
in September to ascertain how far the University there
might serve as a model for London. He spent a week
in the Prussian capital, which he compares unfavourably
with London in everything but cookery, and came away
with ' every piece of information respecting the Univer
sity,' and every book he wished for. At Hamburg he
was given a public dinner by eighty English residents,
and was driven about the town by his old protegk, the
'Exile of Erin.' Back in London, he appeared at a
meeting in support of the Western Literary and Scientific
Institution, and in an eloquent speech declared that if

II 6 FAMOUS SCOTS
his plan of a Metropolitan University succeeded he
would ask for no other epitaph on his grave than to be
celebrated as one of its originators. The plan, fortunately,
did succeed, and although Lord Brougham, to serve his
own political ambitions, tried to rob him of the honour,
there cannot be a doubt that it rightly belongs to Camp
beU. Moreover, King's College would never have
existed but for the London University, so that Campbell,
as he used to remark, did a double good.
MeanwhUe, at the beginning of 1826, he was inter
esting himself in certain domestic affairs. He was
having a spacious study constructed, and he proposed
to treat himself to a new carpet and some elegant leather
chairs. Every volume was to be removed from the
drawing-room ; and henceforth he was to smoke in a
garret, not in his study. His fancy also rioted by anti
cipation in ' a geranium-coloured paper with gold leaves
to harmonise with the glory of my gUded and red-bound
books.' But there his purse and his vanity were at
loggerheads. While the masons were hammering in
the house, the Glasgow students had decided to ask
Campbell to allow himself to be put forward as their
Lord Rector. At first he complied, but as the time
approached he began to waver in his decision. He was
not well, his son's malady distressed him, and his
pecuniary affairs — thanks in a great measure to his
own reckless extravagance — ^were again in deep water.
Writing on November 6 (1826) he says : ' I got in bills
on Saturday morning for the making up of my new
house, treble the amount expected ; and also confirma
tion of an acqudntance being bankrupt, for whom I had
advanced the deposits on three shares in the London
University. I could not now accept the Rectorship if
it were at my option. If I traveUed it must be on
borrowed money. Friends I have in plenty who would
lend, but I fear debt as I do the bitterness of death.'
This seemed decisive enough, and yet nine days later

THOMAS CAMPBELL 117
the Principal of Glasgow University was announcing to
him that he had been elected Lord Rector by the
unanimous vote of the four 'nations.'
The rival candidates were Mr Canning and Sir
Thomas Brisbane, and the contest had proved more
than usually exciting, from the fact that all the pro
fessors except Millar and Jardine were opposed to
Campbell on the not very solid ground of 'political
distrust.' Some enemy even sought to damage his
cause by circulating a report that his mother had been
' a washerwoman in the Goosedubs of Glasgow.' Wilson,
referring in the ' Noctes Ambrosianae ' to this incident,
remarked that in England such baseness would be held
incredible ; but Wilson forgot that the fight was prac
ticaUy a poUtical one, and in poUtics any stick is, or
was, good enough to beat a dog with. Campbell's
triumph was, however, all the greater that it was achieved
under such conditions ; and we can easily imagine the
glow of pride with which he went down to Glasgow in
the succeeding April (1827).
He landed on the 9th of the month, after a journey
which he had cause to remember from the circumstance
that Matilda brought ' seventy parcels of baggage,' and
on the 1 2 th he delivered his inaugural address in the
old College Hall. There is abundant evidence of his
high spirits in an incident recorded by Allan Cunning
ham. Snow lay on the ground at the time, and when
Campbell reached the College Green he found the
students pelting each other. 'The poet ran into the
ranks, threw several snowballs with unerring aim, then,
summoning the scholars around him in the Hall, de
livered a speech replete with phUosophy and eloquence.'
The snowballing was not very dignified perhaps, but it
was strictly in character, and must have added im
mensely to Campbell's popularity with the 'darling
boys ' of his Alma Mater. The Rectorial address was
received with intense enthusiasm. One listener describes

1x8 FAMOUS SCOTS
it as elegant and highly poetical, and says that it was
delivered with great ease and dignity. Another,
a student, writes : ' To say we applauded is to say
nothing. We evinced every symptom of respect and
admiration, from the loftiest tribute, even our tears —
drawn forth by his eloquent recollections of olden times
— down to escorting him with boisterous noise along
the public streets.'
Campbell remained in Glasgow until the ist of May,
banqueting with the Professors and the Senatus (who,
by the way, created him an LL.D., a title which he
never used), hearing explanations by the Faculty, and
coaching himself up in University ordinances and finance.
For Campbell filled the Rectorial office in no sinecure
fashion. Perhaps, as Redding says, he made more of the
post than it was worth, out of a little harmless vanity
and somewhat of local attachment. But at any rate he
did not spare himself. He got his inaugural address
printed, and sent every student a copy of it, inscribed
with his autograph. He wrote a series of Letters on
the Epochs of Greek and Roman Literature, which,
after running through the New Monthly, he presented
to the students in volume form. He investigated the
rights of the students too, and secured them many ad
vantages of which they had been unjustly deprived.
All these duties he performed in person, thus involving
several special journeys to Glasgow; so that, on the
whole, it may safely be said that he conducted himself
like a model Lord Rector.
The result was seen in his re-election, not only for a
second but for a third term, which was almost unprece
dented, and indeed was said to be contrary to the
statutes and usage of the University. His popularity
with the students aU through was very great. They
founded a Campbell Club in his honour; commissioned
a full-length portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence; and
presented him with a silver punch-bowl, which figures

THOMAS CAMPBELL 119
in his will as one of his 'jewels.' When he was elected
for the third time they went wild with delight. Camp
bell was staying with his cousin, Mr Gray, in Great
Clyde Street, a few paces from the river. There the
students gathered to the number of fourteen hundred,
and a speech being called for, Campbell appeared at the
window. ' Students,' he said, ' sooner shall that river'
— pointing to the Clyde — ' cease to flow into the sea,
than I, while I live, will forget the honour this day
done to me.' There is but one step from the sublime
to the ridiculous. At this stage an old washerwoman
passing on the outskirts of the crowd was arrested by
the sight of what she conceived to be a lunatic speak
ing from a window. ' Puir man ! ' she remarked to a
student, ' can his freends no tak' him in ? ' A royal
time it must have been for the poet in Glasgow alto
gether. He was naturally much attached to the city,
and although he complains of feeling melancholy while
walking about his old haunts, yet it was a melancholy
not without alleviations. The Rectorship had been ' a
sunburst of popular favour,' the ' crowning honour ' of
his life ; and as for Glasgow itself, why it flowed with
' syllogisms and ale.'
The third year of Campbell's Rectorship expired in
the autumn of 1829, but meanwhile, in May 1828, he
had lost his wife. Mrs Campbell had been aUing for
some time, and his anxiety on her account darkens all
the correspondence of the period. For several months
he acted both as housekeeper and sick-nurse, and seldom
crossed his door except to get something for the invalid.
Mrs Campbell's death was an irreparable loss to him.
She had been an affectionate, even a childishly adoring
wife (she used to take visitors upstairs on tiptoe to show
the poet ' in a moment of inspiration ' !) and it does not
surprise us to read of the bereaved husband relieving
his feelings with tears at the sight of a trinket or a knot
of ribbon that belonged to her. Mrs CampbeU had

I20 FAMOUS SCOTS
tributes from many quarters. Redding said that no
praise could be too high for her good management and
her general conduct in domestic life. Mrs Grant of
Laggan, writing of Campbell's pecuniary embarrassments,
remarked that ' his good, gentle, patient Uttle wife was
so frugal, so sweet-tempered, that she might have dis
armed poverty of half its evils.' It was maUciously
hinted in Scotland that she lived unhappily with her
husband, but upon that point we may safely accept the
testimony of Redding. ' I never,' he says, ' found Mrs
Campbell out of temper. I never saw a remote symptom
of disagreement, though I entered the poet's house for
years at all times, without ceremony. I beUeve the tale
to be wholly a fiction.'
Mrs Campbell's death sent the poet out into the
world and into company very different from that with
which he had been used to associate. Redding makes
touching reference to the change at his fireside. The
recollection of Mrs Campbell's uniform cheerfulness
and hospitality, the sight of her tea-table without her
presence, her vacant chair, that inexpressible lack of
something which long custom had made Uke second
nature — these things gave to Campbell's home a melan
choly colouring which his old friends never cared to
contemplate. ' Man,' says Lytton, ' may have a splendid
palace, a comfortable lodging, nay, even a pleasant
house, but man has no home where the home has no
mistress.' Henceforward Campbell had practically no
home. He moved about from house to house, always
seeking the comfort which he never found, his books
and his papers and his general belongings getting ever
into a greater state of confusion for want of the hand that
had so quietly and skilfully ordered his domestic affairs.
The literary product of these years of bereavement
and the Glasgow Rectorship was naturally very slight
Indeed the letters to the students, already mentioned,
formed almost the only writings of any importance. In

THOMAS CAMPBELL 121
concert with the elder students he projected a Classical
Encyclopaedia, but for some unexplained reason the
project was allowed to drop. The victory of Navarino
in October 1827 produced some stanzas which he not
inaptly called 'a rumble-tumble concern,' and the ' Lines
to JuUa M  ,' as well as the short lyric, ' When Love
canie first to Earth,' seem to have been written in 1829.
It was, however, an essentially barren period, unmarked
by a single piece above the average of the third-rate
writer.

CHAPTER VIII
CLOSING YEARS
Some time just before the expiration of his Rectorship
at Glasgow in 1829, Campbell changed his residence
from Seymour Street to Middle Scotiand Yard, where
he furnished on such a grand scale that he had to mort
gage a prospective edition of his poems to pay the biU.
In connection with this change there were hints of a
second marriage — hints which continued to be whispered
about for many a day, to CampbeU's evident annoyance.
He declared that there was no foundation for the report,
that it was ' the baseless fabric of a vision ' ; yet we are
assured by Beattie that he took his new house at the
suggestion of 'an amiable and accomplished friend
deeply interested in his welfare, and destined, as he
fondly imagined, to restore him to the happiness of
married life.' Who the amiable lady was we are not
told; nor is anything said as to why the engagement
fell through. The presumption is that CampbeU changed
his mind, and did not want to have the matter dis
cussed. At this time a suitable marriage would certainly have
been no act of madness, for Campbell was clearly feel
ing himself more than usually lonesome. Indeed, it
was with the avowed object of mitigating his forlorn
condition that he established the Literary Union, a
social club over which he presided till he finally left
London in 1843. The burden of work and removal
had again thrown him into a wretched state of health,
and in September (1829) he writes to say that he is

THOMAS CAMPBELL 123
doing next to nothing apart from the New Monthly,
Protracted study exhausts him, and he dare not take
wine, which is the only reviving stimulus left. Starva
tion alone alleviates his distress : a hearty meal means
an agony of suffering; therefore he stints himself at
table, and loses flesh daily.
So the beginning of 1830 found him. His friend
Sir Thomas Lawrence had just died, and although he
was profoundly ignorant of the technique of art, and
had even a limited appreciation of pictures and painting,
he boldly undertook to write the artist's Ufe. He set
to the work in a comically serious fashion. He had a
printed notice sent to his friends and fastened to the
door of his study, intimating his desire to be left un
disturbed till the book was finished. These notices —
for Campbell issued them regularly — ^were the subject
of much merriment among his acquaintances. It was
an announcement of the kind that drew from Hook the
jest about Campbell having been safely delivered of a
couplet. In the present case the ruse apparently did
not answer, for in a week or two he fled to the country.
He seems to have spent a good deal of time over the
Life, but nothing ever came of his labours. Colburn
insisted on having the book in a few months, and Camp
bell, declaring that he could 'get no materials,' petu
lantly threw it aside.
This was in December 1830. By that time CampbeU
had severed his connection with the New Monthly.
Colburn had parted with Redding in October, and the
editor's difficulties were in consequence greatly increased.
He went out of town, and in his absence an attack on
his old friend, Dr Glennie of Dulwich, was inadvertently
passed by Redding's successor, Mr S. C. Hall. Camp
bell does not explicitly say that this incident was the
cause of his resignation, but as he mentions interminable
scrapes and threatened law-suits, we may safely assume
that it was. At any rate he said good-bye to Colburn

124 FAMOUS SCOTS
in no amiable mood. Colburn had a bill of ;^7oo
against him, partly for books and partly for the expense
of the current unsold edition of his poems. How was
he to discharge such a debt? The difficulty was
temporarily met by an agreement with Cochrane, the
publisher, whereby the latter was to pay the ;£'7oo in
return for Campbell's undertaking the editorship of a
new venture, to be called The Metropolitan Magazine,
and for two hundred unsold copies of his poems in
Colburn's hands. Unluckily, Cochrane could not make
up the ;^7oo, and Campbell, in order to satisfy Col
burn, had to stake the rent of his house and sell off his
poems at such price as they would bring. At the close
of 1830 he went into lodgings, and instead of settUng
down, as he had hoped, to enjoy a kind of mUd otium
cum dignitate, he had perforce to resume his seat on the
thorny cushion of the editorial chair. When he left the
New Monthly, Redding asked him, 'What about the
reduced finances ? ' ' Devil take the finances,' said he ;
' it is something to be free if a man has but a shirt and
a carpet bag.' His soreness of heart at having to seU
his liberty again may thus be imagined.
Campbell's connection with the Metropolitan Maga
zine proved anything but agreeable. True, things went
smoothly enough for a time. In the autumn he felt
himself ten inches taller because he had got a third
share in the property. The share cost him ;^5oo, and
he had to borrow the money from Rogers, for whose
security — though Rogers generously decUned any
security — he insured his Ufe and pledged his Ubrary
and house furniture. But the concern turned out to
be a bubble, and Campbell suffered agonies of suspense
about his money. He got it back in the long run, and
it was returned to Rogers. But this was only the
beginning of his troubles. At the request of Captain
Chamier, one of the proprietors, he continued in the
editorship, but the magazine passed through many

THOMAS CAMPBELL 125
vicissitudes. When it came into the hands of his old
friend Captain Marryatt, Campbell wanted to cut con
nection with it entirely, and was prevailed upon to
remain only by Marryatt promising to relieve him of
the correspondence. Shortly after this, Marryatt offered
the editorship to Moore who, however, declined to
supplant Campbell, and so joined the staff merely as a
contributor. Campbell presently reported that ' we go
on in very good heart.' But these conditions did not
last. Campbell found that he could not work comfort
ably under Marryatt — who was just about to give the
magazine a swing with his 'Peter Simple' — and he
threw up the editorship, which in point of fact he had
held only in name. He seems to have left everything
to his sub-editor. He seldom examined a manuscript
unless it came from one of his friends ; nor did he give
by his contributions — nine short pieces of verse — any
thing like value for the money he received. His editor
ship, in short, was purely ornamental.
But it is necessary to retrace our steps. Just after
taking on the Metropolitan in 1831, Campbell fixed
upon a quiet residence at St Leonard's which he now
used as an occasional retreat from the bustle of London.
We hear of him strolling with complacent pride on the
beach while the band played 'The Campbells are
Comin' ' and ' Ye Mariners of England.' He tells his
sister that refined female society had become of great con
sequence to him, and that he found it concentrated here.
He had no pressing engagements, and accordingly had
written more verses than he had done for many years
within the same time. His ' Lines on the View from
St Leonards,' published first in the Metropolitan, were
well-known, though they are now forgotten. A visit
to one of the paper mills at Maidstone in July 1831
was made to inquire about the price of paper for an
edition of ' The Pleasures of Hope ' which Turner had
promised to iUustrate. Campbell had a little joke with

126 FAMOUS SCOTS
the manager at the mills. ' I am a paper-stainer,' he
said, and then he explained that he stained with author's
ink, after which the manager became 'intensely dis
dainful.' At Stoke, near Bakewell, whither he had
gone to see Mrs Arkwright, a daughter of Stephen
Kemble, he heard Chevalier Neukomm play the organ.
This, he says, was as great an era in his sensations
as when he first beheld the Belvidere ApoUo. In the
music he imagined that he heard his dead Alison
speaking to him from heaven, and when he could listen
no longer he slipped out to the churchyard, where he
' gave way to almost convulsive sensations.' Some years
later he met Neukomm again, and at his request turned
a part of the Book of Job — the ' subUme text ' of which
he often extolled — into verse for an oratorio. The effort
appears as a ' fragment ' in his works, and Neukomm
is said to have composed the music, though no mention
of such an oratorio is made in any of the biographical
notices of the composer.
We come now to an important episode in the life of
Campbell — an episode which for long engaged almost
his sole attention. His interest in the cause of Poland
had already been strikingly expressed in ' The Pleasures
of Hope.' It was an interest which, as his friend Dr
Madden puts it, had all the strength of a passion, aU
the fervour of patriotism. Poland was his idol. ' He
wrote for it, he worked for it, he sold his literary labour
for it ; he used his influence with all persons of eminence
in political life of his acquaintance in favour of it ; and,
when it was lost, in favour of those brave defenders of
it who had survived its faU. He threw himself heart
and soul into the cause ; he identified aU his feelings,
nay, his very being with it.' The names of Czartoryski
and Niemeiewitz were never off his lips. A tale of
a distressed Pole was his greeting to friends when
they met; a subscription the chorus of his song.
In fact, he was quite mad on the subject, as mad

THOMAS CAMPBELL 127
as ever Byron was about Greece, or Boswell about
Corsica. What roused him first was the fall of Warsaw, by the
news of which he was so affected that Madden feared
for his life or his reason. He began very practicaUy
by subscribing ;^ioo to the Warsaw Hospital Fund,
' a mighty sum for a poor poet,' as he says in an un
published letter. He had written some 'Lines on
Poland' for the Metropolitan, and these, along with
the Lines on St Leonards, he proposed to pubUsh in
a brochure, by which he expected to raise ^£^50 more.
The number of exiles in London gradually increased.
Many of them were starving. Campbell constituted
himself their guardian, appealed urgently for money on
their behalf, and subsequently, early in 1831, founded
a Polish Association with the object of relieving distress
and distributing literature calculated to arouse pubUc
sympathy on the matter.
Of this Association he was appointed chairman. The
duties proved anything but Ught. In June 1832 he
writes that he has a heavy correspondence to keep up,
both with friends at home and with foreigners. He
has letters in French, German, and even Latin to write,
and these afford him nothing like a sinecure. There
was also a monthly journal called Polonia to edit;
besides which the German question — another and the
same with the Polish — involved him in much vexatious
correspondence with the patriots of the Fatherland.
At this date he was constantly working from seven in
the morning till midnight ; he even changed his dinner
hour to two o'clock to have a longer afternoon for his
beloved Poles. It was impossible that such a strain
could last; and at length, in May 1833, he withdrew
from the Association as having become too arduous
and exciting for his health. Thus closed a part of his
career which was as honourable to him as anything he
ever did, and upon which he looked back with feelings

128 FAMOUS SCOTS
of sad pleasure. His zeal was perhaps a Uttle iU-
regulated, but his sincerity and his active practical
efforts on behalf of many brave, unfortunate men bore
the impress of a noble and a generous nature. The
Poles showed their gratitude in many touching ways;
and we have his own express declaration that only once
in his life did he experience anything at aU like their
warm-hearted recognition of his services on their behalf.
During the whole of this distracted period CampbeU
had all but completely forsaken his own proper business.
He had, of course, continued to edit the Metropolitan,
and his random contributions to that journal must have
filled up some time, but from the fall of Warsaw in
March 1831 to his ceasing connection with the Polish
Association in May 1833 his interests were centred
entirely on the affairs of the exiles. Even the agitation
about the Reform Bill had passed almost unheeded,
though he was among those who celebrated the passing
of the BUI by dining with the Lord Mayor at the Guild
hall, on which occasion he remarked that the turtie soup
tasted as if it had already felt the beneficent effects of
Reform. From Glasgow had come in 1832 an appeal
that he would aUow himself to be nominated as a candi
date for ParUament, but he declined the honour because
a seat in the House would entail a Ufe of 'dreadful
hardship,' and cut up his literary occupation.
The only work of any note which he did while
actively interested in the Poles was the Life of Mrs
Siddons. He finished the book, at the end of 1832, in
one volume, but the 'tyrant booksellers' would not
look at it until he had expanded it into two volumes.
It was at length pubUshed in June 1 834. Few words
need be wasted over it. Mrs Siddons, of whom he
entertained an extravagantly high opinion, had entrusted
him with what he loftily termed the 'sacred duty' of
writing her life, but he was thoroughly unfitted for such
a commission, and it is the simple truth that no man of

THOMAS CAMPBELL 129
even average abUity ever produced a worse biography.
The Quarterly called it 'an abuse of biography,' and
its author 'the worst theatrical historian we have ever
had.' It is full of the grossest blunders, and some of
its expressions are turgid and nonsensical beyond belief.
Thus of Mrs Pritchard we read that she ' electrified the
-house with disappointment,' a statement upon which
the Quarterly remarked : ' This, we suppose, is what the
philosophers call negative electricity,' The thing was
rendered additionaUy absurd by the noise which Campbell
had made about the writing of the book. He talked
about it and wrote about it to everybody, as if it were
to be the magnum opus of his life. From this the public
and his friends naturally formed great expectations, and
when they found they had been deluded they covered
Campbell with ridicule.
With the money which the publication of this wretched
book brought him Campbell now afforded himself a long
break. He conceived the idea of a classical pilgrimage
in Italy as likely not only to benefit his health but to
furnish him with materials for a new poem. A change
in the tide of his affairs carried him however to Paris,
and he never set eyes on the sunny land. He arrived
in the French capital in July, when the weather was so
hot that he told the Parisians their beau climat was fit
only for devUs. He was eagerly welcomed by many of
the Polish exiles, who gave him, what he did not dislike,
a grand dinner, at which Prince Czartoryski proclaimed
him 'the pleader, the champion, the zealous and un
wearied apostle of our holy cause.' He heard Louis
PhUippe deliver his address to the Peers and Deputies,
and made a ' dispassionate enquiry ' into the character
istics of French beauty, which resulted in the conviction
that the French ladies have no beauty at all ! He began
work on a Geography of Classical History, rising every
morning with the sun, and studying for twelve hours a
day. Presently some French friends interested him in
I

130 FAMOUS SCOTS
the recent conquest and colonisation ot Algiers, and,
with his characteristic caprice, he decided to go there at
once and write a book on the colony.
He landed in Algiers on the i8th of September
(1834) to find Captain St Palais translating his poems
for publication. 'Prancing gloriously' on an Arabian
barb, he felt as if he had dropt into a new planet. The
vegetation gave him ecstatic delight, and he was greatly
elated when he discovered some ruins unmentioned by
previous traveUers. As usual he began to harass him
self about money, but the announcement opportunely
arrived that Telford had left him ;^iooo, and he
resolved to go on with his tour. He covered the entire
coast from Bona to Oran, and penetrated as far as
Mascara, seventy miles into the interior. For several
nights he slept under the tents of the Arabs, and he
made much of hearing a lion roar in his ' native savage
freedom.' But all this, and a great deal more, may be
read in his 'Letters from the South,' an informative
and even lively work in two volumes, which appeared
originally in the New Monthly. Campbell's account of
Algerian scenery is so glowingly eloquent that if
unforeseen objects had not diverted his attention, the
African tour would probably have formed the subject
of a new poem. As it was, the tour remained poetically
barren, save for some lines on a dead eagle and a jeu
d'esprit written for the British Consul's children.
Campbell was back in Paris in May 1835, and after
' a long and gracious audience ' with Louis Philippe, he
returned to London to tell more stories than Tom
Coryatt, and enjoy a temporary fame as an African
traveller. The tour seems, however, to have done him
harm rather than good. Redding says he was astonished
at the change in his appearance. He looked a dozen
years older; he was in unusually low spirits, and he
kept harping upon his disordered constitution. From
this date onwards the record of his career is not worth

THOMAS CAMPBELL 131
dwelling upon in any detail. He suffered greatly from
spells of Ul-health ; he shifted fitfully from one residence
to another; he visited this place and that place; and
with constant cackle about his busy pen, did almost
nothing. Under these circumstances the briefest sum
mary of the remaining years of his life will suffice.
Upon his return from Paris in 1835 he settled
down at York Chambers, St James' Street, where he
prepared his ' Letters from the South ' and arranged
about the new edition of his poems to be illustrated by
Turner. In May 1836 he started for Scotland, where
he remained for four months, spending, he says, the
happiest time he had ever spent in the land of his
fathers. On former visits he had always been hurried
and haunted by the necessity of sending manuscripts or
proofs to London ; but now he was his own master.
At Glasgow he dined with the Campbell Club, and got
over the function 'very well,' having left Professor
Wilson and other choice spirits to prolong the carousal
into the small hours. Apropos, a story is told of Wilson
and Campbell which is too good to be missed. The
poet's cousin, Mr Gray, had a bewitchingly pretty maid,
who had set Campbell — so he says — dreaming about
the heroines of romance. The day after the dinner,
Wilson, with other members of the Club, called at the
house whUe the Gray family were absent. ' I rang to
get refreshment for them,' says Campbell, 'and fair
Margaret brought it in. The Professor looked at her
with so much admiration that I told him in Latin to
contain his raptures, and he did so; but rose and walked
round the room like a lion pacing his cage. Before
parting he said, " Cawmel, that might be your ain
Gertrude. Could not you just ring and get me a sight
of that vision of beauty again ? " " No, no," I told him,
"get you gone, you Moral PhUosophy loon, and give
my best respects to your wife and daughters." ' As a
set-off to this, it may be recorded that CampbeU was

132 FAMOUS SCOTS
sadly dismayed at seeing so many of the Glasgow
' bonnie lassies ' going about with bare feet. ' I am
constantly,' he says, 'preaching against this national
disgrace to my countrymen. It is a barbarism so unlike,
so unworthy of, the otherwise civUised character of the
commonality, which is the most intelligent in Europe;
and it is a disgrace unpalUated by poverty in Glasgow,
where the industrious are exceedingly well-off.' The
Club dinner was followed by a meeting of the Polish
Association, at which Campbell gave a forty-five minutes'
speech that, by his own report, caused quite a sensation.
He went to hear his old CoUege chum, Dr Wardlaw,
preach, and afterwards compared him with Chalmers.
Chalmers, he said, 'carries his audience by storm, but
Wardlaw is a reasoning and well-informed person,' a
double-edged compliment to the more famous divine
which Campbell probably did not see.
After a trip to the Highlands — one result of which
was his ' Lines to Ben Lomond,' published shortly after
in the Scenic Annual — he went to Edinburgh, where, on
the 5 th of August, he was made a freeman and was feted
like a prince. The Paisley CouncU and bailies, as he
humorously tells, refused him a like honour ; they
bestowed it on Wilson, who was an inveterate Tory,
and denied it to Campbell because he was a Whig.
Nevertheless, Campbell, taking no offence, went to
Paisley to the dinner, and Wilson and he spent a
merry time at the races afterwards, Campbell being,
indeed, so ' prodigiously interested ' as to have an even
;^5o on one of the events !
Returning to London in October, he was back in Scot
land again in the summer of 1837. There was a printers'
centenary festival in the capital in July, and nobody
could be got to take the chair ' because it was a three-
and-sixpenny soiree.' This roused Campbell's democratic
blood, and he immediately offered to fill the breach.
' Delta ' proposed his health, and the audience got their

THOMAS CAMPBELL 133
hearts out by singing ' Ye Mariners of England.' Be
fore the year ended he had again changed his residence.
This time it was to ' spacious chambers ' in Lincoln's
Inn Fields, which, ignoring all the teachings of experi
ence, he furnished so expensively that he had to under
take a new piece of hack work to cover the cost. The
account of his difficulty with an Irish charwoman who
sought to help him in arranging his books is at once
amusing and pathetic. She understood, he says, neither
Greek nor Latin, so that when he ordered her to bring
such and such a volume of Athenaeus or Fabricius she
could only grunt like one of her native pigs. What
did Campbell expect? Redding has a dreary picture
of the disorder in which he found him one afternoon
shortly after this. The rooms were in a state of extra
ordinary confusion. The breakfast things were stUl on
the table, a coat was on one chair and a dressing-gown
on another; pyramids of books were heaped on the
floor, and papers lay scattered about in endless disarray.
It was indeed a sad change from the neatness which
had prevailed in Mrs CampbeU's time.
About this date the illustrated edition of his poems
was published, and he found himself in some perplexity
over the disposal of the drawings, for which he had
paid Turner ;^55o. He had been assured that
Turner's drawings were like banknotes, which would
always bring their original price, but when he offered
them for ;£^3oo no one would look at them, and Turner
himself subsequently bought them for two hundred
guineas. Of this iUustrated edition two thousand five
hundred copies went off within a twelvemonth ; while of
an edition on shorter paper the same number was sold
in eleven months in Scotland alone. Those were happy
days for poets 1
At the close of this year (1837) the Scenic Annual
appeared, containing four pieces of Campbell's own,
notably his ' Cora Linn, or "The Falls of Clyde,' which

134 FAMOUS SCOTS
he had written whUe in Glasgow the previous summer.
Evidently he had some doubts about the dignity of
accepting the editorship of this work, which was issued
by Colburn merely to use up some old plates. ' You
will hear me much abused,' he says, ' but as I get ;^2oo
for writing a sheet or two of paper it will take a deal
of abuse to mount up to that sum.' One cannot help
recalling how Scott scorned to write for the Keepsake,
but Scott's ideas of self-respect were very different from
those of Campbell. In January 1838 CampbeU in
timates that he is busy on a popular edition of Shake
speare for Moxon. Needless to say, it was a good-for-
nothing production. It is, however, a point in his
favour that he had the grace to be ashamed of it. He
said he had done it hurriedly, though with the right
feeling. 'What a glorious fellow Shakespeare must
have been ! ' he exclaimed, when talking about the book.
' Walter Scott was fine, but had a worldly twist. Shake
speare must have been just the man to Uve with.' This
hint at Scott's worldUness is sufficiently amusing, to say
the least, in view of Campbell's own sordid ambitions.
On the loth of March he tells how he has been
corresponding with the Queen. He had got his poems
and his ' Letters from the South ' bound with as much
gilt as would have covered the Lord Mayor's coach —
the bill was ;^6 — and having sent the volumes to
Windsor, they were, as such things always are, ' graci
ously accepted.' For an avowed democrat CampbeU
made an unaccountable outcry about this 'honour,'
which produced nothing more substantial than an
autograph portrait of Her Majesty. In truth, with all
his good sense, he could be very foolish on occasion.
He was one of the spectators at the coronation of the
Queen in Westminster Abbey this year — ^later on he
was presented at Court by the Duke of Argyll — and he
declares that she conducted herself so weU during
the long and fatiguing ceremony, that he 'shed

THOMAS CAMPBELL 135
tears many times.' Why anyone should shed tears
because a royal lady behaves herself becomingly
would have been a puzzle for Lord Dundreary. But
Campbell was given to blubbering on every conceivable
and inconceivable pretext. Once when he went to
visit Mrs Siddons he was ' overcome, even to tears, by
the whole meeting ' ; and we hear of him crying like a
chUd when drawing up some papers on behalf of the
despoiled Poles. What tears are 'manly, sir, manly,'
as Fred Bayham has it, may sometimes be difficult to
decide, but there can be no question about the unmanly
character of much of Campbell's snivelling.
In July he paid another visit to Scotland, this time
in connection with family affairs. Mrs Dugald Stewart
died while he was in Edinburgh, and one more link
binding him to the past was broken. Returning to
his lonely chambers, he reports himself as working from
six in the morning till midnight, a treadmill business
which he unblushingly admits to be due to sheer avarice.
'The money ! the money ! ' he exclaims ; ' the thought
of parting with it is unthinkable, and pounds sterling
are to me "dear as the ruddy drops that warm my
heart.'" He calls himself spendthrift — as wretched
and regular a miser as ever kept money in an old
stocking; and finds an excuse for himself only in the
fact that he is getting more interested in public charities.
His principal literary work was now a Life of Petrarch.
Archdeacon Coxe had left a biography uncompleted,
and Campbell agreed to finish it for ;^2oo. He found
it, however, so stupid that he decided to write a Life
of Petrarch himself, though he frankly allowed that
untU quite recently he had something like an aversion
to Petrarch because of the monotony of his amatory
sonnets, and his wild, semi-insane passion for Laura.
He had nothing but pity for a man who could be in
love for twenty years with a woman who was a wife
and a proUfic mother to boot. The Life of Petrarch

136 FAMOUS SCOTS
occupied him until the spring of 1840. It was a sorry
performance, and may be dismissed without further
remark. Campbell had neither the sympathy with
the Italian poet nor the intimate knowledge of his life
and work which were requisite in his biographer, and
the book is simply what he called it himself — a mere
piece of manufacture.
Very little of importance had happened while he
was engaged on this production. There were visits to
Brighton and to Ramsgate in search of health; and
another link had been severed by the death of Alison,
his ' mind's father.' He had projected a small edition
of his poems as a resource for his closing years, and
in November 1839 Moxon had thrown off ten thousand
copies in double column, to be sold at two shiUings
each. Of original lyrical work nothing of any note
was produced, the pieces including ' My Child Sweet
heart,' 'Moonlight,' and 'The Parrot.' In September
1840 he was at Chatham for the launch of a couple
of warships, when he made a speech and wrote his
lines on ' The Launch of a First-rate.' Campbell had
a patriotic partiality for the navy, and Uked to hear
about the exploits of seamen, but his speech on this
occasion was a great deal better than the verses which
followed it.
Feeling more than ever the cheerlessness of his
chambers, he now made another expensive change of
residence. He longed for the comforts of a home, and
with his niece, Margaret, the daughter of his deceased
brother, Alexander Campbell, whom he brought from
Glasgow to superintend his domestic arrangements, he
leased the house No. 8 Victoria Square, Pimlico, about
which he spoke to everybody as a child speaks about
a new toy. He removed in the spring of 1841; but
he had not been long in occupation when he fell iU
and went off suddenly to Wiesbaden. Beattie says he
would not abide strictly by regimen, and to his other

THOMAS CAMPBELL 137
complaints was now added an attack of rheumatism.
At Wiesbaden he met Hallam, the historian, 'a most
exceUent man, of great acuteness and of immense
research in reading,' but no other notability seems to
have crossed his path. He benefited greatly by the
waters and baths, and at Ems even managed to write
the baUad of ' The ChUd and Hind,' the story of which,
printed in a Wiesbaden paper, plagued him so that
he could not help rhyming. This piece was obvi
ously meant as an imitation of the old ballad, but it is
as little successful as such imitations usually are.
Reaching London once more, he sat down con
tented — for the time being — at his own fireside; and
in November he writes of his intention to live now as
a gentleman poet. He was highly pleased with his
niece. She was ' well-principled and amiable,' a ' nice,
comfortable housekeeper,' and a ' tolerable musician.'
Some people jeered at her for her scruples about going
to the play, but Campbell allowed nothing to be said
in her hearing that might alarm her pious feelings.
He taught her French and Greek, engaged the best
masters for her general education, and spared no ex
pense in books. His affectionate feelings towards her
are weU expressed in the Unes beginning 'Our friend
ship's not a stream to dry,' and a more tangible token
of his regard was shown at his death, when he left her
nearly the whole of his property.
He had now been busy for some time with ' The
Pilgrim of Glencoe,' and the poem was pubUshed, with
other short pieces, in February 1842. It fell still-born
from the press. Some zealous admirer said it ought to
have been as good as a bill at sight, but alack ! the bill
was found to be unnegotiable. The publisher made
strenuous exertions to obtain a hearing for the poem,
but all to no purpose. The public would not be roused
from their indifference, and ' The Pilgrim of Glencoe '
sunk at once into the shades of oblivion.

138 FAMOUS SCOTS
Campbell was manifestly unprepared for such a re
verse. He had expected a quick and profitable return
from the book, and had entered into heavy responsi
bilities, which now threatened his independence. One
cannot help remarking again upon the mystery of these
continued money difficulties. There was no reason why
Campbell should be everlastingly in financial straits.
He had his pension, he had been uncommonly lucky
in the matter of legacies, he enjoyed property to the
extent of ;£^20o a year, and the profits of his work
besides. There ought now to have been less cause
than ever for pleading poverty. That there were diffi
culties is, however, abundantly evident, from the fact
that he precipitately resolved to dispose of his house
and retire to some retreat where he could live cheaply
and await the advances of old age. London, he pro
tested, was no longer the place for him. His friends,
too, observed that his constitution was visibly faiUng :
he walked with a feeble step, and his face wore an ex
pression of languor and anxiety.
Under these disquieting conditions he made his wiU,
and began to look about for the ' remote comer.' In
the meantime he was preparing still another edition of
his collected poems, which he intended to pubUsh by
subscription. He says that for several years past the
sale of his books had been steadily going down, so that
his poems, which had yielded him on an average ;^soo
per annum, would not now bring him much more than
a tenth of that amount. By keeping the book in his
own hands he expected to make a goodly sum. But
the experiment failed. The subscriptions dribbled in
only at rare intervals, and some money having come to
him from the death of his eldest and only surviving
sister in March 1843, ^ '^^^^ ^^ * l^'tle legacy from
Mr A'Becket, the new edition, like its predecessors,
passed into the hands of Mr Moxon. The volume was
a handsome one of four hundred pages, with fifty-si3{

THOMAS CAMPBELL 139
vignettes by leading artists. It had a not inconsider
able sale, and brought a substantial addition to Camp
bell's exchequer.
UnhappUy he had neither health nor spirits to enjoy
his improved fortunes. He had outlived aU his own
family ; he was getting more and more depressed, more
and more feeble. To leave London seemed ill-advised,
but he was determined upon it, and having made ex
cursions to Brittany and elsewhere in search of a place
of retirement, he at length fixed on Boulogne.^ There
he arrived with his niece in July 1843. Redding saw
him just before leaving and found him in good humour,
though he appeared weak and looked far older than he
was. He had sold a thousand volumes from his Ubrary,
and injudiciously spent ;^5oo on the purchase of an
annuity, because he dreaded that he might run through
the principal. Boulogne proved not uncongenial to his
tastes — a gay place with many public amusements, the
Opera and the ' Comedie,' as well as concerts and
races. But he was never able to derive any pleasure
from it. Even the books he had brought from London
were never placed on their shelves.
He had still some work which he intended doing,
particularly a treatise on ancient geography, but ' incur
able indolence ' overcame him, and he resigned himself
to the arm-chair. He complained of weakness, and
felt a gradually increasing disinclination for any kind of
exertion. In March 1844 Beattie received from him
the last letter he ever wrote. A rapid decay of bodily
strength had set in, and he never rallied. He had
frequently told Beattie, his ' kind, dear physician,' that
if he ever fell seriously ill care should be taken to
acquaint him with the fact. Beattie was accordingly
' Since these lines were written, a memorial tablet has been
placed on the house in the Rue St Jean where Campbell resided.
The tablet describes him as ' the celebrated English poet. ' Was
he not, then, a Famous Scot ?

140 FAMOUS SCOTS
summoned to Boulogne, but his services were unavail
ing, except in so far as he could make the closing days
easier for the patient. When the end came, on the
15 th of June, it came peacefully, so peacefully that
those who were watching by the bedside hardly knew
when the spirit had fled.
Thus died Thomas Campbell, the last of aU his long
family, ' a lonely hermit in the vale of years.' There
was a story that a representative of the Glasgow Ceme
tery Company had waited on the poor enfeebled poet
about a year before his death to beg his body for their
new cemetery. However this may have been — and one
would prefer not to believe the story — when CampbeU
wrote his ' Field Flowers ' it seems clear that he con
templated a grave by the Clyde. Redding says : ' He
often spoke of our going down together to visit the
scenery, and of his preference for it as a last resting-
place.' But the field-flowers, ' earth's cultur'less buds,'
were not to bloom on his grave. His body was brought
to England, and on the 3rd of July was laid with great
pomp in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, where
a fine statue now marks his tomb. A deputation of
Poles attended, and as the coffin was lowered a handful
of earth from the grave of Kosciusko was scattered over
the lid. It was a simple but touching tribute. Two
points struck his intimate friends when they read the
inscription on the coffin lid. He was described as
LL.D., a distinction he detested, and as 'Author of
" The Pleasures of Hope," ' which he detested too.

CHAPTER IX
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND PLACE AS A POET
Something of Campbell's person and character will
have already been gathered from the foregoing pages.
His friends unite in praise of his eyes and his generaUy
handsome appearance as a young man. Lockhart says
that the eyes had a dark mixture of fire and softness
which Lawrence's pencU alone could reproduce. Pat-
more speaks of his ' oval, perfectly regular ' features, to
which his eyes and his bland smUe gave an expression
such as the moonlight gives to a summer landscape.
The thinness of the lips is commented upon by several
writers ; and it is even said that Chantrey declined to
execute a bust because the mouth could never look well
in marble. GilfiUan observes that there was nothing
false about him but his hair : ' he wore a wig, and his
whiskers were dyed ' — to match the wig ! Most of his
acquaintances remark on the wig, which in his palmy
days was ' true to the last curl of studious perfection ' ;
Lockhart. alone declares that it impaired his appearance
because his choice of colour was abominable. Byron's
picture of him as he appeared at Holland House in
1813 has often been quoted: 'Campbell looks well,
seems pleased and dressed to sprucery. A blue coat
becomes him ; so does his new wig. He really looked
as if Apollo had sent him a birthday suit or a wedding
garment, and was witty and lively.'
But the completest and most consistent description
is to be found in Leigh Hunt's Autobiography. Hunt
says : ' His skuU was sharply cut and fine, with plenty,
I4>

142 FAMOUS SCOTS
according to the phrenologists, both of the reflective
and amative organs. . . . His face and person were
rather of a small scale; his features regular, his eye
lively and penetrating; and when he spoke dimples
played about his mouth, which, nevertheless, had some
thing restrained and close in it. Some gentle puritan
strain seemed to have crossed the breed and to have
left a stamp on his face, such as we often see in the
female Scotch face rather than on the male.' After
Mrs Campbell's death in 1828 he lost something of
his old finical neatness, but he continued to the last
to be ' curious in waistcoats and buttons.' Madden
speaks of him in his later years as 'an elderly gentle
man in a curly wig, with a blue coat and brass buttons,
very like an ancient mariner out of uniform and his
natural element.' Before he left London for Boulogne,
he would be seen in the streets with an umbrella tucked
under his arm, his boots and trousers all dust and dirt,
' a perfect picture of mental and bodily imbecility.'
"The best portrait of Campbell is the well-known one
by Sir Thomas Lawrence, engraved in most editions of
his works. It was painted when he was about forty
years of age, and represents him very much as Byron
described him. Redding, who had good means of
judging, says that, barring the lips, which were too
thick, it was 'the perfection of resemblance.' Camp
bell was somewhat vain of his appearance, and would
never have asked, like Cromwell, to be painted warts
and all. He had, in particular, a sort of feminine
objection to an artist making him look old. Late in
life he sat to Park, the sculptor, when his desire to be
reproduced en beau made him decUne to take off his
wig. Park made a very successful bust, but Campbell
disliked it just because of its extreme truthfulness. In
the Westminster Abbey statue by Marshall, the features,
according to those who knew him, are preserved with
happy fidelity, though the attitude is somewhat theatri-

THOMAS CAMPBELL 143
cal, and we get the notion of a much taller and more
athletic figure.
Campbell's social habits have been variously described.
There can be no doubt that occasionally he took too
much wine ; so did most people at that time. Beattie
makes a long story about it, pleading this and that in
extenuation, but there is no need to enlarge on the
matter now. It was merely, as Campbell said himself,
a case of being unable to resist 'such good fellows.'
He was never a solitary drinker, Uke De Quincey with
his opium. When he was left a widower he went more
into company than he had done before ; and apart from
his special temptations, there was the fact that with his
excitable temperament his last defences were carried
before a colder man's outworks. Moreover, he found
that wine gave an edge to his wit, and hence he may
often have passed the conventional bounds in the mere
endeavour to promote the hilarity of his friends.
His other indulgences seem to have been quite
innocent. Hunt hints at his love of a good dinner,
which indeed has been seen from his letters. He was
almost as fond of the pipe as Tennyson, and he had
even been known to chew tobacco when he found it
inconvenient to smoke. He liked music, though he
knew no more about the theory of the art than Scott.
The national songs of his country specially appealed to
him ; and he was severe upon Dr Burney, the musical
historian, because he had not done justice to the old
English composers. He played the flute — how wonder
fully flute-playing has gone out of fashion ! — and could
' strike in now and then with a solo.' His early ' vain
little weak passion ' to have ' a fine characteristic, manly
voice' was never realised, but with such voice as he
had, he often gratified his friends in a Scots song or in
his own 'Exile of Erin.' 'The Marseillaise' was his
favourite air, and when on his deathbed he several times
asked his niece to play it.

144 FAMOUS SCOTS
But CampbeU gave himself very little time for
recreation and social enjoyment. Most of his waking
hours were spent in his study, where he dawdled uncon
scionably over the lightest of tasks. As a rule he
attempted verse only when in the mood. He told
George Thomson, who had asked him for some lyrics,
that if he sat on purpose to write a song he felt sure it
would be a failure. On the other hand, he sat down to
produce prose with the clock-work regularity of Anthony
TroUope. He wrote very slowly, and would often recast
a whole piece out of sheer caprice, the second version
being not seldom inferior to the first. Several of his
friends speak of his practice of adding pencil lines to
unruled paper for making transcripts of his verse. His
habits of study were erratic and desultory. He could
not fix his thoughts for any length of time; yet he
always pretended to be prodigiously busy. Even the
minutes necessary for shaving he grudged : a man, he
said, might learn a language in the time given to the
razor. Scott wondered that he did so little considering
the number of years he devoted to literature. But the
reason is plain : he did not know how to economise his
time. His imagination was active enough, but it was
ill-regulated and flighty, and his incapacity for protracted
exertion led to the abandonment of many well-conceived
designs. This instability, this restless, wayward irresolu
tion, was the weak point in his character. He would
start of a sudden into the country in order to be alone,
and he would be back in London next day. He would
arrange visits in eager anticipation of enjoyment, and
when he arrived at his destination would ask to be
immediately recalled on urgent editorial business !
'There is something about me,' he truly said, 'that
lacks strength in brushing against the world, and battUng
out the evil day.' And he was right when he named
himself 'procrastination Tom.'
CampbeU was not, in the usual sense of the term, a

THOMAS CAMPBELL 145
society man. He liked the company of ladies, especi
ally when they were pretty, but ' talking women ' he
detested. Even Madame de Stael he disparaged be
cause she was fond of showing off. For the ' high
gentry,' to use his own words, he had an ' unconquer
able aversion.' To retain their acquaintance, he said,
meant a life of idleness, dressing, and attendance on
their parties. He censured his own countrymen for
their snobbish deference to the great, citing an instance
of Scott having become painfully obsequious in a com
pany when some unknown lordling arrived. Anything
like formaUty, above all the idea of being invited out for
other than a social and friendly object, made him silent
and even morose. ' They asked me to show me,' he
observed of a certain function ; ' I will never dine there
again.' Lockhart, writing of this phase of his character,
says there was no reason why he should not have been
attentive to persons vastly his superiors who had any
sort of claim upon him ; no reason why he should not
have enjoyed, and profited largely by enjoying, 'the
calm contemplation of that grand spectacle denominated
the upper world.' As a society star, Lockhart is perhaps
to be excused for not sympathising with the position.
Campbell had his bread to make by his own industry,
and he could not possibly fill his hours with forenoon
calls and nightly levees. But more than that, he was
not formed, either by habit or by mode of thinking, for
the conventional round of social life. A man who puts
his knife in the salt-cellar — as, according to Lady
Morgan, Campbell once did at an aristocratic table —
is not made for associating with the ' high gentry.' The
' upper world ' may indeed be, as Lockhart says it is,
' the best of theatres, the acting incomparably the first,
the actresses the prettiest.' But Campbell seems always
to have felt as much out of place there as a country
cousin would feel in a greenroom. Various references
in his letters suggest that he was troubled with a nervous
K

146 FAMOUS SCOTS
self-consciousness, the bourgeois suspicion that his
' betters ' were laughing in their sleeve at him, and the
natural result was gaucherie and sometimes incivUity.
But among his equals he was another man. Hunt tells
of one great day at Sydenham — a specimen, no doubt,
of many such days — when Theodore Hook came to
dinner and amused the company with some extempore
drollery about a piece of village gossip in which Camp
bell and a certain lady were concerned. CampbeU
enjoyed the fun immensely, and ' having drunk a little
more wine than usual,' he suddenly took off his wig and
dashed it at Hook's head, exclaiming : ' You dog ! I'll
throw my laurels at you.' Little wonder that one who
thus mingled vanity with horse-play was not quite at
home among duchesses !
No two authorities agree as to Campbell's powers as
a talker, but the truth would seem to be that he shone
only at his own table or among his intimates, and even
then, as already hinted, only when stimulated by wine.
He was indeed too reserved to be quite successful as a
conversationalist. One of his friends said he knew a
great deal but was seldom in the mood to tell what he
knew. He 'trifled in his table-talk, and you might
sound him about his contemporaries to very little
purpose.' As early as the year 1800 he remarked
that he would always hide his emotions and personal
feeUngs from the world at large, and although we come
upon an occasional burst of confidence in his letters, he
may be said to have kept up his reserve to the end.
Madden called him 'a most shivery person' in the
presence of strangers; Tennyson said he was a very
briUiant talker in a tHe-a-tete. According to an American
admirer, he was quite commonplace unless when excited ;
Lockhart found him witty only when he had taken wine.
Lytton was disappointed with him on such occasions as
he met him in general society, but spoke of an evening
at his house when CampbeU led the conversation with

THOMAS CAMPBELL 147
the most sparkling talk he had ever heard. Nothing,
he said, could equal 'the riotous affluence of wit, of
humour, of fancy' that CampbeU poured forth.
To this may be added a second quotation from
Leigh Hunt, which wiU serve to bring out some other
points. Hunt writes :
Those who knew Mr Campbell only as the author of ' Gertrude
of Wyoming ' and ' The Pleasures of Hope ' would not have sus
pected him to be a merry companion overflowing with humour and
anecdote, and anything but fastidious. Those Scotch poets have
always something in reserve. . . I know but of one fault he had,
besides an extreme cautiousness in his writings, and that one was
national — a matter of words, and amply overpaid by a stream of
conversation, lively, piquant, and liberal, not the less interesting
for occasionally betraying an intimacy with pain, and for a high
and somewhat overstrained tone of yoice, like a man speaking with
suspended breath, and in the habit of subduing his feelings. No
man felt more kindly towards his fellow-creatures, or took less
credit for it. When he indulged in doubt and sarcasm, and spoke
contemptuously of things in general, he did it, partly, no doubt,
out of actual dissatisfaction, but more perhaps than he suspected
out of a fear of being thought weak and sensitive ; which is a
blind that the best men commonly practise. He professed to be
hopeless and sarcastic, and took pains all the while to set up a
University. He seems to have had a very good opinion of his
own powers as a talker, and apparently he some
times failed from sheer over-anxiety to shine. At
Holland House he used to set himself up against
Sydney Smith. Of one visit he says : ' I was deter
mined r should make as many good jokes and speak
as much as himself; and so I did, for though I was
dressed at the dinner-table much like a barber's clerk,
I arrogated greatly, talked quizzically, metaphorically.
Sydney said a few good things ; I said many.'
This is, of course, all flummery, whether Campbell
was really serious in his assertion or not. Whatever
wit he may have shown on rare occasions, he was not.

148 FAMOUS SCOTS
like Sydney Smith, naturally witty. As a writer his
forte lay in the didactic and rhetorical, and when he
attempted to move in a lighter step he became ridicu
lous. ' There never was a man,' says Redding, ' who
had less of the comic in his character than CampbeU.'
Some of his friends aver that he often had fits of
punning, but such of his puns as have survived do not
lead us to believe that he can ever have been very
successful in that most mechanical form of wit. ' I
have only one muse and you two, so you must be the
better poet,' he once said to Redding; the explanation
being that Campbell's house had one mews while
Redding's house had two. At another time Redding
having complained that he could not get into his desk
for his cash because he had lost the key, Campbell
replied : ' Never mind, if nothing better turns up you
are sure of a post among the lack-keys' When Hazlitt
pubUshed ' The New Pygmalion ' he declared that the
title ought to have been ' HogmaUon ' ; and he told a
friend that the East was the place to write books on
chronology because it was the country of dates. These
are specimens of Campbell's puns, from which it wiU
be gathered that humour was certainly not one of his
endowments. Nowhere does this lack of real humour come out
more clearly than in his letters, which are plain and
ponderous almost to the verge ' of boredom. There is
nothing in them of that ever-glowing necessity of brain
and blood which makes the letters of Scott and Byron,
for example, so humanly interesting. He has no light
ness Uke Walpole, no quiet whimsicality like Cowper, no
sidelights on literature and life like Stevenson. Lock-
hart's apology for him is that, chained so fast to the
dreary tasks of compilation, he could not be expected
to have a stock of pleasantry for a copious correspond
ence. But none of the brilliant letter-writers can be
suspected of having kept a choice vintage of epistolary

THOMAS CAMPBELL 149
Falernian in carefuUy sealed bottles. A man's individu
ality expresses itself in his letters as naturally as a
fountain flows. The truth is that Campbell was too
reserved, or too artificial, or both, to make a good
letter-writer. By all accounts he had not the best of tempers ;
indeed he admitted that to many people he had been
' irritable, petulant, and overbearing.' Of personal
quarrels, however, he had very few ; and although he
said that he had been several times on the point of
sending challenges, he was not once concerned in a
duel. His chivalry led him to take the then bold step
of defending Lady Byron's character against the stric
tures of her husband, and when the press abused him
he regarded it as a compliment. Of his kindhearted-
ness there are many proofs, apart from the generous
way in which he dealt with his widowed mother and his
sisters. No man was more ready to perform a good deed.
His charities were varied and widespread. He held the
view that in tales of distress one can never believe too
much, and naturally he was often imposed upon. When
he was in the country he seldom wrote without some
confidential communication in the way of largess, often
in a pecuniary form. On one occasion he sent Redding
a couple of pounds for a poor unfortunate whom he
had been trying to reclaim. He made strenuous efforts
to get the child of a couple who had been condemned
to death adopted by some kindly person ; and there is
a story of him weeding out hundreds of volumes from
his library to help a penniless widow to stock a little
book shop. When subscriptions were being asked for
a memorial to Lord Holland, he excused himself by
saying that he must give all he could spare to the
Mendicity Society.
At the same time, in money matters he was almost
criminally careless. The British Consul at Algiers said
that his servant might have cheated him to any extent.

ISO FAMOUS SCOTS
He disliked making calculations of cash received or paid
away, and there were times when he knew nothing of
the real state of his finances. He would profess to be
in great distress about money when, as a matter of fact,
he had a roll of bank notes in his pocket. In 1841
Beattie, while he was absent at Wiesbaden, found in an
old sUpper at the bottom of a cupboard in his house a
large number of notes twisted into the form of ' white
paper matches.' When reproached with this piece of
imprudence CampbeU, admitting that the security was
' slippery,' remarked that ' it must have happened after
putting on my night-cap.' At certain periods of his Ufe,
notably after his wife's death, he was positively miserly,
but even then he had his wayward fits of generosity.
He would throw away pounds one day, and the next day
grudge sixpences. Very often he forgot what he had
spent or given in charity, but he never forgot what he
owed. One of the most charming traits in his character was
his love for children. As he put it in his 'Child
Sweetheart,' he held it a religious duty
To love and worship children's beauty.
They've least the taint of earthly clod —
They're freshest from the hand of God.
He could not bear to see a chUd crossed, to hear it cry,
or have it kept reluctantly to books. Once at St
Leonards he drew a Uttle crowd around him on the
street whUe trying to soothe a sick baby. What he
called ' infantUe female beauty ' especially attracted him :
' ^u-children,' he said, not very elegantly, ' are never in
beauty to be compared with she ones.' He saw a re
markably pretty Uttle girl in the Park, and was afterwards
so haunted by the vision that he actually inserted an
advertisement in the Morning Chronicle with the view of
making her acquaintance. Hoaxes were the natural
result. One reply directed him to the house of an old

THOMAS CAMPBELL 151
maid — ' a wretch who,' as he used to say with peevish
humour, 'had never heard of either me or my poetry.'
Campbell was a man of sixty when this incident occurred
His friends not unreasonably suspected . his sanity ; but
he was only putting into practice the theory which he
propounded in the lines just quoted.
PoUtically Campbell was a Whig of the Whigs, with
rancorous prejudices which sometimes led him into
unpleasant scrapes. On the question of Freedom he
held very pronounced opinions. He was called the
bard of Hope, but he was the bard of Liberty too. He
abhorred despotism of aU kinds. ' Let us never think of
outliving our liberty,' he once wrote. The emancipation
of the negroes he termed 'a great and glorious measure.'
He does not seem to have been a perfervid Scot, though
he speaks of something offending his tartan nationality.
We are told that he never spared the disadvantages of
his country's cUmate, nor the foibles of the Lowlanders,
whatever these may have been; but just as Johnson
loved to gird at Garrick, though allowing no one else to
censure him, so Campbell would not permit his native
country to be attacked by another. He once rejected
an otherwise suitable paper for the New Monthly because
something which the writer had said about Edinburgh
did not meet with his approval.
Of his religious views very Uttle is to be learnt,
certainly nothing from his poems. Beattie says that
as a young man he suffered great anxiety on the subject
of religion, and spent much time in its investigation
before he arrived at ' satisfactory conclusions.' What
these conclusions were does not exactly appear. Redding
expressly affirms that he was sceptical, adding that he
was very cautious in discussing religious subjects with
strangers. His freedom from bigotry was generally
remarked : he condemned every form of intolerance,
and never cared to ask a man what his creed was. He
told his nephew Robert, who seems to have had some

152 FAMOUS SCOTS
misgivings on the point, that he could get no harm by
attending a Roman Catholic Church. ' God listens* to
human prayers wherever they are offered up.' The
Catholics might be mistaken, but persecution was not a
necessary part of their system ; and if it were, did not
Calvin and the Kirk of Geneva, 'which is the mother
of the Scotch Eark,' get Servetus burnt alive for being
a heretic? Campbell himself seldom went to church
in London, but when he was in Scotland he did as the
Scots did, and heroically sat out the sermon. It is
clear that his countrymen, of whose rigid righteousness
he had many good stories, did not regard him as
heterodox, otherwise the General Assembly would never
have asked him, as they did in 1808, to make a new
metrical version of the Psalms ' for the benefit of the
congregations.' Nor is it certain that he was really
sceptical, though it is very likely that he hesitated upon
some points of dogma. It is, however, only in his later
years that we get any indication of his religious sensi
bility, and then only of the vaguest kind. When Mrs
CampbeU died he exclaimed, as if he had doubted the
fact before, 'There must be a God; that is evident;
there must be an all-powerful, inscrutable God.' Again,
when speaking of the sufferings of the Poles, he re
marked: 'There is a Supreme Judge, and in another
world there will be rewards and punishments.' But we
are not justified in forming any conclusion about his
settled religious convictions from emotional outbursts
resulting from special circumstances and in the shadow
of the tomb. In aU likeUhood he paid the conven
tional observance to religion, and, if he thought about
doctrines at all, took care not to shock his family
and prejudice his popularity with any expression of
heterodoxy. Campbell's literary pasturage does not appear to have
been very wide or very rich. Robert . Carruthers, of
Inverness, who wrote an interesting account of some

THOMAS CAMPBELL 153
mornings spent with him, says his library was not exten
sive. There were one or two good editions of the
classics, a set of the ' Biographic Universelle,' some of
the French, Italian, and German authors, the Edinburgh
Encyclopaedia, and several standard English works, none
very modern. Apparently he made no attempt to keep
abreast of current literature ; he stuck by his old
favourites, and would often be found poring over
Homer or Euripides. In his early days MUton, Thom
son, Gray, and Goldsmith were his idols among the
poets. Goldsmith, it was said, he could never read
without shedding tears, another instance of his tendency
to snivel. Thomson's ' Castle of Indolence ' is fre
quently mentioned with approbation in his letters — ' it
is a glorious poem,' he said to Carruthers — and seems,
indeed, to have been to some extent the model of his
' Gertrude.' Allan Ramsay he called one of his prime
favourites, but, strange to say, he does not appear to
have regarded Burns with any special enthusiasm.
Certainly he told the poet's son that Burns was the
Shakespeare of Scotland, and ' Tam-o'-Shanter ' a
masterpiece; but, on the other hand, he contended —
unaccountably enough, for surely Burns' nationality
was the very fount of his inspiration — that Burns was
'the most un-Scotsman-like Scotsman that ever ex
isted'; and in conversation he was known to have
denounced his own countrymen for their extravagant
adulation of the Ayrshire poet.
Campbell had something of Southey's amiable weak
ness for minor bards, and would often praise work which
he must have known to be of poor quaUty. He thought
very highly of James Montgomery of Sheffield ; and he
once caUed Mrs Hemans ' the most elegant poetess
that England has produced.' He had no great admira
tion for the Lake School of poets. He declared that
whUe doing some good in freeing writers from profitless
and custom-ridden rules, they went too far by substitut-

154 FAMOUS SCOTS
ing licentiousness for wholesome freedom. For Cole
ridge's poetry he evinced an especial distaste, due partly,
no doubt, to the fact that Coleridge had attacked ' The
Pleasures of Hope' in his lectures. Of his criticism
he spoke more favourably, but maintained that he had
borrowed many of his ideas from Schlegel. In French
poetry his favourite was Racine, whose tenderness, he
said, was unequaUed even by Shakespeare. But per
haps of all the poets his darUng was Pope, whom he
defended in a manner described by Byron as ' glorious.'
The ' Rape of the Lock ' he held to be unsurpassed.
Of three American writers — Channing, Irving and
Bryant — he had the highest opinion. The first he con
sidered ' superior as a prose writer to every other Uving
author,' a statement at which we can only raise our
eyebrows. Among the novelists he specially extolled
Smollett and Fielding. To the latter he says he never
did justice in his youth, but shortly before his death
he wrote that he had come to ' venerate ' him, and to
regard him as the better philosopher of the two, the truer
painter of life. All this shows no exceptional critical
discernment ; and Sydney Smith was no less happy in
his phrase than usual when he said that Campbell's
mind had ' rolled over ' a large field. A rolling stone
gathers no moss. But that is more than Smith could
have meant.
And now what, it must be asked, is Campbell's place
as a poet ? Before trying to answer the question it is
necessary to understand exactly what we mean by it.
If a poet's place depends on the extent to which he
is read, then CampbeU has no place, or almost none.
He is not read, save by school-children for examinations.
Milton and many another, it might be said, are in the
same case ; but there is a difference. Milton wUl always
remain a supreme model, or at least a suggestive fount
of inspiration ; and the lover of poetry can be sure of
never turning to him without some pleasure, some gain.

THOMAS CAMPBELL 155
But Campbell's pages are not turned to by the lover of
poetry for solace or refreshment, for inspiration or
guidance. As Horace Walpole said of two poems by
writers to whom Campbell owed something — Akenside
and Thomson — 'the age has done approving these poems,
and has forgot them.' What is this but to say that the
poems in the main are lacking in the one essential — the
poetic ? The well-spring of poetry was not vouchsafed to
CampbeU. He worked from the outside, not from the
depths of his own spirit. He spoke of having a poem ' on
the stocks,' of beating out a poem ' on the anvil.' By
these words does he not stand, before the highest tri
bunal, condemned? We read of him polishing and
poUshing untU what little of original idea there was
must have been almost refined away. We never hear
of him bringing forth his thoughts with pain and travail.
His letters are full of complaints about his vein being
dried up, of his mind being too much cumbered with
mundane concerns to have leisure for poetry ; but we
never once get a hint of any real misgiving as to his
powers. 'There is no greater sin,' said Keats, ' than
to flatter oneself with the idea of being a great poet.
. . . How comfortable a thing it is to feel that such a
Clime must bring its own penalty, that if one be a self-
deluder, accounts must be balanced ! '
Time has brought in its revenges for Campbell. His
poems enshrine no great thoughts, engender no consum
mate expression. Felicities, prettinesses, harmonies of a
sort one may find ; respectabiUties, vigour, patriotic and
Uberal sentiments declaimed with gusto. But these do
not raise him above the level of a third-rate poet.
His war songs wiU keep him alive, and that after all is
no mean praise.

INDEX

ALGlERS,Campbell's visit 10,130.
Altona, Campbell at, 58.
Anderson, Dr Robert, 30, 37,
43. 67.
Annals of Great Britain, The, 75.
Battle of the Baltic, The, 64.
Boulogne, Campbell settles at,
139-
Campbell, Alexander, poet's
father, 10- 1 3, 67.
 , Alison, poet's son, 90, 99.
 , Archibald, poet's grand
father, 10.
 , Margaret, poet's niece,
136, 137-
 , Mrs, poet's mother, 13, 99.
 , Mrs, poet's wife, 80, 113,
119.
Campbell, Thomas, ancestry, 9 ;
birth, 1 1 ; at Grammar School,
15 ; his love for the classics,
16; first verses, 17, 18; at
Glasgow University, 20-32 ;
his professors, 20 ; his fellow-
students, 21 ; early turn for
satire, 24; first visit to Edin
burgh, 25 ; becomes a tutor,
27, 32 ; falls in love, 29, 34 ;
second visit to Edinburgh, 36 ;
becomes a clerk, 37 ; is intro
duced to literary society of
capital, 37 ; his first literary
commission, 39 ; ' Pleasures of
Hope ' published, 43 ; Con
tinental travels, ^i-tz; first
visit to London, 62, 66 ; re
turns to Edinburgh, 68 ; visits
Dr Currie at Liverpool, 70 ;

settles in London, 77 ; his
marriage, 81 ; first child bom,
83 ; takes up house at Syden
ham, 85 ; his opinion of pub
lishers, 89 ; gets a Government
pension, 91 ; his ' Gertrude of
Wyoming ' published, 94 ; in
troduced to Princess of Wales,
100 ; lectures at Royal Institu
tion, 100; visits Paris, 102;
lectures at Liverpool and Bir
mingham, 106, 107 ; visits
Holland and Germany, 109;
founds London University,
115 ; elected Lord Rector
Glasgow University, 117;
active interest in Polish cause,
126; visits Algiers, 130;
settles at Boulogne, 139; his
death, 139; his appearance,
29i 37i 141 ; social habits,
143 ; not a society man, 78,
145 ; as a conversationalist,
146; his letters, 148; his
temper, chivalry, kind-hearted
ness, 149 J love of children,
150; politics, 151; religious
views, 151 ; literary tastes,
152 ; place as a poet, 154.
Campbell, Thomas Telford,
poet's son, 83, lOJ, 112.
Child and the Hind, The, 137.
Cora Linn, 133.
Currie, Dr, 70, 77, 84.
Exile of Erin, The, 60.
Gertr ude of Wyoming, 94.
Glasgow in Campbell's young
days, 14.

iS8

INDEX

Glasgow University, Campbell
Lord Rector of, Ii6.
Glenara, 98.
Hamburg, Campbell in, 52, 58,
115.
Hohenlinden, 57, 62.
Holland, Lord and Lady, 66.
Kant's Philosophy, CampbeU
on, 61.
Kemble, J. P., 67, 71.
Klopstock, 52.
LAST Man, The, 113.
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, Camp
bell's projected Life of, 123.
Letters from the South, 130.
Leyden, John, 38, 63.
Lines on leaving a Scene in
Bavaria, 64.
Literary Union (The) founded,
122.
Lochiel's Warning, 72.
London University founded by
Campbell, 115.
M'Cann, Tony ('Exile of Erin'),
60.
Mackintosh, Sir James, 66.
Marryat, Captain, 125.
Melrose Abbey, Campbell on, 75.
Metropolitan Magazine, Camp
bell's editorship of, 125.
Minto, Lord, 69.
Murray, John, publisher, 88, 93.
Napoleon, Campbell on, 67, 79.
Neukomm Chevalier, 126.
New Monthly Magazitu, Camp
bell's editorship of, 111, 123.

O'CONNOR'S Child, 98.
Paul, Hamilton, 21, 32.
Petrarch, Campbell's Life of, 135.
Pilgrim 0/ Glencoe, The, 137.
Pleasures of Hope, The, 42-48.
Poland, Campbell's interest in,
126.
Ratisbon, Campbell at, 53, no.
Redding, Cyrus, iii.
Reid, Dr Thomas, 12, 15.
Richardson, John, 55.
Rogers, Samuel, 67.
SCENIC Annual, 133.
Schlegel, A. W., 103, no.
Scottish Monastery, Ratisbon,
S3. 54-
Shakespeare, Campbell's edition
of, 134-
Siddons, Mrs, 67 ; Campbell's
Life of, 128.
Soldier's Dream, The, 64.
Specimens of the British Poets,
84, 89, 93, 107.
St Leonards, Lines on the View
from, 125.
Telford, Thomas, 71, 72, 77,
83. 130-
Theodric, 1 14.
Turner's drawings for ' Pleasures
of Hope,' 133.
Watt, Gregory, 22, 86.
Wounded Hussar, The, 40.
Ye Mariners of England, 64.

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON THE
"FAMOUS SCOTS" SERIES.
Of THOMAS CARLYLE, by H. C. Macpherson,
The Literary World says : —
" One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far out-weighing in
value some more pretentious works with which we are familiar."
Of ALLAN RAMSAY, by Oliphant Smeaton,
The Scotsman says : —
^ " It is^ not a patchwork picture, but one in which the writer, taking genuine
interest in his_ subject, and bestowing conscientious pains on his task, has his
materials well in hand, and has used them to produce a portrait that is both life
like and well balanced."
Of HUGH MILLER, by W. Keith Leask,
The Expository Times says :—
" It is a right good book and a right true biography. . . . There is a very fine
sense of Hugh Miller's greatness as a man and a Scotsman ; there is also a fine
choice of language in making it ours."
Of JOHN KNOX, by A. Taylor Innes,
Mr Hay Fleming in the Bookman says : —
"A masterly delineation of those stirring times in Scotland, and of that famous
Scot who helped so much to shape them."
Of ROBERT BURNS, by Gabriel Setoun,
The New Age says : —
** It is the best thing on Bums we have yet had, almost as good as Carlyle's
Essay and the pamphlet published by Dr Nichol of Glasgow."
Of THE BALLADISTS, by John Geddie,
The Spectator says : —
"The author has certainly made a contribution of remarkable value to the
literary history of Scotland. We do not know of a book in which the subject has
been treated with deeper sympathy or out of a fuller knowledge."
Of RICHARD CAMERON, by Professor Herkless,
The Dundee Courier says : —
" In selecting Professor Herkless to prepare this addition to the ' Famous Scots
Series' of books, the ^publishers have made an excellent choice. The vigorous,
manly style adopted is exactly suited to the subject, and Richard Cameron is
presented to the reader in a manner as interesting as it is impressive. . . .
Professor Herkless has done remarkably well, and the portrait he has so cleverly
delineated of one of Scotland's most cherished heroes is one that will never fade.'
Of SIR JAMES YOUNG SIMPSON, by Eve Blantyre
Simpson,
The Daily Chronicle says : —
'* It is indeed long since we have read such a charmingly-written biography a&
this little Life of the most typical and ' Famous Scot' that his countrj-men have
been proud of since the time of Sir Walter. . . . There is not a dull, irrelevant,
or superfluous page in all Miss Simpson's booklet, and she has performed the
biographer's chief duty— that of selection — with consummate skill and judgment"

Press Opinions on "Famous Scots" Se,b.ies— continued
Of THOMAS CHALMERS, by W. Garden Blaikie,
The Spectator says : —
" The most notable feature of Professor Blaikie's book— and none could be more
commendable — is its perfect balance and proportion. In other words, justice is
done equally to the private and to the public hfe of Chalmers, if possible greater
justice than has been done by Mrs Oliphant."
Of JAMES BOSWELL, by W. Keith Leask,
The Morning Leculer says : —
" Mr W. K. Leask has approached the biographer of Johnson in the only possible
way by which a really interesting book could have been arrived at — by way of the
open mind. . . . The defence of Boswell in the concluding chapter of his delightful
study is one of the finest and most convincing passages tlmt have recently appeared
in the field of British biography."
Of TOBIAS SMOLLETT, by Oliphant Smeaton,
The Weekly Scotsman says : —
*'The book is written in a crisp and lively style. . . . The picture of the great
novelist is complete and lifelike. Not only does Mr Smeaton give a scholarly
sketch and estimate of Smollett's literary career, he constantly keeps the reader in
conscious touch and sympathy with his personality, and produces a portrait of the
man as a man which is not likely to be readily forgotten."
Of FLETCHER OF SALTOUN, by W. G. T. Omond,
The Leeds Mercury says :-=—
" Unmistakably the most interesting and complete story of the life of Fletcher of
Saltoun that has yet appeared. Mr Omond has had many ^ciUties placed at his
disposal, and of these he has made excellent use."
Of THE BLACKWOOD GROUP, by Sir George Douglas,
The Weekly Citizen says : —
" It need not be said that to everyone interested in the literature of the first half
of the century, and especially to every Scotsman so interested, * The Blackwood
Group ' is a phrase abounding in promise. And really Sir George Douglas fulfils
the promise he tacitly makes in his title. He is intimately acquainted not only
with the books of the different members of the ' group,' but also with their environ
ment, social and otherwise. Besides, he writes with sympathy as well as know
ledge." Of NORMAN MACLEOD, by John Wellwood,
The Star says : —
"A worthy addition to the ' Famous Scots Series' is that of Norman Macleod,
the renowned minister of the Barony in Glasgow, and a man as typical of every
thing generous and broadminded m the State Church in Scotland as Thomas
Guthrie was in the Free Churches. The biography is the work of John Wellwood,
who has approached it with proper appreciation of the robustness of the subject."
Of SIR WALTER SCOTT, by George Saintsbury,
The Pall Mall Gazette says : —
" Mr Saintsbury's miniature is a gem of its kind. . . Mr Saintsbury's critique
of the Waverley Novels will, I venture to think^ despite all that has been written
upon them, discover fresh beauties for their admirers. '
Of KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE, by Louis A. Barb!
The Scotsman says ; —
"Mr BarbS's sketch sticks close to the facts of his Hfe, and these are sought out
from the best sources and are arranged with much judgment, and on the whole
with an impartial mind."

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