THE POET Campbell was the editor of the New Monthly Magazine and of the Metropolitan, but it is to his work as editor of “Specimens of the British Poets” that we owe his essay on Chatterton,—almost the only one of his shorter prose pieces which has not dropped out of circulation. His work as a poet was of the highest importance to English literature in helping to renew the lyrical impulse which in the eighteenth century it had almost lost. An Englishman in his diction, Campbell was Scotch in his ear for melody. His longer poems are under the influence of the formalism of the Queen Anne school, but in his lyrics and ballads he is thoroughly natural, and, except in diction, almost as Scotch as Burns himself. His lyrics are based on the ear for music which is more potent than the best tradition of any school of art, and it is almost impossible for any one who has once learned them to forget them. He was born at Glasgow, July 27th, 1777. At Edinburgh where he went to attend the university, he made the acquaintance of Scott, Brougham, and Francis Jeffrey, who were valuable friends to him in his literary career. “The Pleasures of Hope,” published in 1799, was an instantaneous success, as it deserved to be from the beauty and delicacy which characterize its conceptions. It lacks the artistic simplicity of expression which gives his lyrics their remarkable power, but is still accepted as his masterpiece and one of the masterpieces of English poetry. He died at Boulogne, June 15th, 1844.