notes. They were loose in his pocket, and he had probably pulled them out in the coach or the yard, when he was searching for something else.

This habitual carelessness was inconsistent with a growing fondness for money, which was one of the marks of his decline. Naturally he was one of the most generous men in the world. He seems to have had no expensive habits, but, after satisfying his own moderate wants, always managed to embarrass himself by his charities. His circumstances in his latter years ought to have been entirely comfortable, as the number of his private dependants had diminished. But he had grown acquisitive, or affected to have become so. When he edited the Scenic Annual for 1838, he was conscious that he would be much abused for lending his name to such a work. "But," he said, "as I get two hundred pounds for writing a sheet or two of paper, it will take a great deal of abuse to mount up to that sum." So, when he was engaged in eliminating a Life of Petrarch from the manuscripts of Arch-deacon Coxe, he found it wearisome enough; but the thought of two hundred pounds descending in a golden shower consoled him. "I am the lovely Danae," he said, “and Colburn is my Jupiter." In relation to the same enterprise, he described himself to a friend as working literally as hard as any mechanic, from six to twelve; - but "this treadmill labor," he added, "is the result of sheer avarice, miserly niggardliness! I am principally employed in translating from Italian authors, and could get the whole done by an assistant, I believe, for thirty pounds. But the money -the money! O, my dear M., the thought of parting with it is unthinkable! and pounds sterling are to me dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart!""

If Campbell had been the miser that he pretends, he would never have confessed it to himself, much less to his correspondents. If it were anything more than a whim or caprice, the secret of it is explained in the following extract from a letter to an intimate friend: "Moxon has thrown off ten thousand copies of an edition of all my poems, in double columns, at two shillings a copy. I hope to make well by it. I am getting more and more avaricious -at the same time, more interested than ever in public charities; above all, in the Mendicity Society. At present, the payment of the wood-cuts keeps me low, but next year I expect to be rich! Whatever I can now

spare, I mean to go to organized societies for the benefit of my own countrymen. After supporting the Polish Association for nine years, I mean now to take my leave of it, because it interferes with my subscriptions to other institutions. * * Poor fellows! I heartily pity the Poles still; and there is, no doubt, much suffering among them; but where can you look round, without seeing sufferings? And our own country has the most sacred claim upon us. 0,were you and I but rich enough, what masses of misery we should alleviate! ** For my own part, the last years of my checkered life are cheered by the prospect of having a residue to relieve distress, out of an income that has lately increased, and is threatened with no diminution."

Campbell's manner in conversation was lively, and sometimes impetuous. He was never comic, but as light-hearted and cheerful as a boy. He told an amusing story with effect, though he failed in all his printed attempts of this kind. He occasionally put on a Scotch accent, for humor's sake; but his general conversation was free from it. In the domestic circle he is said to have been the "pleasantest company that could be conceived." An instance is related of the way in which he would sometimes abandon himself to his impulses. When he went to Glasgow to be inaugurated as Lord Rector, on reaching the college-green he found the boys pelting each other with snow-balls. He rushed into the mêlée, and flung about his snow-balls right and left with great dexterity, much to the delight of the boys, but to the great scandal of the professors. He was proud of the piece of plate that the Glasgow lads gave him, and referred to the occasion as one of the pleasantest recollections of his life. Of the honor conferred by his college title he was less sensible. He hated the sound of Doctor Campbell; and when Pringle, the poet and traveller, reminded him that he must submit to it as an LL.D., he looked grave, and said that "no friend of his would ever call him so."

In his study he kept a tobacco-box, from which he would fill his pipe, and occasionally, when a little abstracted, transfer a small quantity of the weed to his mouth. But this was an exception to his general habit, and rather an indication of absence of mind. Of this latter trait, one or two anecdotes are told. Whenever he wanted to dispose of anything at home in a particularly secure place, he was

sure not to find it again without a good deal of extra trouble. On one occasion, he by note invited his friend Redding to dine with him on the 29th of January. When his guest came, with whom he was intimate enough to take the liberty, Campbell expressed surprise, and insisted that he had invited him for the next day. "I've tories to-day," he said, "and whigs to-morrow." Redding would have withdrawn, but Campbell peremptorily forbade it. "You shall have both dinners," he said. "All the party for to-morrow are of the right kind, stanch Cromwellians, sturdy Roundheads, — and we'll have calf's head, and toast the immortal memory of Old Noll." Campbell would have protested that the mistake in the day was his friend's; but the invitation was in writing, and spoke for itself.

Campbell's politics, however, did not materially interfere with his friendships. He was in the habit of going familiarly to Murray's, where he met with more men of talent than under any other roof, but Rogers' or Lord Holland's. Murray's was then the great resort of the Quarterly reviewers and the literary tories; but Campbell mingled with them freely. Sometimes he found himself the only whig present; and on one occasion, it being remarked that he had not remained long on a visit - "I felt myself a sojourner in a strange land," he replied; "I did not like to be the only one of my party.” He was warm and earnest in his views of political questions, highminded and liberal; and, with less impatience of restraint, and a more regular application to business, he might have distinguished himself in public life. He was not successful, however, as a speaker. His ideas flowed faster than his speech, and he soon became excited and almost unintelligible.

He was averse to controversy, and sought to live upon kind terms with all his literary brethren, though he detested Hazlitt, and had no love for the poets of the Lake school. On the publication of Moore's Life of Byron, he found two or three passages that annoyed him exceedingly, and, as the champion of Lady Byron, he assailed the author in terms of unnecessary ardor. The noble poet had understood Campbell as speaking in a sarcastic spirit at Lord Holland's, when he said, "Take the incense to Lord Byron, he is used to it,"— and had represented him as being "nettled." "What feeling," he said, in a letter to Moore on this subject, "but that of kindness could I have had to Lord Byron? He was always affectionate to me, both

in his writings and in personal interviews; how strange that he should misunderstand my manner on the occasion alluded to! and what temptation could I have to show myself pettish and envious before my inestimable friend Lord Holland? The whole scene described by Lord Byron is a phantom of his imagination. Ah, my dear Moore! if we had him back again, how easily could we settle these matters!" A coldness ensued between the poets, in consequence of Campbell's attack on the biographer; but it formed only a temporary interruption to their friendship.

His disposition to evade discussion is shown by his conduct in regard to the "Pope" controversy. In his Specimens of the British Poets, speaking of the several editors of Pope, Campbell had referred to Mr. Bowles, and the stress laid by that critic on the argument that Pope's images are "drawn more from art than nature." Campbell defended Pope, and Mr. Bowles wrote a letter to justify what he called his "invariable principles of poetry." On this, a literary mêlée followed, in which Byron, Gilchrist, Roscoe, the Quarterly Review, and at length Moore, were engaged, with no little ardor. On the publication of his third lecture on Poetry, Campbell attached a note to it, in which he says, "When the book in which I dissented from Mr. Bowles' theory of criticism comes to a second edition, I shall have a good deal to say to my reverend friend. I have not misrepresented him, as he imagines; but 1 have no leisure to write pamphlets about him." When the work in question came to a second edition, Campbell was still less in the vein for controversy. He left the volunteers to fight out the battle, and perhaps never thought of it again.

Campbell was of a delicate organization. Haydon, the painter, in his autobiographical notes, styles him "bilious and shivering." His habits required seclusion even for the perusal of a book. Trifles distracted him. He was exceedingly sensitive, and reserved in the expression of his opinions. Of his own poetry he spoke but seldom, and only when he could not well avoid it. He was a simple-hearted man, of blameless intentions, and with a tender regard for the feelings of all with whom he was called to associate. One who had known him for thirty years, and for more than one-third of that period had been in habits of almost daily association with him, bears the strongest testimony to the beauty and purity of his character. "I believe

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a more guileless man," says Mr. Cyrus Redding, one less capable of imagining evil towards another, never breathed."

His habits of study were discursive. Some ten years elapsed between his commencement of the Specimens of the British Poets and its publication. His Lectures on Poetry he laid by for a year and a half, whilst he was editing the New Monthly Magazine, to which he contributed meanwhile but a few verses. Many subjects interested him. He was sometimes deep in political economy, and again in German metaphysics and biblical literature. To classical literature he always devoted a good deal of time. From the main subject of his immediate study he was continually diverging into the collateral topics suggested in the course of his reading. This easy diversion rendered him unreliable in any literary undertaking; and hence, perhaps, Campbell's querulous censures of the booksellers. The trade could not depend upon his punctuality, and were not ready to contract for unfinished works at some uncertain future period. Though in jest he toasted Napoleon for having" shot a bookseller," he seems to have been treated with uniform liberality by his publishers.

His memory was well stored with passages from the ancient and modern classics. Greek verses he could repeat thirty or forty in succession, and with the same facility from the English and Italian poets. With French literature he was not so conversant, and the writers in that language he seldom quoted. He was exceedingly fastidious with reference to his own productions. He was not satisfied with effect, but sought to finish and polish till he sometimes impaired and enfeebled his poems. Many of his poems, as they are now printed, are very different from the original impressions. His retouches, however, were chiefly designed to render his verse more complete, or to improve the verbal expression of a thought. Errors of description or in natural history, such as abound in Gertrude of Wyoming, he never corrected. Except in the case of The Pleasures of Hope, he consulted no one before publication. He said that he "never leaned on the taste of others, with that miserable disregard of his own judgment" which was implied in some of the anecdotes, in regard to his habits of composition, which had found their way into print. His prose manuscripts he seldom copied. His poems he frequently wrote out very fairly and legibly, on paper which he ruled