"They who knew Mr. Campbell only as the author of
Gertrude of Wyoming,
and the Pleasures of Hope, would not have
suspected him to be a merry companion, overflowing with humour and
anecdote, and anything but fastidious. The Scotch poets have always
something in reserve. It is the only point in which the major part of them
resemble their countrymen. Campbell was one of the few men whom I could at
any time have walked half-a-dozen miles through the snow to spend an
evening with.
"No man felt more kindly towards his
fellow-creatures, or took less credit for it. When he indulged in doubt
and sarcasm, and spoke contemptuously of things in general, he did it
partly out of actual dissatisfaction, but more, perhaps, than he
suspected, out of a fear of being thought weak and sensitive, which is a
blind that the best men very commonly practice.
"When I first saw this eminent
person, he gave me the idea of a French Virgil. I found him as handsome as
the Abbe Delille is said to have been ugly. But he seemed to me to embody
a Frenchman’s ideal 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 diminishing 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 (at the time) a volume of the French poet in his hand.
"Campbell’s skull was sharply cut
and fine, with a full share, according to the phrenologists, both of the
reflective and amative organs; and his poetry will bear them out. 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."
