Campbell, as has already been observed, was educated at Glasgow, and received the honour of election as Lord Rector, three successive years, notwithstanding the opposition of the professors, and the excellent individuals who were placed against him; among whom were the late minister Canning, and Sir Walter Scott. The students of Glasgow College considered that the celebrity of the poet, his liberal principles, his being a fellow-townsman, and his attention to their interests, entitled him to the preference.

In person, Mr. Campbell is below the middle stature, well made, but slender. His features indicate great sensibility; his eyes are particularly striking, and of a deep blue colour; his nose aquiline; his expression generally saturnine. His step is light, but firm; and he appears to possess much more energy of constitution than men of fifty-two who have been studious in their habits, exhibit in general. His time for study is mostly during the stillness of night, when he can be wholly abstracted from external objects. He is remarkable for absence of mind; is charitable and kind in his disposition, but of quick temper. His amusements are few; the friend and conversation only; and in the "flow of soul" there are few men possessing more companionable qualities. His heart is perhaps one of the best that beats in a human bosom : it is," observes a biographer, "that which should belong to the poet of Gertrude, his favourite personification.'

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To exhibit the poet in the social circle, as well as to introduce a very piquant portrait, drawn by a friend, we subjoin a leaf or two from Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries*-displaying all the graphic ease for which Mr. Hunt is almost without a rival:

"I forget how I became acquainted with Mr. Hill, proprietor of the Monthly Mirror; but at his house at Sydenham I used to meet his editor, Mr. Dubois, Mr. Campbell, who was his neighbour, and the two Smiths, authors of The Rejected Addresses. Once or twice I saw also Mr. Theodore Hook, and Mr. Mathews, the comedian. Our host (and I thought him no older the other day than he was then) was a jovial bachelor, plump and rosy as an abbot : and no abbot could have presided over a more festive Sunday. The wine flowed merrily and long; the discourse kept pace with it; and next morning, in returning to town, we felt ourselves very thirsty. A pump by the road side, with a plash round it, was a bewitching sight.

"They who know Mr. Campbell only as the author of Gertrude of Wyoming and the Pleasures of Hope, would not suspect him to be a merry companion, overflowing with humour and anecdote, and any thing but fastidious. These Scotch poets have always something in reserve: it is the only point in which the major part of them resemble their countrymen. The mistaken character which the lady formed of Thomson from his Seasons is well known. He let part of the secret out in his Castle of Indolence; and the more he let out, the more honour he did to the simplicity and cordiality of the poet's nature, though not always to the elegance of it. Allan Ramsay knew his friends Gay and Somerville as well in their writings, as he did when he came to be personally acquainted with them; but Allan, who had bustled up from a barber's shop into a bookseller's, was a cunning shaver;' and nobody would have guessed the author of the Gentle Shepherd to be penurious. Let none suppose that any insinuation to that effect is intended against Mr. Campbell: he is one of the few men whom I could at any time walk half-a-dozen miles through the snow to spend an afternoon 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 has, besides an extreme cautiousness in his writings; and that one is 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, * We are aware of part of the subsequent extract having appeared in vol. xi. of THE MIRROR, but the additional interest which it bears in juxtaposition with this Memoir, induces us to repeat it here.

like a man speaking with suspended breath, and in the habit of subduing his feelings. No man, I should guess, feels more kindly towards his fellowcreatures, or takes less credit for it. When he indulges in doubt and sarcasm, and speaks contemptuously of things in general, he does it, partly, no doubt, out of actual dissatisfaction, but more perhaps than he suspects, out of a fear of being thought weak and sensitive-which is a blind that the best men very commonly practise. Mr. Campbell professes to be hopeless and sarcastic, and takes pains all the while to set up an university.

When I first saw this eminent person, he gave me the idea of a French Virgil: not that he is 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 dimi nishing nature as in a drawing-room mirror. This fancy was strengthened in the course of conversation, by his expatiating on the greatness of Racine. I think he had a volume of the French Tragedian in his hand. 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. For a lettered solitude and a bridal properly got up, both according to law and luxury, commend us to the lovely Gertrude of Wyoming. 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. Some gentle puritan 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 the male. But he appeared not at all grateful for this; and when his critiques and his Virgilianism were over, very unlike a puritan he talked! He seemed to spite his restrictions; and out of the natural largeness of his sympathy with things high and low, to break at once out of Delille's Virgil into Cotton's, like a boy let loose from school. When I have the pleasure of hearing him now, I forget his Virgilianisms, and think only of the delightful companion, the unaffected philanthropist, and the creator of a beauty worth all the heroines in Racine.

Mr. Campbell has tasted pretty sharply of the good and ill of the present state of society, and for a book-man has beheld strange sights. He witnessed a battle in Germany from the top of a convent (on which battle he has written a noble ode); and he saw the French cavalry enter a town, wiping their bloody swords on the horses' manes. Not long ago he was in Germany again, I believe to purchase books; for in addition to his classical scholarship, and his other languages, he is a reader of German. The readers there, among whom he is popular, both for his poetry and his love of freedom, crowded about him with affectionate zeal; and they gave him, what he does not dislike, a good dinner. There is one of our writers who has more fame than he; but not one who enjoys a fame equally wide, and without drawback. Like many of the great men in Germany, Schiller, Wieland, and others, he has not scrupled to become editor of a magazine; and his name alone has given it among all circles a recommendation of the greatest value, and such as makes it a grace to write under him.

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I have since been unable to help wishing, perhaps not very wisely, that Mr. Campbell would be a little less careful and fastidious in what he did for the public; for, after all, an author may reasonably be supposed to do best that which he is most inclined to do. It is our business to be grateful for what a poet sets before us, rather than to be wishing that his peaches were nectarines, or his Falernian Champagne. Mr. Campbell, as an author, is all for refinement and classicality, not, however without a great deal of pathos and luxurious fancy."

Mr. Campbell's literary labours are perhaps too well known and estimated to require from us any thing more than a rapid enumeration of the most popular, as supplementary to this brief memoir. In his studies he exhibits great fondness for recondite subjects; and will frequently spend days in minute investigations into languages, which, in the result, are of little moment. But his ever-delightful theme is Greece, her arts, and literature. There he is at home: it was his earliest, and will, probably, be his latest study. There is no branch of poetry or history which has reached us from the "mother of arts" with which he is not familiar. He has severely criticised Mitford for his singular praise of the Lacedæmonians at the expense of the Athenians, and his preference of their barbarous laws to the legislation of the latter people. His lectures on Greek Poetry have appeared, in parts, in the New Monthly Magazine. He has also published Annals of Great Britain, from the Accession of George III. to the Peace of Amiens; and is the author of several articles on Poetry and Belles Lettres in the Edinburgh Encyclopædia,

Among his poetical works, the minor pieces display considerably more energy than those of greater length. The Pleasures of Hope is entitled to rank as a British classic; and his Gertrude is perhaps one of the most chaste and delicate poems in the language. His fugitive pieces are more extensively known. Some of them rouse us like the notes of a war trumpet, and have become exceedingly popular; which every one who has heard the deep rolling voice of Braham or Phillips in Hohenlinden, will attest. Neither can we forget the beautiful Valedictory Stanzas to John Kemble, at the farewell dinner to that illustrious actor. Another piece, the Last Man, is indeed fine --and worthy of Byron. Of Campbell's attachment to his native country we have already spoken, but as a finely-wrought specimen of this amiable passion we subjoin a brief poem :

LINES WRITTEN ON VISITING A SCENE IN ARGYLESHIRE.

AT the silence of twilight's contemplative hour,

I have mused in a sorrowful mood,

On the wind-shaken weeds that embosom the bower,

Where the home of my forefathers stood.

All ruin'd and wild is their roofless abode,

And lonely the dark raven's sheltering tree:
And travell❜d by few is the grass-cover'd road,
Where the hunter of deer and the warrior trode
To his hills that encircle the sea.

Yet wandering I found on my ruinous walk,
By the dial-stone aged and green,

One rose of the wilderness left on its stalk,
To mark where a garden had been.

Like a brotherless hermit, the last of its race,

All wild in the silence of nature, it drew,

From each wandering sun-beam, a lonely embrace
For the night-weed and thorn overshadow'd the place,
Where the flower of my forefathers grew.

Sweet bud of the wilderness! emblem of all
That remains in this desolate heart!

The fabric of bliss to its centre may fall,

But patience shall never depart !

Though the wilds of enchantment, all vernal and bright,

In the days of delusion by fancy combined

With the vanishing phantoms of love and delight,
Abandon my soul, like a dream of the night,

And leave but a desert behind.

Be hush'd, my dark spirit! for wisdom condemns
When the faint and the feeble deplore;

Be strong as the rock of the ocean that stems
A thousand wild waves on the shore !

Through the perils of chance, and the scowl of disdain,
May thy front be unalter'd, thy courage elate!
Yea! even the name I have worshipp'd in vain
Shall awake not the sigh of remembrance again :
To bear is to conquer our fate.

Of a similar description are his " Lines on revisiting a Scottish River."*
Mr. Campbell contributes but little to the pages of the New Monthly
Magazine: still, what he writes is excellent, and as we uniformly transfer his
pieces to the Mirror, we need not recapitulate them. The fame of Campbell,
however, rests on his early productions, which, though not numerous, are so
correct, and have been so fastidiously revised, that while they remain as stan-
dards of purity in the English tongue, they sufficiently explain why their
author's compositions are so limited in number, since he who wrote so
correctly could not be expected to write much." His Poetical pieces have
lately been collected, and published in two elegant library volumes, with a
portrait esteemed as an extremely good likeness.

A contemporary critic, speaking of the superiority of Campbell's minor effusions, when compared with his larger efforts, observes, "His genius, like the beautiful rays of light that illumine our atmosphere, genial and delightful as they are when expanded, are yet without power in producing any active or immediate effect. In their natural expansions they sparkle to be sure, and sweetly shine; but it is only when condensed, and brought to bear upon a limited space or solitary object, that they acquire the power to melt, to burn, or to communicate their fire to the object they are in contact with." Another writer says, "In common with every lover of poetry, we regret that his works are so few, though, when a man has written enough to achieve immortality, he cannot be said to have trifled away his life. Mr. Campbell's poetry will find its way wherever the English language shall be spoken, and will be admired wherever it is known "

See MIRROR, No. 297.