Born, in Glasgow, 27 July, 1777. Educated at Glasgow Grammar School, 1784–91; at Glasgow University, Oct. 1791 to Spring, 1796. As private tutor at Downie, 1796–97. Returned to Glasgow. Removed to Edinburgh to study Law. A few weeks later undertook literary work for Messrs. Mundell and Co., publishers. Also gave private tuition. First poems published, April 1799. To Germany, 1800; studied and wrote poems. Returned to London, April 1801. Married Matilda Sinclair, 10 Oct. 1803. Devoted himself to literary work, and lived in London for rest of life. Crown pension of £200 granted him, 1805. Lectured on poetry at Royal Institution, 1810. Visit to Paris, 1814. Royal Institution lectures repeated at Liverpool and Birmingham, 1819. In Germany and Austria, May to Nov. 1820. Edited “New Monthly Magazine,” Nov. 1820 to 1830. Scheme of London University conceived, 1824. Visit to Berlin University, Sept. 1825. Lord Rector of Glasgow University, 1826–29. Wife died, 1828. Edited “Metropolitan Magazine,” 1831–32. Founded Polish Association, 1832. Visit to Paris and Algiers, 1834. Returned to London, 1835. Settled in Victoria Square, Pimlico, with niece (Mary Campbell) as companion. Edited “The Scenic Annual” for 1838. To Boulogne for health, June 1843. Died there, 15 June 1844. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “The Pleasures of Hope,” 1799; “Annals of Great Britain” (anon.), 1807; “Gertrude of Wyoming,” 1809; “Essay on English Poetry,” 1819; “Specimens of the British Poets” (7 vols.), 1819; “Miscellaneous Poems,” 1824; “Theodric,” 1824[?] (2nd edn., 1824); “Rectorial Address,” 1827; “Poland,” 1831[?] (2nd edn., 1831); “Life of Mrs. Siddons” (2 vols.), 1834; “Letters from the South” (2 vols.), 1837; “Life of Petrarch” (2 vols.), 1841; “The Pilgrim of Glencoe,” 1842; “History of Our Own Times” (anon.), 1843. Posthumous: “Life and Letters,” ed. by W. Beattie, 1849. He edited: Byron’s Works (with Moore, Scott, etc.), 1835; Shakespeare’s Plays, 1838; “Frederick the Great; his Court and Times,” 1842–43. Collected Poems: in 2 vols., 1810, 1815; in 2 vols., 1828; in 2 vols., 1833, 1837, 1839, 1851 (ed. by W. A. Hill, illustrated by Turner), etc.

Personal

  This morning I returned from a visit to our poet Campbell. He has fixed himself in a small house upon Sydenham Common, where he labours hard, and is perfectly happy with his wife and child. I have seldom seen so strong an argument, from experiment, in favour of matrimony, as the change it has operated on the general tone of his temper and manners.

  I told the little poet, after the proper softenings of wine, dinner, flattery, repeating his verses, etc., etc., that a friend of mine wished to lend him some money, and I begged him to take it. The poet said that he had a very sacred and serious notion of the duties of independence; that he thought he had no right to be burdensome to others from the mere apprehensions of evil, and that he was in no immediate want. If it was necessary, he would ask me hereafter for the money without scruple; and that the knowing he had such resources in reserve, was a great comfort to him. This was very sensible, and very honourable to him; nor had he the slightest feeling of affront on the subject, but, on the contrary, of great gratitude to his benefactor, whose name I did not mention, as the money was not received; I therefore cancel your draft, and will call upon you, if he calls upon me. This, I presume, meets your approbation. I had a great deal of conversation with him, and he is a much more sensible man than I had any idea of.

  Mr. Campbell asked me to come out and see him to-day, and make it a long day’s visit. So, after the morning service, I drove out, and stayed with him until nearly nine this evening. He lives in a pleasant little box, at Sydenham, nine miles from town, a beautiful village, which looks more like an American village than any I have seen in England. His wife is a bonny little Scotchwoman, with a great deal of natural vivacity; and his only child, a boy of about ten, an intelligent little fellow, but somewhat injured by indulgence, I fear…. They seem very happy, and have made me so, for there was no one with them but myself, except an old schoolmate of Campbell’s now a barrister of considerable eminence…. Campbell had the same good spirits and love of merriment as when I met him before,—the same desire to amuse everybody about him; but still I could see, as I partly saw then, that he labors under the burden of an extraordinary reputation, too easily acquired, and feels too constantly that it is necessary for him to make an exertion to satisfy expectation. The consequence is, that, though he is always amusing, he is not always quite natural.

  Do you happen to know Mr. Campbell? I dare say not. I do. Oh! he is such a pretty, little, delicate, lady-like, finical gentleman. He would look so well in a mob-cap, hemming a pocket-handkerchief; or in a crape turban, flirting a fan. He is such a doubter, such a hummer and hawer, such a critical Lord Eldon, so heavy and so slow. He was full fifteen years getting up that notable failure, the “Specimens,” the whole of his part of which might have been put into an eighteen-penny pamphlet or two sides of the “Times” newspaper—fifteen years was he at that! Think of what will become of the Magazine, which, as Talfourd says, “is like a steamboat, and must come to the hour in spite of wind and tide.” Then his reputation is just of that sort (high and tottering) which will make him afraid to praise for fear of setting up a rival, or to blame for fear of being thought envious.

	Now, the Minstrel of Gertrude—Compiler of Colburn—
	Once the bard of high Scotland—now that of High Holborn;
	Whose jinglings the Cockney-lambs lead like a ram-bell,
	And, after the toast, strike up, “Ranting Tom Campbell.”

  He is heartless as a little Edinburgh advocate. There is a smirk on his face which would befit a shopman or an auctioneer. His very eye has the cold vivacity of a conceited worldling. His talk is small, contemptuous and shallow. The blue frock and trousers, the eye-glass, the wig, the very fashion of his brow, proclaim the literary dandy. His wife has black eyes, a fair skin, a symmetrical but vulgar face; and she speaks with that accursed Celtic accent—a twang which I never yet heard associated with any manly or profitable thought or sentiment, which to me is but the symbol of Highland vanity and filth and famine. “Good heavens!” cried I, on coming out, “does literature lead to this? Shall I, too, by my utmost efforts realise nothing but a stupid Gaelic wife, with the pitiful gift of making verses, and affections cold as those of a tinker’s cuddie, with nothing to love but my own paltry self and what belongs to it?”… Perhaps I am hasty about Campbell. Perhaps I am too severe. He was my earliest favorite. I hoped to have found him different.

  A little man, with a shrewd eye, and a sort of pedagoguish, parboiled voice; plenty to say for himself, especially about other people, and not restrained from saying whatever seemed good to him by any caution.

  Sterling says that Campbell is a man who more than any other has disappointed him in society,—sitting in a corner and saying nothing.

  He has, considering his advanced age, a full round face, with a dark complexion. His forehead does not appear to be so amply developed as it really is, owing to his brown wig overlapping the upper part of it.

  Campbell resided at Sydenham eighteen years. His house was on Peak-hill, and had a quiet and sweet view towards Foresthill. The house is one of two tenements under the same roof, consisting of only one room in width, which, London fashion, being divided by folding doors, formed, as was needed, two. The front looked out upon the prospect already mentioned. To the left was a fine mass of trees, amid which showed itself a large house, which, during part of the time, was occupied by Lady Charlotte Campbell. The back looked out upon a small neat garden, inclosed from the field by pales; and beyond it, on a mass of fine wood, at the foot of which ran a canal, and now along its bed, the atmospheric railway from London to Croydon. The house is, as appears, small, and very modest; but its situation is very pleasant indeed, standing on a green and quiet swell, at a distance from the wood, and catching pleasant glimpses of the houses in Sydenham, and of the country round. In the little back parlor he used to sit and write; and to prevent the passage of sound, he had the door which opened into the hall covered with green baize, which still remains.

  There is but one point connected with these Memoirs which I approach with reluctance. Every friend of the Poet will anticipate what I have to say—and none of his readers will expect me to say more that is due to the veracity of history: they will not pass over many excellent qualities to enlarge upon one failing—a failing common to him with too many great men—a habit which he condemned in others, but could not conquer in himself. But make allowance, kind reader, for the tempting circumstances under which the social cup was often presented to his lips—for the exhilaration which the weary, the sad, and the suffering are too ready to purchase at any price—and then the censure may be allowed to fall lightly.

	Narrator et prisci Catonis
	Sæpe mero caluisse virtus.

At my own family table, where he dined oftener, perhaps, during the last twelve or fourteen years of his life, than at any other, he was never “merry, even beyond the limits of becoming mirth.”

  They who knew Mr. Campbell only as the author of “Gertrude of Wyoming,” and the “Pleasures of Hope,” would not have suspected him to be a merry companion, overflowing with humor and anecdote, and any thing but fastidious…. He was one of the few men whom I could at any time have walked half a dozen miles through snow to spend an evening with; and I could no more do this with a penurious man than I could with a sulky one. I know but of one fault he had, beside 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 strained tone of voice, like a man speaking with suspended breath, and in the habit of subduing his feelings…. When I first saw this eminent person, he gave me the idea of a French Virgil. Not that he was like a Frenchman, much less the French translator of Virgil. I found him as handsome, as the Abbé Delille is said to have been ugly. But he seemed to me to embody a Frenchman’s ideal notion of the Latin poet; something a little more cut and dry than I had looked for; compact and elegant, critical and acute, with a consciousness of authorship upon him; a taste over-anxious not to commit itself and refining and diminishing nature as in a drawing-room mirror. This fancy was strengthened in the course of conversation, by his expatiating on the greatness of Racine…. His skull was sharply cut and fine; with plenty, according to the phrenologists, both of the reflective and amative organs: and his poetry will bear them out…. His face and person were rather on a small scale; his features regular; his eye lively and penetrating; and when he spoke, dimples played about his mouth; which, nevertheless had something restrained and close in it.

  Campbell’s appearance was more in unison with his writings than is generally the case with authors. He was about thirty-seven years of age; of the middle size, lightly and genteelly made; evidently of a delicate, sensitive organization, with a fine intellectual countenance and a beaming poetic eye. He had now been about twelve years married. Mrs. Campbell still retained much of that personal beauty for which he praises her in his letters written in the early days of matrimony; and her mental qualities seemed equally to justify his eulogies: a rare circumstance, as none are more prone to dupe themselves in affairs of the heart than men of lively imaginations. She was, in fact, a more suitable wife for a poet than poet’s wives are apt to be; and for once a son of song had married a reality and not a poetical fiction.

  He had never sufficient control over himself, never sufficient command of his intellectual condition and movements, to be sure he might not be tempted, at a moment’s warning, to abandon the wide and populous solitude of his little study at Sydenham, or the sweet society of his own “Gertrude of Wyoming,”… for the boisterous good-fellowship … of Tom Hill’s after-dinner table, with its anomalous ollapodrida of “larking” stockbrokers, laughing punsters, roaring [?] farce-writers, and riotous practical jokers…. To sum up this speculation in a word,… Tom Campbell was a very good fellow, and a very pleasant one withal; but he prevented Thomas Campbell from being a great poet, though not from doing great things in poetry.

  In the spring of 1832 I introduced Campbell to Lady Blessington. The acquaintance commenced inauspiciously. There was a coolness in it from the beginning, which soon made it very evident to both parties there was no cordiality between them to be expected. The lady, who was disappointed with Byron at her first interview with him, was not very likely to be delighted with Campbell—a most shivery person in the presence of strangers—or to have her beau ideal of the poetic character and outward appearance of a bard realized by an elderly gentleman in a curly wig, with a blue coat and brass buttons, very like an ancient mariner out of uniform, and his native element, being on shore. Campbell, on the other hand, had a sort of instinctive apprehension of any person who was supposed to be an admirer of Byron, and he could not divest his mind of the idea that Lady Blessington did not duly appreciate his own merits. After dining at Seamore place twice, I believe, and freezing her ladyship with the chilliness of his humor, the acquaintance dropped, and left no pleasing recollections on the minds of either of the parties.

  There was poor Campbell the poet, obtruding his sentimentalities, amidst a quivering apprehension of making himself ridiculous. He darted out of our house, and never came again, because, after warning, he sat down, in a room full of people (all authors, as it happened) on a low chair of my old aunt’s which went very easily on castors, and which carried him back to the wall and rebounded, of course making everybody laugh. Off went poor Campbell in a huff; and, well as I had long known, never saw him again: and I was not very sorry, for his sentimentality was too soft, and his craving for praise too morbid to let him be an agreeable companion.

  His mode of life at Sydenham was almost uniformly that which he afterwards followed in London, when he made it a constant residence. He rose not very early, breakfasted, studied for an hour or two, dined at two or three o’clock, and then made a call or two…. He would return home to tea, and then retire early to his study, remaining there till a late hour; sometimes even till an early one. His life was strictly domestic; he gave a dinner-party now and then, and at some of them Thomas Moore, Rogers, and other literary friends from town were present. His table was plain, hospitable, and cheered by a hearty welcome.

  I remember being told by a personage who was both a very popular writer and a very brilliant converser, that the poet Campbell reminded him of Goldsmith—his conversation was so inferior to his fame. I could not deny it; for I had often met Campbell in general society, and his talk had disappointed me. Three days afterwards, Campbell asked me to come up and sup with him tête-à-tête. I did so. I went at ten o’clock. I stayed till dawn; and all my recollections of the most sparkling talk I have ever heard in drawing-rooms, affords nothing to equal the riotous affluence of wit, of humour, of fancy, of genius, that the great lyrist poured forth in his wondrous monologue. Monologue it was; he had it all to himself.

  He spoke with a marked Scotch accent, which added a zest, allied to humour, to the amusing anecdotes and stories which he told so well. When in this facetious mood, there was a roguish twinkle in his eye; and you could hardy conceive the touching and impressive poet to be hid behind the mantling smile and genial chuckle.

  In ordinary society Campbell did not appear by any means to the same advantage as Jeffrey, though he possessed incomparably more genius and sensibility. The former made no attempt at display in conversation; but the occasional splendid expression, the frequent tear in the eye, bespoke the profound emotion which was felt.

  The remaining glories of Poet’s Corner belong to our own time and to the future. It would seem as if, during the opening of this century, the place for once had lost its charm. Of that galaxy of poets which ushered in this epoch, Campbell alone has achieved there both grave and monument, on which is inscribed the lofty hope of immortality from his own poems.

  Had a cold, Scotch manner, but that was merely the educated habit or manner of his country—cautious, canny. There was sap behind the bark. If the oppression of the Poles or any other flagrant enormity was brought before him, his energy quickly flamed up. And he was also very vivacious, not to say riotous, in his cups.

  Campbell’s career was deeply weighted in other ways. His only son, whose childhood had been beautiful beyond expression to the tender father, who felt, as young parents often do, his own child a revelation from heaven, was a life-long grief and disappointment to him, and spent most of his life in a lunatic asylum. His wife died early; and he was left to make up to himself, as far as he could, by a hundred gentle flirtations, chiefly with ladies under the age of ten, for the absence of a woman’s society, and the bright faces of children. Some of his innocent adventures in this way are at once amusing and pathetic.

  Campbell, when he did himself justice, is known to have been an interesting converser: he rarely left you without having made some observation that was singularly suggestive, and which haunted the memory. Let us remember that it was Campbell who said—

	To live in hearts we leave behind
	Is not to die.

But the graceless Hogan kenned nothing of this; he was only able to tell me that Campbell was a feeble little fellow, that he spoke with a broad Scottish accent, that he wore a wig. Poor Campbell! Poor Hogan! Hogan knew even less about Campbell than Crabbe appeared to Moore to have known about Burke.

  Though Campbell was a poet, he was a great contrast to my beloved Southey. You could see that Southey was a poet, the very embodiment of poetry, while Campbell looked more like a lively and intelligent man who might never have written a line in his life. I think the difference was this: Southey wrote because he could not help it, Campbell because he liked to do it.

Pleasures of Hope, 1799

  I am not sure if Mr. Campbell’s “Pleasures of Hope” be not the most poetical production of the age. From the moment of its appearance to the present moment, the reading of it has always filled me with equal admiration of its plan, its melody, and powers of execution. It is full of genius and of noble conceptions—expressed in numbers at once polished and perfect.

  Is one of the few standard heroic poems in our language. Poetic taste has undergone many remarkable changes since it appeared, but its ardent numbers are constantly resorted to by those who love the fire of the muse as well as her more delicate tracery.

  The various and magnificent range of English poetry presents no example of early excellence to equal the “Pleasures of Hope.”… The laborious polish in the verses of the “Pleasures of Hope” are among the best proofs to what an extent English is capable of being refined, and how far the capabilities of the language will go to attain in the eyes of true taste a classical and healthful longevity—but to make further comment upon the merit of that which has received the plaudit of the world for half a century would be superfluous and out of place, stamped as it is with the impress of permanent endurance.

  It is almost impossible to speak of it in terms of exaggerated praise; and whether taking it in parts, or as a whole, I do not think I overrate its merits in preferring it to any didactic poem of equal length in the English language. No poet, at such an age, ever produced such an exquisite specimen of poetical mastery—that is, of fine conception and of high art combined…. Sentiments tender, energetic, impassioned, eloquent, and majestic, are conveyed to the reader in the tones of a music forever varied—sinking or swelling like the harmonies of an Æolian lyre—yet ever delightful; and these are illustrated by pictures from romance, history, or domestic life, replete with power and beauty…. It is like a long fit of inspiration—a chequered melody of transcendent excellence; passage after passage presenting only an ever-varying and varied tissue of whatever is beautiful and sublime in the soul of men and the aspects of nature.

  Of the nature of a prize poem, though a brilliant one.

  It is true that marks of juvenility are everywhere apparent; that the diction is often redundant, and sense not always commensurate with sound. Still it is a poem of sustained rhythmical march of sentiments expressive of every note in the gamut of feeling; and of episodes, whether from history, fiction or domestic life, full of beauty, force, pathos and natural truth…. Perhaps there is no didactic poem in our language so well known and loved as this, if not as a whole, by its component parts. There is hardly a doubt that it will continue to be so, in spite of new schools of poetry, and poetical criticism; and that it will retain its place, as a classic, in our literature, nobly closing that bright era of which Dryden and Pope heralded the morn, and which closed when the star of Wordsworth’s genius appeared above the political horizon, to announce a new day-spring of poetry and beauty.

  Campbell’s fame is secure in quotation. Many of his lines have become household words.

  In the last year of the last century appeared Campbell’s “Pleasures of Hope.” The “Pleasures of Memory,” published about seven years previously, had already passed through ten editions, and from Rogers the young Scottish poet seems to have caught his inspiration. It made him famous at once; yet it is difficult to say what attraction readers found in a poem full of inaccuracies and platitudes, and in which, as Hazlitt wittily says, “the decomposition of prose is substituted for the composition of poetry.” Campbell’s youthful success, however, affords a striking illustration of the obvious fact that in “the realms of gold” immediate popularity is no proof of sterling worth…. Yet the fact remains that Campbell’s extraordinary reputation at the outset of his career was due to a poem that is comparatively worthless.

  There are flaws in Campbell’s works as there were faults in his life, yet his name is associated with the finest lyrics in the English language, and no higher honour can be coveted by the most ambitious. The rather too rhetorical “Pleasures of Hope” survive, and will endure in single lines only; still it is no mean achievement or slight glory to have added even a few lines to the household speech of a people.

  Its success was so sudden that he was astonished, and so great that he was bewildered; for from that day forward he was, as his friend Scott remarked, afraid of the shadow that his own fame cast before him. Young persons of immature taste and abundant leisure may still recall the glittering and turgid lines of this overrated production; but no lover of its writer cares for it now.

  In “The Pleasures of Hope” these romantic enthusiasms were poured with much skill into the classical mould of Popian verse, suffusing without breaking its delicate contours. The literary public was captivated by a succession of impressive images, conveyed in lines of arrowy swiftness and strength.

  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…. 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.

Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809

  We rejoice to see once more a polished and pathetic poem in the old style of English pathos and poetry. This is of the pitch of the “Castle of Indolence,” and the finer parts of Spenser; with more feeling, in many places, than the first, and more condensation and diligent finishing than the latter. If the true tone of nature be not everywhere maintained, it gives place, at least, to art only, and not to affectation—and, least of all, to affectation of singularity or rudeness…. There are but two noble sorts of poetry—the pathetic, and the sublime; and we think he has given very extraordinary proofs of his talents for both.

  I am very glad that Jeffrey thinks so favourably of Campbell’s new poem, for his good opinion is very essential to the poet’s prosperity. Nobody will deny that it abounds in touches of a true genius; but the obscurity and embarrassment in the narrative, and the many bouts-rimés which we may charge upon the impatience of his subscribers, prevent me from reading the work yet with that uninterrupted pleasure which poetry must give, or it fails.

  The secret of Tom Campbell’s defense of inaccuracy in costume and description is, that his “Gertrude,” etc., has no more locality in common with Pennsylvania than with Penmanmaur. It is notoriously full of grossly false scenery, as all Americans declare, though they praise parts of the poem. It is thus that self-love forever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens, even accidentally, to stumble upon it.

  We conceive that Mr. Campbell excels chiefly in sentiment and imagery. The story moves slow, and is mechanically conducted, and rather resembles a Scotch canal carried over lengthened aqueducts and with a number of locks in it, than one of those rivers that sweep in their majestic course, broad and full, over Transatlantic plains and lose themselves in rolling gulfs, or thunder down lofty precipices. But in the center, the inmost recesses of our poet’s heart, the pearly dew of sensibility is distilled and collects, like the diamond in the mine, and the structure of his fame rests on the crystal columns of a polished imagination. We prefer the “Gertrude” to the “Pleasures of Hope,” because with perhaps less brilliancy, there is more of tenderness and natural imagery in the former.

  The greatest effort of Campbell’s genius, however, was his “Gertrude of Wyoming;” nor is it ever likely to be excelled in its own peculiar style of excellence. It is superior to “The Pleasures of Hope” in the only one thing in which that poem could be surpassed—purity of diction; while in pathos, and in imaginative power, it is no whit inferior.

  The construction of the entire poem is loose and incoherent. Even the love scenes, which, as Hazlitt says, breathe a balmy voluptuousness of sentiment, are generally 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 sympathetically 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. Anything more unlike the sweet, easy, graceful compactness of Spenser could scarcely be imagined. Nor are the characters of the poem altogether successful; indeed, with the single exception of the Indian, they are mere shadows. Gertrude herself makes a pretty portrait; but as Hazlitt has remarked, she cannot for a moment compare with Wordsworth’s Ruth, the true infant of the woods and child-nature.

Specimens of the British Poets, 1819

  It is the singular goodness of his criticisms that makes us regret their fewness; for nothing, we think, can be more fair, judicious and discriminating, and at the same time more fine, delicate and original, than the greater part of the discussions with which he has here presented us. It is very rare to find so much sensibility to the beauties of poetry, united with so much toleration for its faults; and so exact a perception of the merits of every particular style, interfering so little with a just estimate of all.

  Read the Poets—English, that is to say—out of Campbell’s edition. There is a good deal of taffeta in some of Tom’s prefatory phrases, but his work is good as a whole. I like him best, though, in his own poetry.

  There are also several incidental critical opinions in Campbell’s “Specimens” very elegantly expressed, and of a pure as well as highly cultivated taste; but there are others very careless; and some, I think, not a little prejudiced.

  A mere piece of task-work for the Booksellers and a thing of scissors and paste, save the fine Introduction and a half-a-dozen of the little Memoirs.

  The essays on poetry which precedes the “Specimens” is a notable contribution to criticism, and the lives are succinct, pithy, and fairly accurate, though such a writer is inevitably weak in minor details. He is especially hard on Euphuism, and it is curious that one of his most severe thrusts is made at Vaughan, to whom he probably owes the charming vision of “the world’s grey fathers” in his own “Rainbow.” The most valuable portions of the essay are those on Milton and Pope, which, together with such concise and lucid writing as the critical sections of the lives of Goldsmith and Cowper, show that Campbell was master of controversial and expository prose. Despite Miss Mitford’s merry-making, in one of her letters, over the length of time spent in preparing the “Specimens,” students cannot but be grateful for them as they stand. The illustrative extracts are not always fortunate, but this is due to the editor’s desire for freshness rather than to any lack of taste or judgment.

Theodric, 1824

  It is distinguished accordingly by a fine and tender finish, both of thought and of diction—by a chastened elegance of words and images—a mild dignity and tempered pathos in the sentiments, and a general tone of simplicity and directness in the conduct of the story, which, joined to its great brevity, tends at first perhaps to disguise both the richness and the force of the genius required for its production. But though not calculated to strike at once on the dull palled ear of an idle and occupied world, it is of all others perhaps the kind of poetry best fitted to win on our softer hours, and to sink deep into vacant bosoms—unlocking all the sources of fond recollection, and leading us gently on through the mazes of deep and engrossing meditation—and thus ministering to a deeper enchantment and more lasting delight than can ever be inspired by the more importune strains of more ambitious authors.

  Campbell wrote one other long story, “Theodric” by name, which he calls “domestic,” and in which he resumes the old heroic couplet (why called “heroic” it is hard to understand), stumping along as if with two wooden legs. It is a commonplace tragedy of real life prosaically related, into which a plainness of speech not usually met with in poetry is occasionally introduced, with a view no doubt to give the effect of reality and truth. Such language might have fulfilled its purpose had the story been written in prose; but being in verse of a stiff and pompous form, the effect is that of incongruity combining two affectations, an affectation of poetic elevation with an affectation of simplicity. In short, the poem is altogether unworthy of its author.

General

	To the famed throng now paid the tribute due,
	Neglected genius! let me turn to you.
	Come forth, O Campbell! give thy talents scope;
	Who dares aspire if thou must cease to hope?

	Campbell, for Hope and fine war-songs renown’d,
	With a wail underneath them of tenderer sound.

  Have you seen Campbell’s poem of “O’Connor’s Child?” it is beautiful. In many parts I think it is superior to Scott.

  If the rank of poets were to be settled by particular passages, I should place Campbell above Scott; I should predict, with more confidence, that “Lochiel,” the “Exile of Erin,” and the “Mariner’s Song” would endure, than I could venture to do about any other verses since Cowper and Burns—I had almost said, since Gray and Goldsmith. I am sorry to hear that he is engaged on an epic poem;—his genius is lyrical.

  The exquisite harmony of his versification is elaborated, perhaps, from the “Castle of Indolence” of Thomson, and the serious pieces of Goldsmith;—and it seems to be his misfortune, not to be able to reconcile himself to any thing which he cannot reduce within the limits of this elaborate harmony. This extreme fastidiousness, and the limitation of his efforts to themes of unbroken tenderness or sublimity, distinguish him from the careless, prolific, and miscellaneous authors of our primitive poetry;—while the enchanting softness of his pathetic passages, and the power and originality of his more sublime conceptions, place him at a still greater distance from the wits, as they truly called themselves, of Charles II. and Queen Anne.

  Byron’s and Scott’s “Poems” (I have read) and must admire,—though you recollect, we used to give Campbell a decided preference, and I still think, with justice.

  Mr. Campbell always seems to me to be thinking how his poetry will look when it comes to be hot-pressed on superfine wove paper, to have a disproportionate eye to points and commas, and dread of errors of the press. He is so afraid of doing wrong, of making the smallest mistake, that he does little or nothing. Lest he should wander irretrievably from the right path, he stands still. He writes according to established etiquette. He offers the Muses no violence. If he lights upon a good thought he immediately drops it for fear of spoiling a good thing. When he launches a sentiment that you think will float him triumphantly for once to the bottom of the stanza, he stops short at the end of the first or second line, and stands shivering on the brink of beauty, afraid to trust himself to the fathomless abyss. Tutus nimium, timidusque procellarum. His very circumspection betrays him. The poet, as well as the woman, that deliberates, is undone. He is much like a man whose heart fails him just as he is going up in a balloon, and who breaks his neck by flinging himself out of it when it is too late.

  I understand that Mr. Thomas Campbell has in some newspaper in a paltry refutation of some paltry charge of plagiarism regarding his paltry poem in the paltry Edinburgh touched the egg of my last man—the gentleman is completely addled.

  I wonder often how Tom Campbell, with so much real genius, has not maintained a greater figure in the public eye than he has done of late. The Magazine seems to have paralyzed him. The author, not only of the “Pleasures of Hope,” but of “Hohenlinden,” “Lochiel,” &c., should have been at the very top of the tree. Somehow he wants audacity, fears the public, and what is worse, fears the shadow of his own reputation. He is a great corrector too, which succeeds as ill in composition as in education. Many a clever boy is flogged into a dunce, and many an original composition corrected into mediocrity. Tom ought to have done a great deal more: his youthful promise was great.

Campbell, whom Freedom’s deathless Hope endears.

  What the devil did you mean by classing Campbell and one Pollok together in your toast at the St. Andrew’s dinner? Your wine must have been detestable. No sensible man like yourself could have made such a remark under the influence of champagne or Scottish whiskey. Campbell and Pollok. Hyperion to a satyr! Pray can you repeat without a book six lines of the “Course of Time?” If so, you have a very good memory badly employed. Can you not repeat without book every line which Tom Campbell has published? If not, you have never been as happy a man as you ought to have been.

  I should not omit this opportunity to mention that the Greenock paper was established by a Mr. John Davidson, a connexion with whom was afterwards formed by Mr. Thomas Campbell, the poet, in his marriage. Mr. Davidson was a very worthy illess bodie, and he has in my opinion the merit of first shewing with how little intellectual ability a newspaper may be conducted. I say not this in malice, but in sober sadness; for when Campbell wrote his “Battle of Hohenlinden,” I got an early copy, which I sent to Mr. Davidson to be inserted, but he with a sage face afterwards told me, that it was not worthy of a place in his paper.

  The conversation here turned upon Campbell’s poem of “Gertrude of Wyoming,” as illustrative of the poetic materials furnished by American scenery…. He (Scott) cited several passages of it with great delight. “What pity it is,” said he, “that Campbell does not write more, and oftener, and give full sweep to his genius.” He has wings that would bear him to the skies; and he does, now and then, spread them grandly, but folds them up again, and resumes his perch, as if he was afraid to launch away…. “What a grand idea is that,” said he, “about prophetic boding, or, in common parlance, second sight—

	‘Coming events cast their shadows before.’
	*        *        *        *        *

The fact is,” added he, “Campbell is, in a manner, a bugbear to himself. The brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his further efforts. He is afraid of the shadow that his own fame casts before him.”

  Dinner at Rogers’s. Almost over when I arrived. Company: Wordsworth, Landseer. Taylor, and Miss R. A good deal of talk about Campbell’s poetry, which they were all much disposed to carp at and depreciate, more particularly Wordsworth. I remarked that Campbell’s lesser poems, his sea odes, &c., bid far more fair, I thought, for immortality than almost any of the lyrics of the present day; on which they all began to pick holes in some of the most beautiful of these things.

  Do not start if I tell you that in my poor opinion Campbell is a much better poet than Petrarch. I do not say a better; I say a much better.

	What lauding sepulchre does Campbell want?
	’Tis his to give, and not derive renown.
	What monumental bronze or adamant,
	Like his own deathless lays can hand him down?

	In yon Minster’s hallow’d corner, where the bards and sages rest,
	Is a silent chamber waiting to receive another guest.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Tears along mine eyes are rushing, but the proudest tears they be,
	Which in manly eyes may gather,—tears ’twere never shame to see;
	Tears that water lofty purpose; tears of welcome to the fame
	Of the bard that hath ennobled Scotland’s dear and noble name.

  Campbell’s poetry has little need of critical illustration. His chief merit is rhetorical. There is not vagueness of mysticism in his verse. The scenes and feelings he delineates are common to human beings in general, and the impressive style with which these are unfolded, owes its charm to vigor of language and forcible clearness of epithet. Many of his lines ring with a harmonious energy, and seem the offspring of the noblest enthusiasm. This is especially true of his martial lyrics, which in their way are unsurpassed.

  Campbell possessed a noble nature, but its impulses were checked by an incurable laziness. He “dawdled” too much over his long compositions. The curse of his life was a pension of two hundred pounds. The capacity of the man is best displayed in those burning lyrics, which were called forth by the events of his time. When his soul was roused to its utmost, it ever manifested great qualities. His poems, generally, will probably live…. Had Campbell written “Childe Harold,” it would have cost him ten years more labor than it did the author, and would not have been half as long.

  I looked at the life of Campbell by a foolish Dr. Beattie; a glorious specimen of the book-making of this age. Campbell may have written in all his life three hundred good lines, rather less than more. His letters, his conversation, were mere trash. A life such as Johnson has written of Shenstone, or Akenside, would have been quite long enough for the subject; but here are three mortal volumes.

  No poet of the nineteenth century has, in my estimation, a higher rank than Thomas Campbell; no one is more universally admired, and no one will be longer remembered. His exquisite harmony of versification, his occasional sublimity, his enthusiasm, his pathetic tenderness, his richness of natural description, together with his elevation and purity of moral sentiment, all combine to make him a classic secure of his immortality—standing upon the same shelf with Goldsmith, Thomson and Gray.

  We know of few specimens of English verse comparable to the best of Campbell’s for effective rhythm.

  His mind, deficient in manly vigor of thought, had worked itself out in the few first bursts of youthful emotion, but no one has clothed with more of romantic sweetness the feelings and fancies which people the fairy-land of early dreams, or thrown around the enchanted region a purer atmosphere of moral contemplation.

  With all his classic taste and careful finish, Campbell’s writing, especially in his earlier poetry, is rarely altogether free for any considerable number of lines from something hollow and false in expression, into which he was seduced by the conventional habits of the preceding bad school of verse-making in which he had been partly trained, and from which he emerged, or by the gratification of his ear lulling his other faculties asleep for the moment.

  Campbell was a great artist, but on reading his lyrics we are struck with the fact that they are in a large measure the product of a skilled mind rather than of a real singer.

  Campbell described the fall of freedom in some of the most beautiful lines which were ever composed; and the vigour of his descriptions breathed new life into the cause of the popular party, both in England and Europe.

  A mild and moonlike lustre surrounds the name of Campbell. He is like one of those holy personages whom the painter, in the later ages of Italian or Christian art, represents with a faint lumour round the head, in the company of Saints of a more illustrious order who have a full-circleted glory, while the Madonna or other protagonist is endowed with a cruciform nimbus on a complete scale. The question arises in the artist’s and the spectator’s mind whether it were wiser to define this holy personage by that lowest symptom of sainthood, or rather to merge him in the mass of men to whom no occipital glimmer appertains. Even to himself, could he answer the question articulately, might it not be more congenial to remain undistinguished than thus to be distinguished by the minimum of outward beatitude? The painter is in half a mind to rub out the lumour round his head: but at last he determines the question on grounds of strict and accurate right. This personage is entitled to his lumour: Simeon, Joachim, Zacharias, or what not, he has a right to the distinctive sign, and must not be despoiled of it. And so with Campbell. Any reader who should deny him the name of poet, and the aureole of poesy, would do an injustice; but one may needfully discriminate as to which of his various compositions have rightly earned him this eminence, and may demur to rating the eminence, in any instance, higher than its demonstrable value.

  The English language has nothing finer or more inspiriting in their kind than the patriotic ballads which were perfected at this period…. It is one of the mysteries of genius which is least comprehensible, how a youth of the most peaceable sort, trained upon letters, and sea-sick and wretched when fate compelled him to cross the Channel, should have been the person to add to our national literature those boldest and most gallant of sailor-lyrics.

  There are poems by Campbell which can be forgotten only with the language in which they are written. There is that weird “Lochiel! Lochiel! beware of thy day!” which no school-book of our time ought to omit, and no collection should be without. It will never be an easy task to banish “Gertrude of Wyoming” from the poetry of love and passion; or those noble lyrics, “The Battle of the Baltic,” and “Ye Mariners of England,” from the patriot-poetry of the world. One of the most touching pieces in any language is that pathetic story in verse about a parrot, which, by the force of genius, is lifted into an atmosphere of the rarest beauty.

  He was the Tyrtæus of England’s song, the laureate of her naval victories, unsurpassed and unsurpassable.

  It is by his shorter pieces that Campbell will retain his hold upon posterity. It is difficult to imagine a time in which human hearts will not thrill with patriotic ardour at the recital of “Hohenlinden,” “Ye Mariners of England,” and the “Battle of the Baltic” or throb with sympathy at the recital of “The Soldier’s Dream,” and the story of “Lord Ullin’s Daughter.” There are a lofty tone and rhythmic movement in these ballads which one would think could never fail to please. “The Last Man” is one of the grander of these shorter pieces, and well-nigh rises to the level of its sublime theme. “O’Connor’s Child” is a more sustained effort, full of passion, pathos, and poetic fervour. Campbell was at his best when his heart was stirred by patriotic emotion or sympathy for the suffering and the oppressed. Had he written no more than this small group of poems, with “O’Connor’s Child” for his longest effort, he would have written himself deep in human hearts, and therefore high in human estimation.

  In Campbell’s work, which is known to every school-boy and school-girl in lines and extracts, but which nobody reads now as a whole except under some other compulsion than the fascination of the poetry, there were no signs of a disposition to break with the past either in form or in choice of subject…. Like Gray, Campbell lacked the courage of his imagination. The incubus of literary tradition lay heavy on him. He had a distrustful critic within, the creation of scholastic training, which clung to the skirts of his imagination and impeded its freedom of movement whenever it tried to burst away from the beaten track. His diffidence about “Hohenlinden” is sometimes quoted as an example of the saw that “genius is unconscious of its own excellence.” But against this must be set the fact that late in life Campbell considered the “O’Connor’s Child” was his best poem, and that in this he has the support of most people who are familiar with his poetry. It is unlike his popular lyrics, in the fact that it takes more than one reading to appreciate, but it is worth the trouble of reading more than once. Some think that if “Gertrude of Wyoming” had been published before the “Pleasures of Hope” it might have ranked as his chief work, but the subject is too remote to have achieved any great amount of popularity.

  The three splendid war-songs … the equals, if not the superiors, of anything of the kind in English, and therefore in any language—set him in a position from which he is never likely to be ousted. In a handful of others—“Lochiel,” the exquisite lines on “A Deserted Garden in Argyleshire,” with, for some flashes at least the rather over-famed “Exile of Erin,” “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” and a few more—he also displays very high, though rather unequal and by no means unalloyed, poetical faculty; and “The Last Man,” which, by the way, is the latest of his good things, is not the least. But his best work will go into a very small compass: a single octavo sheet would very nearly hold it, and it was almost all written before he was thirty…. It is to be noted that even in Campbell’s greatest things there are distinct blemishes, and that these blemishes are greatest in that which in his best parts reaches the highest level—“The Battle of the Baltic.” Many third and some tenth rate poets would never have left in their work such things as “The might of England flushed To anticipate the scene,” which is half fustian and half nonsense: no very great poet could possibly have been guilty of it. Yet for all this Campbell holds, as has been said, the place of best singer of war in a race and language which are those of the best singers and not the worst fighters in the history of the world—in the race of Nelson and the language of Shakespeare. Not easily shall a man win higher praise than this.

  He was a born actor—in need (for his best work) of the foot-lights, the on-lookers, the trombone, the bass-drum. He never glided into victories of the pen by natural inevitable movement of brain or heart; he stopped always and everywhere to consider his pose.

  What Campbell felt and expressed with singular power was the terrible sublimity of Battle. His battle-pictures have touches of Hebraic imagination, the “hurricane eclipse of the sun,” or “Her march is o’er the mountain-waves, her home is on the deep.” But Campbell’s sublimity hovers near the verge of the melodramatic, and one of these otherwise magnificent songs is marred by false notes like that which tells how the “might of England flush’d to anticipate the scene,” or how a kindly mermaid “condoles” with the mourners for the dead. Nor does he quite escape the naïvetés incident to agressive patriotism; as when the victors, after hailing their foes as “men and brothers,” proceed to demand that they shall surrender fleet and crews “and make submission meet to our King.” Little of Campbell but these songs now survives.

  He had a remarkable gift for lucid, rapid, and yet truly poetical narrative; his naval odes or descants, the “Battle of the Baltic” and “Ye Mariners of England,” are without rivals in their own class, and Campbell deserves recognition as a true romanticist and revolutionary force in poetry, although fighting for his own hand, and never under the flag of Wordsworth and Coleridge. For the time being, however, Campbell did more than they—more, perhaps, than any other writer save one—to break down in popular esteem the didactic convention of the classic school.

  The well-spring of poetry was not vouchsafed to Campbell. 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 tribunal, condemned? We read of him polishing and polishing until 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…. Time has brought in its revenges for Campbell. His poems enshrine no great thoughts, engender no consummate expression. Felicities, prettinesses, harmonies of a sort one may find; respectabilities, vigour, patriotic and liberal sentiments declaimed with gusto. But these do not raise him above the level of a third-rate poet. His war songs will keep him alive, and that after all is no mean praise.