Many like instances might be cited. The story might have been made more of, but sentiment was the poet's forte, and richness of imagery his great excellence. Full of tenderness, his sentiment goes deep into the soul. The ambition of departed years is visible throughout, but it is recognised only in a dim sketch.

The concluding lines of "Theodoric" are not worthy of the commencement. It is always politic to wind up well that the reader may leave off with a favourable impress from what he peruses. The " Pleasures of Hope" comes nobly to its conclusion, and the gentle "Gertrude" terminates her song in a manner equally effective and appropriate; but "Theodoric" is brought to its termination faintly and wearily without a line that leaves upon the mind of the reader the reflection that he has been perusing a work to which he may return with renewed pleasure. It is singular that so perfect a master of his art should have overlooked this point, for he could not have intended to try how far he could lead his verse to please by extreme gentleness and even tameness as it had before astonished by the vigour and strength it displayed. He composed much of "Theodoric" in his study in Seymour Street. I wrote letters there once while he worked at his task. He corrected several of the proofs while I was present, during which I employed myself in reading; for at such times there was not a word of conversation. Although he spoke of what he had in hand, I never saw the entire manuscript until just before he had copied it out for the printer. When he mentioned the title, I said, "What, the king of the Ostrogoths?"

"No, no," he replied; "a love-story. I have only borrowed the name." It was kept standing in type by the printer for a few weeks to receive his final corrections. ·

Campbell was, one day about that time, surprised by a call from the son of Brant, or Brandt, the Indian chief whom he had charged with such atrocities in his "Gertrude." Some travellers, and among them Lieutenant Hall, of the dragoons, had, in visiting America, made mention in their published tours, of an Indian chief having held the rank of colonel in the British service in America. The stranger was the only son of the Indian chief whom Campbell thus denounced as the destroyer of the village of Wyoming, upon the banks of the Susquehanna, where now stands the town of Wilksbarre. It appeared that Brandt had settled in Canada under the protection of his British allies: that he had accustomed his people, the Mohawks, to farming; had built a church, and translated one of the Gospels into the Mohawk language. His grave was found by Lieutenant Hall (so his travels stated) under the walls of the church he had erected. He left behind him a son and daughter. The British government had erected a large house for the chief near Burlington, on Lake Erie. His son was a fine young man, of gentlemanly manners and appearance, who spoke and wrote English well, dressed in the English fashion, and was a lieutenant in the English service. His sister would not have disgraced the circles of fashion in Europe; her face and person were fine and graceful. She spoke English elegantly, and comported herself in speech and manners with almost Oriental softness.

This much had been known in Europe, though until the unexpected event of young Brant (as the Indian name should be spelled) coming to England, Campbell had not any other knowledge of the chief than that he might have gleaned from the "History of the Destruction of Wyoming

by the English and Indians in 1778," and that history, in some points, appears to have been exceedingly erroneous. The inhabitants were nearly all massacred, of three hundred men only four escaping. The commanders on both sides are said to have been named Butler. Brant, the Mohawk chief, was many miles from the spot when the battle took place. Campbell, with a poet's licence and haste, had taken the current account of this battle, in which Brant was represented as a monster, whereas he was an Indian of singularly civilised habits. All this became known to him for a fact by young Brant coming to England. A friend of Campbell's first announced such an event, and that the young Indian chief had documents which would incontestibly prove his father's innocence. Campbell stated that he had, as poets had done from time immemorial, drawn upon imagination for the larger part of the incidents in the poem, taking the name of Brant from history. He stated that he could not dream at the time he did so that an Indian chief would ever be affected by it, much less peruse its contents. It must be admitted that with the state of information in England even in 1808, it might as well have been imagined that the St. Lawrence should flow to London as that the people represented, and believed in England to be horrible savages, putting prisoners to unheard of tortures, and scarcely attaining beyond animal existence, should find an individual in their number who could be as sensitive as Brant was about his father's fair fame. Time and the march of information had in twenty years done wonders in England, as well as in America, and the son of the redoubted chief, whom Campbell represented as heading the slaughter at Wyoming, entered the poet's dwelling in London to ask that redress for his father's memory which the poet could not but be gratified in conceding. I think Campbell informed me afterwards, that young Brant had become Lieutenant-colonel Brant. Campbell was much taken with his gentlemanly manners and address. This incident was, upon the whole, a singular and touching event in the poet's life.

In the letter which he wrote to Brant and published, he says, that he "took the liberty of a versifier to run away from fact into fancy, like a schoolboy who never dreams that he is a truant when he rambles on a holiday from school. It seems, however, that I falsely represented Wyoming," (Campbell alludes here to the Canada newspapers,) "as a terrestrial paradise. It was not so, say the Canadian papers, because it contained a great number of Tories; and, undoubtedly, that cause goes far to account for the fact. Earthly paradises, however, are not lasting things, and Tempe and Arcadia may have their drawbacks on happiness as well as Wyoming. I must, nevertheless, still believe, that it was a flourishing colony, and that its destruction furnished a just warning to human beings against war and revenge. But the whole catastrophe is affirmed in a Canadian newspaper to have been nothing more than a fair battle. If this be the fact, let accredited signatures come forward to attest it, and vindicate the innocence and honourableness of the whole transaction, as your father's character has been vindicated. An error about him by no means proves the whole account of the business to be a fiction. Who would not wish its atrocity to be disproved! But who can think it disproved by a single defender, who writes anonymously and without definable weight or authority ?"

There was a note subjoined to the letter thus addressed to Brant, which slightly noticed his own feelings about hostile criticism, and the submisApril.-VOL. LXXIX. NO. CCCXVI.

2 F

sion of his works to the censorship of friends. I believe, from something like the best part of thirty years' closer intimacy with Campbell for a good part of that time than any other man, I believe that what he states is strictly correct. Except in early life, when he submitted, to the kind advice and critical judgment of Dr. Anderson, the manuscript copy of the "Pleasures of Hope," he consulted nobody in the composition of his poems. In solitude and silence he conceived and composed them. He was a proud man in this sense; he would have thought it an insult to his own understanding to consult this individual or that, who might be among his friends, and to take their judgment in preference to his own, after his former efforts had been crowned with great success. He might have read the manuscript to a friend or two before he put it into the printer's hand, but only when it was perfected. The world has a notion that a different is a wise course, because in these matters the world is as foolish as its own idea. Who are the critics of the hour, but men nine times out of ten utterly incapable of exhibiting a tithe of the merit upon which they assume to sit in judgment? If Racine read his verses to an old woman, it was only that he might avail himself of obvious objections that would strike plain minds before a theatrical audience, and afford him the means of considering such as might merit alteration. Such is the corruption of what is miscalled criticism in modern times, that interest, party feeling, private dislike, or the reverse, govern notices of new works, since criticisms they cannot be called, where no analysation of such works takes place where the critic, self-styled, rarely gives the work he treats upon even a decent perusal. It becomes a writer, therefore, who has a particle of self-respect left, rather to suffer a fault to pass than submit his labours to empirics, and place himself in the position of the man who, in trying to please every body, pleased nobody, and lost his labour.

-

In re

as

Campbell says, I have no doubt with the most perfect truth,-" Nor did I ever lean on the taste of others with that miserable distrust of my own judgment, which the anecdote conveys," referring to a statement from which Washington Irving, in a biographical notice prefixed to an American edition of "Gertrude of Wyoming," infers that he did. gard to criticism, he was too proud to exhibit what he felt, though far as authors generally are from bowing to the justice of hostile criticism," to use his own words. That he did feel it, and deeply, there is no doubt, but he never showed that he did so, otherwise than in some distaste to the individual from whom it originated. He never appeared to have a dread of it; no one could imagine this to be the case from his previous bearing, for he thought it would be a weakness to exhibit the cause. When" Theodoric" was published, I said, "You will have it from the Quarterly, no doubt ?"-" O, I have made up my mind to that," was his reply. When the Review appeared, I found it upon his study table. "You have got the Review, I see?" "Yes," he replied, in perfect good humour; "they are not quite so fierce upon me as I thought they would be." No more passed, and, considering that the two "great" Reviews, as they were always styled, par excellence, mainly depended upon vituperating the literary works of their political antagonists, Campbell, a Whig, had nothing more to expect than he received, more especially when the poem was so much inferior to his preceding performances, of which he was himself conscious, or I certainly imagined him to be so. In such a case, had the poem been far more worthy of critical commenda

tion, unless it fairly outdid any or indeed all his previous efforts, it would have been received with coldness.

Campbell, notwithstanding what I believe to be the correctness of the above statement, could not forgive any one who made a blow at him, where the result would not admit of being interpreted but to his disad→ vantage. He felt, then, that he had the worst of the matter at issue, the criticism was no party or personal matter, and that he was, in consequence, so far injured. This it must be confessed he never forgot. He did not care what spleen, or party feeling, or malevolence might do ; these unjust attacks his own position and consciousness of merit might repel, but real justice in an attack struck home, and he never got over his antipathy to its author.

Hazlitt had justice on his side, when he said of Campbell, that though he loved popularity, self-respect was the primary law-the condition on which it was to be obtained. He never tolerated the remarks made by this writer, although it cannot be denied that Hazlitt has commended his poetry in the highest terms; he has given the poet all but boundless praise. But his remarks were neutralised in Campbell's estimation by the discovery that one of the lines in the "Pleasures of Hope" was a borrowed line, unintentionally there is no doubt; Campbell's pride would have at once prevented the accident had he been aware of it. Perhaps it was passed over even in his young years through one of those abstractions already alluded to, as so unaccountable in his after life; haply he had forgotten that he had read Blair, and the line remained confounded with his own verses in his mind. No matter, Hazlitt, amid the highest encomiums on his poetry, mentioned the circumstance, and added, that the best line in the poem

Like angel visits few and far between

was borrowed from Blair's

ire

grave

Like angel visits, short and far between.

This feeling exhibited itself in numberless instances; even while speaking in terms of praise of the essays of that writer, Campbell vented his upon the man. He declared to me, that Hazlitt had been a means of irritating John Scott to such a degree, that it was one cause of his going out in the duel where he fell: that Hazlitt was a dangerous man.

I was anxious that Hazlitt's contributions should be received in the Magazine, being well aware of the feeling of Campbell towards him. Before the "Spirits of the Age" appeared in a volume, Hazlitt had made known the incident respecting the line from Blair. Campbell never referred to that circumstance in our conversation about Hazlitt's contributions, as it might be judged he would not, since it might induce a suspicion of the cause of his antipathy, at least, so I imagined-but I was wrong here. A paper on Milton's "Comus," which I had written, and in which, without thinking about it, I had commented upon Pope's borrowing from Milton, word for word, in the epistle of "Eloise and Abelard," and had further remarked that Pope had diminished the grace of Milton's language by his interpolations, I showed to the poet at the time we had been talking of Hazlitt. This was ill-timed, but Campbell, so far from applying it as he might have done, to a parallel between himself and Blair, and imagining, as I had fought strenuously for

the admission of Hazlitt's articles, that I had something personal in view in such a paper, whereas the coincidence was perfectly accidental; said it was curious he had not remarked Pope's plagiarisms himself, and seemed rather pleased with the observation. I had wished the article in the fire when it was too late; yet it went into the Magazine. How very different would a suspicious mind have acted under the circumstances. The simplicity and integrity of Campbell's heart prevented that construction, which, without much blame, any one might have been induced to construe into design. His habitual forgetfulness could not have interposed here. I believe a more guileless man, one less capable of imagining evil towards another, never breathed.

Still his prejudices were insurmountable where the error detected was founded on justice and could not be set aside. The "Spirits of the Age" was not published until 1825, but the remarks of the critic had a long prior existence, indeed as far back as 1816 or 1817, when they were first broached by Hazlitt in his lectures. It was difficult to imagine how Campbell at that time writhed under a few remarks that could not do him the slightest injury in reality and would not have affected any other human being at all. No writer is faultless, and Campbell's lofty elevation and established reputation as a poet it was impossible could be affected by observations which it was natural enough for any critic to entertain, and in the present case, made by one then almost unknown. He would not from indolence or self-love correct palpable mistakes in his works acknowledged to be such by himself, and it was too much to suppose they would not be matter of comment to critics. Hazlitt was splenetic and dealt unsparingly with some writers, but he by no means used Campbell so very hardly, as his character of the poet's verse in the "Spirits of the Age" abundantly testifies.

To show where this distasteful feeling had its origin, it happened that in some of Hazlitt's lectures, his remarks had excited the notice and, called forth the comment of a countryman who was a friend of Campbell's friend, Thomas Pringle. This was as early as 1818. Pringle gave the poet an intimation of this advocacy and a copy of the article. It was grateful to the poet beyond conception, and his written reply to Pringle on the occasion, dated from Sydenham, showed how deeply any remarks that he did not conceive friendly really wounded him at the time, notwithstanding his effort to appear regardless of them. After thanking Pringle cordially and gratefully for his statement about Hazlitt, he continued as follows:"I will not pretend to be an utterly impartial judge, but neither will I submit to say, but that I think his bold style a torrent which will possibly brawł itself away a little sooner than you imagine. Of the bitterness of his heart and of the causes of his hostility to me, I know more than to attach importance to his opinion. My insensibility to his attack may arise from self-respect or from self-conceit, just as charity or severity may choose to explain it. But no feelings which I have had upon the subject interfere with the gratitude which I owe to you and to your friend. It is a kind, friendly, timely act of goodness. The spirit of your interference is generous. I will let any man read the preface, and say impartially if it be not ably and elegantly written. I feel myself honoured by your friend's vindication, both by the matter and by the manner of it. As to the spirit which pervades it, I am absolutely unable to thank you com