GENERAL INTRODUCTION. LIFE. THOMAS CAMPBELL, though born and bred in Scotland, Campbell's can scarcely be called a Scottish poet, for there is little in his poetry to remind us that he was a Scotsman at all. Like his literary predecessors-Dryden, Pope, and Goldsmith-he was essentially a Londoner, but a Londoner who never lost his early memories of mountain moorlands and braeside wild flowers. school life. Campbell was born in Glasgow, July 27th, 1777, the Childhood and eighth son and youngest child of a family of eleven. His parents both belonged to the Campbell clan, though not otherwise related. His father was a retired and somewhat unsuccessful merchant, the son of a Scottish laird-Alexander Campbell, of Kirnan, near Inverarayand was a devout follower of the Kirk. Campbell's home life was of the type immortalized by Burns in his Cottar's Saturday Night, without, however, being at all strait-laced. His father was, indeed, somewhat too easy-going; never used the rod, a peculiarity which impressed Tom Campbell with a life-long gratitude; and left to his wife the main burden of domestic discipline and household economy. The family hearth was brightened with intellectual and cultivated company, professors of the University being frequent visitors. Among these were the celebrated Adam Smith and Dr University career. Tutorship in Thomas Reid, at that time Professor of Moral Philosophy, by whom the poet was christened, and after whom he was named. At the age of eight Tom Campbell went to the Grammar School; took rather too kindly to his books, and so fell ill, and had to be sent for a six weeks' summer holiday to a country cottage on the banks of the river Cart. Here the love of Nature first took root in his soul, and those germs of poesy were implanted which in later life blossomed into such poems as his Field Flowers and To the Evening Star. When he was fourteen years old he entered the Glasgow University (October, 1791). Though never a plodder, and always fond of social comradeship, he was a bright and successful scholar in the University, as he had been at school. From eight years old he had developed a faculty for rhyming, which was never allowed to lie dormant. He wrote verses on current topics, grave or gay; won the University prize for English poetry; and published an ode in a Glasgow newspaper on the tragic fate of the Queen of France. Milton, Pope, Thomson, Gray, and Goldsmith were his favourite English authors; he used to learn by heart and recite to his friends long passages from Horace and Virgil, and from Anacreon, Sophocles, and Homer; and he won three University prizes for verse translations from Claudian, Aristophanes, and Aeschylus. In May, 1795, owing to his father's straitened circumstances, he was compelled to break off his college studies, and take a tutorship in a family living in the Isle of Mull. Here he found sufficient leisure for literary culture, and above all for drinking in the wild beauty of sea and sky, of mist-clad mountain, and surf-beaten shore. Here, too, he took a fancy to a young lady of seventeen, the pretty daughter of a clergyman, who paid a visit to the family. This fleeting love episode found expression later in the stanzas addressed to Caroline. They are pleasing and musical, but not for one moment to be compared with Wordsworth's Lucy or Coleridge's Genevieve; being, indeed, a mere prettilywoven design of fancy, without a touch of genuine passion. With the exception of one or two songs of slight importance, this is Campbell's only love-poem. Interwoven with his poetry are frequent and touching pictures of married love and conjugal fidelity, but the emotions thus described are always sober, calm, and domestic; the only passions that ever thrilled his soul and roused him to really lofty lyric strains were the love of country and the love of freedom. Glasgow. After six months of tutorial work in Mull, Campbell Return to returned to Glasgow and continued his University studies, helping to pay his way by giving lessons to younger students. From one of these we learn that at this period Campbell became an ardent admirer of such literature as Lord Chatham's speeches in favour of American freedom, Burke's declamation against Warren Hastings, and Wilberforce's impassioned pleadings on behalf of the tortured and down-trodden African slave. It is themes such as these that are the real inspiration of Campbell's unique juvenile success, the best-known of his longer poems, The Pleasures of Hope. Like all the other youthful poets of that time, he was an enthusiastic advocate for the French Revolutionists, stoutly maintaining that even the Reign of Terror was a far less evil than would be the re-establishment of the Bourbon Tutorship at At Glasgow and Edinburgh; literary hackwork. despotism by the Allies. The then recent partition of Poland filled him with horror and indignation, which three years later found utterance in the one passage (see 11. 199-234) of The Pleasures of Hope, with which every reader of poetry is familiar. In June, 1796, Campbell went to live as tutor in the family of Colonel Napier, at Downie, a farm-house on the Sound of Jura. He had only one pupil, a boy of eight; and consequently had plenty of leisure for reading, for literary work, and for open-air rambles. The rough draft of his Love and Madness was written here. A Miss Broderick in Warwickshire, had murdered her faithless lover; and Campbell gives expression to her half-insane despair in lines of the recognised conventional type, obviously modelled on Pope : "Thy sleepless spirit, breathing from the tomb, In the spring of 1797, tired of tutorship, he returned to his Glasgow home; but, after searching in vain for employment there, two months later he trudged on foot to Edinburgh. There he obtained some ill-paid copying work in different offices, and, what was of more service to him, an introduction to one of the literary celebrities of the Scottish capital, Dr. Anderson, author of the Lives of the British Poets. Through his good offices Campbell obtained an engagement from Mr. Mundell, a publisher, to write for £20 an abridgment of a book on the "West Indies." Walking back to Glasgow, he worked at the abridgment, and at this time achieved his first popular |