The poet was highly pleased at the simile. I could only tell him the man's name was Dix, and that I knew no more. He said, have they been printed ? we must have them in the magazine. There was an adaptation about them, a complete appropriateness as well as smoothness, which was well worthy of preservation. "I gratified his whim about them, but in which volume of the thirty, during his ten years of editorship, or in what manner, I do not recollect. It seemed to be a practice with Campbell, not, indeed, one at all out of the way, to treasure up the remembrance of casual passages that struck his fancy, of a similar kind to the present. That already mentioned in page 56, he often repeated afterwards, when the conversation turned upon poetry, as we were going over any of the productions that came for inspection. Mention has already been made of Thomas Pringle, who had sent from Scotland to the poet an article, written by a friend of his own, in defence of Campbell against some censures of Hazlitt in his public lectures, to which the poet's reply has been given. Some time afterwards, Pringle went out, with some members of his family, as an emigrant to the Cape of Good Hope, where he set himself down in a sequestered valley, which he and his friends named Glen Lynden. It appears that, while in this remote region among Hottentots and wild animals , his well-known attachment to the muses did not weaken. He wrote Campbell, under date of September, 1825, from Bavian's River, at the Cape. He had heard of the New Monthly, and, far distant as he was, he had heard of the work being under the poet's superintendence. He stated that he had previously sent some trifles for the magazine to London, but they did not appear to have come to hand. I had no recollection of their receipt. He proceeded : “ In the remote situation in which I have since resided, I have no means of ascertaining whether any of those trifles have been deemed worthy of admittance. Nevertheless, I now use the freedom to send you a few additional pieces, through a more direct channel. The two, signed J. F. and Q., are written by my friend, Mr. J. Fairburn, lately conjunct editor with me of a South African Journal, suppressed by the interference of our colonial government. The other verses are late attempts of my own; some of them, perhaps, or all, unfit for your distinguished miscellany; but, if they secure no other purpose, permit me to request that they may at least be considered as a slight testimony of the writer's high respect for your character and principles, and his heartfelt gratitude for the pure enjoyment and consolation your poetry has often afforded him in situations of solitude and adversity, where the true value of works, like yours, can, perhaps, be most fully appreciated.” Pringle was soon after obliged to return to England, owing to the despotic conduct of that Verres of the Cape, Lord Somerset, then governing there. The South African Journal was a very excellent periodical work, and conferred great credit upon Pringle, who, indeed, was not unused to periodical literature, having had a hand in establishing Blackwood's Magazine, which he very soon afterwards left. Pringle gave both to Campbell and myself copies of the work up to the time of its suppression, a number or two only. It would have puzzled the most scrupulous diabolus regis, or attorney-general of the good old times, to find an assailable sentence in it. The contents were in no way political, the larger part confined to local and natural history. The sic volo, sic jubeo, was all the redress poor Pringle could get. "Lord Bathurst, then colonial secretary, wished him to go out again, considering he had been grossly ill-treated; but Pringle was wiser than to place himself where he would be continually marked out for that annoyance which Lord Bathurst could not restrain. He knew what the petty satraps, who govern some of our colonies, have it in their power to do if they choose, and he had experienced enough of Lord Somerset's tyrannical pretensions, as well , indeed, as the whole colony, had done. Pringle, therefore, looked about for something to do at home, and, soon after his arrival, called upon Campbell. He lodged, I think, in Arundel-street, in the Strand. Campbell introduced him nominally to me, some time in 1826. The first article he sent to the magazine, related to colonial slavery at the Cape. He stated, in a note to Campbell , that he had “taken a very different view of the subject from some other recent writers; but that a residence of six years in the colony, and an intimate acquaintance with every class of its inhabitants, had enabled him to give a just and unexaggerated picture of the great moral and political evil as it existed in South Africa.” Campbell at once entered into the idea, gave me Pringle's letter, and I called upon him. I found a strong made, mild, good-humoured man, upon crutches, and at once formed an idea of the excellence of the man's character, that was never falsified, but rose higher and higher on further acquaintance. I took him to the poet's house, as they had no personal knowledge of each other, and in turn introduced him. They afterwards became warm friends until the decease of Pringle, which preceded that of the poet eight or nine years. The letters on slavery in South Africa were his articles, among others, inserted in the seventeenth volume of the magazine. Campbell, fired at once by the subject, went into the cases cited as if slavery had been a novelty. "The slaveholders,” said he, "act like thieves who are conscious that they have the stolen property upon them, and are ever in fear of losing it—they abuse it.” He highly commended Pringle's zeal in the good cause, and the Cape emigrant, superior man as he was, became a visitor at Campbell's, among those friends who entered his house whenever inclination prompted. “I do not know how it is, said Campbell, “but I like Pringle the more I see of him.” “ Yes,” I observed, laughingly, “a friend of ours calls him a Scot without guile.' “No national reflections,” said the poet; we are only a little more careful than other people, that is all. We are sadly libelled by your Wilkes and your Junius," added he, laughing; "the one nobody knowing who he is, his scandal is synonymous with what nobody says; the other was an arrant knave." Men of the greatest genius are sometimes lazy, and want a spur; sometimes modest, and scarcely dare venture before the public; and they are often conscious of the faults in their better productions. Even their best things they are not fond of, because their idea of what they ought to be is far above what they have made them. 66 Hence it was," says & distinguished writer, “ I am induced to believe that Virgil desired his works to be burned.” This kind of idleness, in relation to Campbell, was too apparent in a superficial glance, if, indeed, that be idleness, in the general acceptation of the term, which consists, not in inactivity, but only in action foreign to any good purpose. I have mentioned the deviations of the poet in this respect." I must further state my doubts, whether he ever wrote any thing wholly to his satisfaction, except the lines Here I observed, that we took it according to the terminating sound from the French; but then there was the Latin sepulchrum, from which Johnson derived it. Upon this he took down Johnson, and agreed that we might have had it from either the one tongue or the other. Sepulcretum was a burying-place. We applied the word "sepulchre” in a definite sense to the burying-place of an individual, but the Latin sepulcretum differed from sepulchrum on this very ground, that the Latin language had the advantage of two words; the one particular, and the other general. We wanted the general word still. “Well," said I, “there is the genitive case of sepulchrum ?” “ I can't make an English nominative out of a Latin genitive. No, no; I must be content with Johnson. If you could find sepulchry' in Sidney, or in any Elizabethan writer, in Chaucer, or Gower, or any time between those and Dryden's day, I would use it. I do not like the termination, but it must stand for all I can do to amend it." “ Then I would adopt it," I replied. “No, no, my friend, I would not do that; the critics would be on me more severely than they have been about the existing blemish. It reads well alone, if we forget that there should be a concinnity with the preceding lines. The critics have barked at it long ago, and their barking is over. I must not renew it." He asked me one day—I must observe that, though our business led to literary conversation continually, he rarely spoke of his own poems, a circumstance arising from a delicate feeling lest he should be thought boastful of them—he one day asked me which I preferred, the “ Pleasures of Hope," or “ Gertrude of Wyoming,” because I had used a quotation from the first. I replied, I liked the “Gertrude” best; not only on account of its being written in a stanza that, of all others, I preferred, but because there was something preceptive or didactical about the “Pleasures of Hope;" whereas his “Gertrude” described nature and feeling only. The mere virtue, however, dressed in poetic grace, did not interest like a tale of passion, which seemed nearer to man than one of his abstract faculties, although I would subscribe humani nihil alienum. “ You then think as I do ; for the reason you give, perhaps, that we feel a deeper interest in subjects of that nature, but I was not always of the same opinion.” He spoke at one of our desultory conversations, of an image which had occurred to him as highly poetical to the following purport. "Imagine,” said he, “the passengers of a vessel kept below during a gale, that 66 canvas. the proceedings on the deck may not be interrupted. Suppose them so close upon a lee shore that all chance of safety has disappeared for the vessel." From the despair of the commander and crew, arising out of the knowledge that nothing can save their lives, their actual state is announced to them, with the departure of all hope, while the rising sun is darting a bright ray in at the cabin windows, against which the sea beats for an entrance, speaking to their hearts · How many millions, this fine morning hail with rapture those brilliant beams which only serve to light us to our destruction.' He had wished, but had not been able, to introduce this image in any form into poetry, so as to embody it in a particular picture of distress. It was a feeling more easy to imagine than put into words. There were many such images that language could convey in outline from mind to mind, but that imagination alone could fill up. It was that kind of poetry which the art of painting could never place upon the The idea might be made to Ait across the minds of the supposed sufferers, but how was the thrill of anguish that accompanied it to be put into language ? It often happened that a crude or roughly written paper was offered to the magazine of which I should complain, saying, in other respects it was good. He would in such a case give advice the reverse of that which he made his own rule on commencing his editorship. “Never mind,” he would observe, “if one should not write so one'sself, there is no objection to it sometimes in others, it makes a variety in the style of the papers. Such articles are like spontaneous thoughts arising out of casual positions, in which chance places us in relation with company or novelty of scenery. They are often rough and original, and very often, too, more forcible than they could be made by the most elaborate study. Don't let us endeavour to mend that which we cannot make our own nor retain as another's." He added to a notice of “Godwin's Commonwealth,” and he was very intimate with the author, the following rather severe remark. “An air of good faith and of willingness to contemplate every thing that passes before him with calmness and candour constitutes nearly all that is valuable in this compilation. But here our praise must end. As an historical work, we cannot say that it is valuable, for he neither narrates events nor draws characters with any skill or ingenuity. There is every thing that is the reverse of a lucidus ordo in the arrangement of the materials. All is placed before us like a future without perspective. Nor has he made the slightest addition in the way of research to the stock of facts already well known respecting that period, with the exception of a few errors which he detected in Hume.” “ You are rather severe on your old friend Godwin,” I observed, “he will be much hurt at such remarks." True,” he replied, " I did not advert to that, but I ran my eye over the work, and am inclined to think the judgment is right.' “Mr. Colburn, too, will wonder, for he supposes, of course, that you had read the work in manuscript when you recommended him to publish it." Ay, true, I did not reflect upon that." He then put his pen through the whole. Yet he had commended the work. The truth was, he had probably not read more than a dozen pages of it in the manuscript, for he was very impatient of reading any thing out of print. He used to say, too, what every one must have felt who has been much concerned in literary labour, that it is not half as easy to detect errors in manuscript as in print, nor even to acquire their contents so well for the purpose of giving an opinion upon their merits. Among the numerous communications received from time to time, there was one that interested him, because it related to Sir Walter Raleigh, it was of no use to the magazine. The writer's name I forget. It gave him also an invitation to inspect some Hindoo deities in the writer's possession. He would not have gone to have inspected even Greek sculptures at that moment, and he had soon forgot all about the matter. He complained also that the lines were not well substantiated as originals, though said to be taken from an old book in possession of a friend of the writer's, printed in the last century. The lines thus said to be Raleigh's I preserved. They were printed with the others in the book spoken of, according to his correspondent, Tell mirth it is but madness, Tell hope it disappointeth, The heart like balm anointeth, Then give them, too, the lie! “ The writer sent the lines to me because he heard there was to be a new edition of my Specimens,'” said Campbell. “I have not yet heard a word of it.” Mrs. Hemans sent a poem called the “Forest Sanctuary," to theNew Monthly, which, on telling him of it, he begged me to notice it in the large print, in place of sending it to a friend who wrote most of the small print critiques. Mrs. Hemans sent with it the following note, which, as connected with her name, is worthy of preservation : “The accompanying little poem I have the pleasure of sending for the New Monthly. I trust the packet which I forwarded to you last week has been received safely, and in sufficient time for the destination of its contents. “ You will do me a kindness by announcing a book of mine, which will shortly be published by Mr. Murray, it is called the . Forest Sanctuary, with Lays of many Lands, and other Poems.' “ The Forest Sanctuary' is the tale of a Spanish exile, who flies from the religious persecutions of his country in the sixteenth century, and takes refuge in the wilds of America, where he relates his own story. The remaining pieces consist chiefly of the little poems founded on national customs and recollections, which I have, from time to time, sent to the New Monthly." It was a very rare instance indeed that Campbell did not give a lady clear way in all she said, listening and paying attention, if what was said was frivolous, with the most polite attention. He was not like Scott, who could not bear a religious wife, but he was far more inimical to intolerance in a female than in one of the other sex. He used to say of Inglis, then as now the standing representative of the intolerance of the day in public life," he is a most excellent good-natured man, a Tory to be sure; as to his bigotry, however could he represent Oxford orthodoxy without being its own dear doxy to the letter. I know him for a good kind of man with a bad-natured faith.” |