ECLECTIC MAGAZINE OF JULY, 1851. From the People's Journal. THOMAS CAMPBELL. WITH A PORTRAIT. With all that Nature's fire To thrill or warm the heart.-MACNISH. THE bard of hope-who has hymned her pleasures so sweetly-stands high among those illustrious Scotchmen who have in recent years removed from their country the stigma of literary indolence and barrenness, if not of inaptitude and incapacity. The grounds for affixing such a stigma on such a land might be purely negative; but that the stigma was not a malicious, gratuitous invention, is allowed by her own writers, whatever they may be pleased to assign as the cause. Thus, Mr. Lockhart, in his Life of Burns, dwells on the fact, that no man can point out any Scottish author of the first rank in all the long period which intervened between Buchanan and Hume. charge is amply refuted by this time of day, But the Not to speak of the Mackenzies, Smolletts, Robertsons, Blairs, Beatties, &c., belonging to the last century, what a noble thors army of authe Scotland of our time proudly may VOL. XXIIL NO. III enumerate! One thinks-how gratefully!of a Walter Scott; and his son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart; and John Wilson, the admirer and admired of both; and Jeffrey, their public antagonist and private friend; and James Hogg, mourned, as meet is, on Ettrick banks and the braes of Yarrow; and "Delta" Moir, dear to the lovers of "Maga. ;" and Thomas Aird, little known as he may be on this side the Tweed as excelling in energetic verse and manly prose; and Allan Cunningham, and John Galt, and Sir W. editor of Blackwood), and Joannie Baillie, Hamilton, and W. E. Aytoun (the present and Jane Porter, and Annie Grant, and Sir and Thomas Carlyle, and William Mure, and James Mackintosh, and Thomas Chalmers, Hugh Miller, and other no less worthy names. No one amongst them all, however, appears more secure of a permanent and shining reputation than Thomas Campbell. Lord Jef 19 frey, imagining a book of Specimens of Bri- | tish poetry, to be edited and published some time next century, is more liberal in the quota he assigns to Campbell in that supposed anthology than to any of his contemporaries:-There," he says, " shall posterity hang with rapture on the half of Campbell, and the fourth part of Byron, and the sixth of Scott, and the scattered tithes of Crabbe, and the three per cent. of Southey-while some good-natured critic shall sit in our mouldering chair, and more than half prefer them to those by whom they have been superseded." It may be remarked, en passant, that the triumphant fifty per cent. which the above paragraph guarantees for Campbell, is not, as to quantity, more, if so much, as the poor three per cent. to which Southey is stinted. Considering the expectations one had naturally formed upon such a subject, the Life of Campbell, by Dr. Beattie, is, we confess, upon the whole, one of the dullest books we ever essayed to read. Before the first bulky volume is nearly finished, one yawns portentously, drops expressions about "awfully slow work," and is only induced to abide the two other over-grown tomes by the hope of something piquant by way of relief-pippins and cheese to come. From it we learn that Thomas Campbell was born at Glasgow, A. D. 1777—at which time Scott was a sickly boy of six years oldf-and Charles Lamb a prattler of two, and Southey of three, and Coleridge of five-and Burns and Schiller were ardent youths of eighteen summers. At thirteen he appeared in print-again at fifteen and eighteen-but in each case prematurely. But before he was two-and-twenty, Campbell gave the world The Pleasures * Edinburgh Review, March, 1819. of Hope, and the world will never forget the It was in this year that Mrs. Cockburn, au. thoress of the new version of the Flowers of the Forest, wrote to her minister, Dr. Douglass, as follows:-"I last night supped in Mr. Walter Scott's. He has the most extraordinary genius of a boy I ever saw. He was reading a poem to his mother when I went in. I made him read on; it was the description of a shipwreck. His passion rose with the storm, He lifted his eyes and hands. There's the mast gone,' said he; crash it goes!--they will all perish!' After his agitation, he turns to me. "That is too melancholy,' said he; 'I had better read you something more amusing.' I preferred a little chat, and asked his opinion of Milton and other books he was reading, which he gave me wonderfully. Pray what age do you suppose this boy to be? Name it now, before I tell you. Why, twelve or fourteen. No such thing; he is not quite six years old."-Lockhart's Scott, chap. ii. poem, |