married an old cultivated friend, the gentle poetess, Caroline Bowles (1787-1854); but her care could not save a brain and a body which had been overstrained. In 1839 his health broke down, and on the 21st of March 1843 he died. He was buried, in the presence of the venerable Wordsworth, in the churchyard of Crosthwaite. The moral nature of Southey had a beauty which is not reflected in his poetry. He My dear Sor. Berwick. I May. 1870 I will not left a post pass while without acknowledging It receipt of your paper concerning Coleridy. What can I say open to rad. ་ был? c. subject? _ What but that I always looker on with desenifert & corron to the disclosures pluck wouk be made after his dealt by some person in mere renseless indiscretion. by others in matice, & by come, as in your cass in proper self defence! How fee would content themselves with rayong as little as little as you handa У Кіть и сти is one mesaffrehencers concernens anyself. My engagement as your стишу Poet Laureate did wit commence litt 1798; & It quant to that? rappled was never intended to b. countered as making up Colendger defiemey I never Boat & Hat Caurenterlich without rahifaction. The gunner a week shike I hits it came in a reasonably in and of the slender oneant. it a very considerable part of those Menor Roces sand I han Royht Россия bork preservers, & upon stuct much careful correct on has recently bee bestover, were writter on your employ, & otherouse wout not have bee witter. 1 Prevent my Robert Southey. Facsimile Letter from Southey to Daniel Stuart was reserved-he "covered," he said, "his feelings with a bear-skin"—and his austerity and abruptness made him many enemies; but he was a man of the finest rectitude and the most practical generosity of heart, without jealousy, without littleness, bearing sorrow and pain with equanimity, nobly desirous to preserve intact the dignity of life and literature. His lifelong attitude to Wordsworth, to Coleridge and his family, to Scott, to Landor, to Davy, attests the constancy and the unselfishness of his character. But he was hard in later life, and without any of the suppleness which makes social intercourse agreeable, while it is impossible to deny that he grew both arrogant and priggish. He had so handsome a presence in middle life that Byron declared that, to possess it, he would even have consented to write Southey's Sapphics. Were but to them a scene of joyance and delight. Vainly, ye blessed twinklers of the night Quench'd in the unnatural light which might out-stare And thou from thy celestial way Pourest, O Moon, an ineffectual ray ! Blotting the lights of heaven With one portentous glare. Behold the fragrant smoke in many a fold Ascending, floats along the fiery sky, And hangeth visible on high, A dark and waving canopy. What effect the new ideas could produce on a perfectly ductile fancy may be observed in a very interesting way in the case of THOMAS CAMPBELL. This young Scotchman, born in 1777, had evidently seen no poetry more modern than that of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Rogers, when he published his Pleasures of Hope. The very name of this work discovered its adhesion to eighteenthcentury tradition. It was a tame, "correct" essay, in a mode already entirely outworn. As a student it had been Campbell's pride to be styled "the Pope of Glasgow." When he became aware of them, he rejected all the proposed reforms of Wordsworth, whose work he continued to detest throughout his life; but in 1800 he proceeded to Germany, where he fell completely under the spell of the romantic poets of that nation, and presently gave to the world Lochiel, Hohenlinden, and the Exile of Erin. These were succeeded by other spirited ballads, amatory and martial, and by a romantic epic in Spenserian stanza, Gertrude of Wyoming, in which Campbell's style is wholly Teutonised. After this Campbell wrote little that was readable, and his fame, once far greater than that of Coleridge and Wordsworth, has now dwindled to an unjust degree. 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 Eugland, 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. Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) was the eighth son and eleventh child of Alexander Campbell, a Virginia merchant of Glasgow, who had recently been ruined by the American War when the future poet was born on the 27th of July 1777. He was a precocious scholar and an early rhymester, and at the age of fourteen he entered the University of Glasgow with credit. His student verses were unusually spirited, his student speeches were delivered "with remarkable fluency and in a strong Glasgow brogue." In 1794 the poverty of his parents obliged him, though not yet seventeen, to accept a clerkship in a merchant's office, but his notion was to escape from this drudgery to America. In the summer of 1795, however, he obtained a tutorship at Sunipol, in the island of Mull, and started for the Western Highlands in company with a friend. "The wide world contained not two merrier boys; we sang and recited poetry through the long, wild Highland glens." This visit to Mull left an indelible impression on Campbell's imagination. It was followed in 1796 by a similar appointment on the Sound of Jura. In the year 1797 Campbell published, perhaps in a broadsheet, the Thomas Campbell After the Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence earliest of his characteristic battle-poems, The Wounded Hussar, and was encouraged to look to literature as a profession. He moved his headquarters from Glasgow to Edinburgh, and in 1798 he began to compose The Pleasures of Hope. This poem appeared the following year, and "the demand for copies was unprecedented." The coteries of Edinburgh opened their arms to welcome the young poet, and among the friends his book brought him was the still youthful Walter Scott. The Pleasures of Hope exactly suited the taste of the day, and Campbell was "very much noticed and invited out." He spent the money which his poem brought him in foreign travel, and on 1st June 1800 left Leith for Hamburg. He had some stirring adventures, acquainted himself with much German literature, and returned to London in something less than a year. It was in Germany that several of his famous patriotic poems were composed. He settled again in Edinburgh, until in 1802 he accepted an invitation from Lord Minto to be his guest, and perhaps secretary, in his London house. A description of Campbell taken at this time, when he was in his twenty-sixth year, brings him before us as "scrupulously neat in his dress, . . . . a blue coat, with bright gilt buttons, a white waistcoat and cravat, buff nankins and white stockings, with shoes and silver His hair was already falling off; and he adopted the peruke, which he never LIT: UNION afterwards laid aside." In 1803 appeared a subscription edition of Campbell's collected poems, which brought him in some money, and he was emboldened to marry his lively and elegant cousin, Miss Matilda Sinclair. The young couple took a house at Sydenham, which remained their home. until 1820. Unfortunately, Campbell was, as he said, "always ready to shoot himself when he came to the subject of cash accounts," and his life became as a nightmare of financial embarrassment. In 1804 he wrote The Battle of the Baltic and Lord Ullin's Daughter, and this may be considered the highwater mark of his career as a poet. In 18 5 his distresses were relieved by a pension of £200 a year. The remainder of Campbell's life was not very interesting. In 1809 he published, with universal approbation, his Gertrude of Wyoming, a poem, as was then considered, instinct with "the soft and skyish tints of purity and truth,” arranged in the Spenserian stanza as employed in The Castle of Indolence. In 1815 the Campbells, always wretched managers, were again in pecuniary distress, when a remote and eccentric Highland connection, who had heard of his piety to his mother and sister, remarked that "little Tommy the Poet ought to have a legacy," and then died, leaving him nearly £5000. Campbell became prominent as a lecturer on poetry, and he showed a broad sympathy in dealing with the treasures of our early literature. In 1820 he became editor of the New Monthly Magazine, an easy post with a handsome salary, which he held for ten years. His narrative poem, Theodric, appeared in 1824, and was a failure. Troubles now gathered upon Campbell; his only surviving child became insane, his excellent wife died, and he himself became the victim of irritable melancholia. He wrote much, in prose, but he did his work badly; his old fastidiousness and care seemed to have left him. His Life of Mrs. Siddons (1834), from which great things were expected, proved to be a deplorable piece of shirked hack-work. Campbell had lost the healthy gusto of life. He was still, however, a Thomas Campbell From a Drawing by Daniel Maclise |