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action itself, or a series of such actions, would have cost; with the great disadvantage, too, of being relieved by none of that invigoration which, to the man in action, would have sprung from the spirit of the action itself, and have renovated the ardor which it was expending. A person of decisive character, by consuming as little passion as possible in dubious musings and abortive resolutions, can secure its utmost value and use, by throwing it all into effective operation.

Another advantage of this character is, that it exempts from a great deal of interference and persecution, to which an irresolute man is subjected. Weakness, in every form, tempts arrogance; and a man may be allowed to wish for a kind of character with which stupidity and impertinence may not make so free. When a firm, decisive spirit is recognized, it is curious to see how the space clears around a man, and leaves him room and freedom. The disposition to interrogate, dictate, or banter, preserves a respectful and politic distance, judging it not unwise to keep the peace with a person of so much energy. A conviction that he understands and that he wills with extraordinary force, silences the conceit that intended to perplex or instruct him, and intimidates the malice that was disposed to attack him. There is a feeling, as in respect to fate, that the decrees of so inflexible a spirit must be right, or that, at least, they will be accomplished.

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The last resource of this character is hard, inflexible pertinacity, on which it may be allowed to rest its strength, after finding it can be effectual in none of its milder forms. I remember admiring an instance of this kind, in a firm, sagacious, and very estimable old man, whom I well knew, and who is now dead. Being on a jury, in a trial of life and death, he was completely satisfied of the innocence of the prisoner; the other eleven were of the opposite opinion. But he was resolved the man should not be condemned, and, as the first effort for preventing it, very properly made application to the minds of his associates, spending several hours in laboring to convince them. But he found he made no impression, while he was exhausting the strength which was to be reserved for another mode of operation. He then calmly told them it should now be a trial who could endure confinement and famine the longest, and that they might be quite assured he would sooner die than release them at the expense of the prisoner's life. In this situation they spent about twentyfour hours, when, at length, all acceded to his verdict of acquittal.

CHARACTER OF FRANKLIN.

His predominant passion appears to have been a love of the useful. The useful was to him the summum bonum, the supreme

fair, the sublime and beautiful, which it may not perhaps be extravagant to believe he was in quest of every week for half a century, in whatever place, or study, or practical undertaking. No department was too plain or humble for him to occupy himself in for this purpose; and in affairs of the most ambitious order this was still systematically his object. Whether in directing the constructing of chimneys or of constitutions, lecturing on the saving of candles or on the economy of national revenues, he was still intent on the same end, the question always being how to obtain the most of solid tangible advantage by the plainest and easiest means. There has rarely been a mortal, of high intelligence and flattering fame, on whom the pomps of life were so powerless. On him were completely thrown away the oratorical and poetical heroics about glory, of which heroics it was enough that he easily perceived the intention or effect to be, to explode all sober truth and substantial good, and to impel men, at the very best of the matter, through some career of vanity, but commonly through mischief, slaughter, and devastation, in mad pursuit of what amounts at last, if attained, to some certain quantity of noise, and empty show, and intoxicated transient elation. He was so far an admirable spirit for acting the Mentor to a young republic. It will not be his fault if the citizens of America shall ever become so servile to European example as to think a multitude of supernumerary places, enormous salaries, and a factitious economy of society, a necessary security or decoration of that political liberty which they enjoy in pre-eminence above every nation on earth. In these letters of their patriarch and philosopher, they will be amply warned, by repeated and emphatical representations, of the desperate mischief of a political system in which the public resources shall be expended in a way to give the government both the interest and the means to corrupt the people.

"WHERE WILL YOU LEAVE YOUR GLORY?"

Men must leave their glory. If they would but think, as they look upon the things that are swelling their pride, "This, and this, is what I am to leave: it has no one relation to me so positive as that I shall leave it. I feel my being standing off from it-in separation, as preparing to leave it. So near as I now ain to it, I may in a moment come to behold it as at an immense distance. The most certain of all things is, that the moment will be when I shall find that I have left it." And where will they (the man of material wealth, the possessor of earthly honors, the man who glories in his intellectual power) leave it? where? In their funeral pomps? in the dimensions and decorations of their sepulchres? in their names, which, when called, there is no living

person to answer to? Contrast with all these forms of folly, the predominant aim of a Christian, which is "glory" still; but a glory which he will not have to leave, a glory accumulating for him in the world whither he is going, to which he is progressively transmitting, if we may so speak, the effects of all his exertions here, for God, for the Redeemer, for the good of men, for the future welfare of his soul, which he commits, together with his spirit, to Christ, and can say, "I know that he is able to keep that which I have committed to him against that day."

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THOMAS CAMPBELL, the celebrated British poet, was the son of a merchant in Glasgow, and was born in that city on the 27th of July, 1777. After finishing his academical course at the University of Glasgow, where he gave much promise of future fame, he accepted the situation of a tutor in a family in Argyleshire. After remaining here a short time, he went to Edinburgh in the winter of 1798, with the first rough draft of the Pleasures of Hope in his pocket, and showed it to Dugald Stewart and Dr. Robert Anderson, who praised it warmly and prophesied its success. It was dedicated to Dr. Anderson, and published in April, 1799; but the author was so unwise as to sell the copyright for the small sum of sixty pounds to Mundell, the bookseller.1

With "money in his purse," Campbell had an earnest desire to visit Germany. He did so, and was gone about thirteen months. On his return to England he made arrangements for the publication of a complete edition of his poems in a quarto form, which appeared in London in 1803. On the 11th of October the same year, he married Miss Matilda Sinclair, of Edinburgh, and fixed his residence in Sydenham, in Kent, working for his bread by contributing to magazines, newspapers, &c. In 1805 he received a pension of two hundred pounds a year, which came very opportunely to save him from great pecuniary embarrassment. In 1809 he added another wreath to his fame, by the publication of Gertrude of Wyoming, in which the poverty of the story is concealed by the elegance of the descriptive passages, and the sweetness and delicacy of the poetical language, which charms us with its grace and melody.

Usurper there may be something personal; for I must confess that, ever since he shot the bookseller in Germany, I have had a warm

1" The copyright of my Pleasures of Hope," | ravens, croakers, suckers of innocent blood and he writes, "worth an annuity of two hundred living men's brains." Again, to Alison, in 1811: pounds for life, was sold out-and-out for sixty-"Perhaps in my feelings towards the Gallic pounds." "But." he adds, "for two or three years the publishers gave me fifty pounds on every edition." This was better than nothing: but what was it, compared with what the pub-side for him. It was sacrificing an offering by lisher made? No wonder he ever after felt so sore on the subject, and that in 1805 he thus wrote to Scott:-"They are the greatest ravens on earth with whom we have to deal,-liberal enough as booksellers,--but still, you know,

the hand of Genius to the Manes of the victims immolated by the trade; and I only wish we had Nap here for a short time, to cut out a few of our own cormorants."

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His next great work was the Specimens of the British Poets, in seven octave volumes, published in 1819. The Preliminary Essay to this work is a charming piece of prose, and the little prefatory notices abound in delightful criticism.1 The next year he entered upon the editorship of the New Monthly Magazine. He contributed but little, however, to this periodical, though he drew around him a band of clever writers, who made it very popular. In 1824 he put forth another poem,-a dramatic tale,-Theodric,-in which the public were sadly disappointed. After this he wrote no poem of any considerable length. It is not by his longer poems, however, that Campbell will be best remembered, but by his shorter pieces of such exquisite finish and feeling, such as The Soldier's Dream, &c., and especially by those noble martial lyrics or war-songs, which, as has been well said, "form the richest offering ever made by poetry at the shrine of patriotism."

In 1827 he was elected Lord Rector of his own mother-University at Glasgow by the free and unanimous choice of the students. On the 9th of May the next year, he lost his amiable and excellent wife, which was a severe blow to him. In 1830 he resigned the editorship of the New Monthly, and, lending his name to another publisher, started the Metropolitan Magazine, in which he was afterwards aided by his poetical friend Thomas Moore. In 1834 he published, in two octavo volumes, the Life of Mrs. Siddons, which added but little to his reputation. His subsequent publications were a Life of Shakspeare, The Life and Times of Petrarch, Frederick the Great and his Court and Times, and some smaller poems. He left London for Boulogne, on account of his health, in 1843, and he resided in that city, with his niece as his companion, until his death, which took place on the 15th of June, 1844. On the 3d of the next month his remains were deposited in the "Poets' Corner" in Westminster Abbey, over against the monument to Shakspeare. He had two sons; the younger died at an early age,-while the elder, a helpless imbecile from his birth, survived the father.5

I know well that in these days (1866) it is fashionable to admire the poets of the present and to disparage those of the preceding generation: yet I must express my own convictions, and say that no poet of the nineteenth century

1 But the fault of the work is, it does NOT give the best specimens of the various authors; and it is for this reason, I presume, that another edition was not called for till 1841, when it was reprinted in one large octavo volume. The ground had been trodden by others before, who made the best selections from their authors. Campbell wished not to tread in their track, and hence the failure of the book. As was well said by a writer in Fraser's Magarine for November, 1844, "No one will go to a book for specimens of a poet in his secondbest manner or his third-rate mood. We want the cream of a poet, not the skimmed milk of his genius."

What a pity it is," said Sir Walter Scott to Washington Irving," that Campbell does not write more and oftener, and give full sweep to his genius! He has wings that would bear him to the skies, and he does, now and then, spread them grandly, but folds them up again and resumes his perch, as if he was afraid to launch away. The fact is, Campbell is, in a manner, a bugbear to himself: the brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his

after-efforts. He is afraid of the shadow that his own fame casts before him.”

"It was deep snow," writes Allan Cunningham, "when he reached the college-green; the students were drawn up in parties, pelting one another; the poet ran into the ranks, threw several snow-balls with unerring aim, then, summoning the scholars around him in the hall, delivered a speech replete with philosophy and eloquence. It is needless to say how this was welcomed."

4 The after-history of the Magazine is well known; the two poets retired, and Marryat, with his Peter Simple, gave it an extent of reputation it had not before.

Read an Essay on the Genius and Character of Campbell, by George Gilfillan; an article in the North British Review, x. 459; another in the London Quarterly, lxxxv. 32; also in the Gentleman's Magazine, August, 1846, December, 1848, and February, 1849; also the Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, by William Beattie, M.D.; and an excellent review of this work in the Gentleman's Magazine for Febru ary, 1849.

has, in my estimation, a higher rank than Thomas Campbell; no one is more generally read and admired, and no one will be longer remembered. There is no mysticism about him: all is clear as well as ennobling. His exquisite harmony of versification, his occasional sublimity, his enthusiasm, his pathetic tenderness, his richness of natural description, together with his elevation and purity of moral sentiment, all combine to make him a classic secure of his immortality, standing upon the same shelf with Goldsmith, Thomson, and Gray.1

THE MOTHER AND HER CHILD.

Lo! at the couch where infant beauty sleeps,
Her silent watch the mournful mother keeps;
She, while the lovely babe unconscious lies,
Smiles on her slumbering child with pensive eyes,
And weaves a song of melancholy joy:
"Sleep, image of thy father; sleep, my boy;
No lingering hour of sorrow shall be thine;
No sigh that rends thy father's heart and mine;
Bright as his manly sire the son shall be
In form and soul; but, ah! more blest than he!
Thy fame, thy worth, thy filial love at last,
Shall soothe his aching heart for all the past,—
With many a smile my solitude repay,

And chase the world's ungenerous scorn away.

"And say, when summon'd from the world and thee,

I lay my head beneath the willow-tree,

Wilt thou, sweet mourner, at my stone appear,
And soothe my parted spirit lingering near?
Oh, wilt thou come at evening hour to shed
The tears of Memory o'er my narrow bed—
With aching temples on thy hand reclined,
Muse on the last farewell I leave behind,
Breathe a deep sigh to winds that murmur low,
And think on all my love, and all my woe?"

So speaks affection, ere the infant eye
Can look regard, or brighten in reply:
But when the cherub lip hath learnt to claim
A mother's ear by that endearing name;
Soon as the playful innocent can prove
A tear of pity, or a smile of love,
Or cons his murmuring task beneath her care,
Or lisps with holy look his evening prayer,

1 Since writing the above, I have been happy majestic, are conveyed to the reader in the to find my high estimate of Campbell as a tones of a music forever varied,-sinking or poet confirmed by so sound and tasteful a swelling like the harmonies of an Eolian lyre, critic as Mr. Moir, the A (Delta) of Black-yet ever delightful: and these are illus wood. He says, "I do not think I overrate trated by pictures from romance, history, or the merits of the Pleasures of Hope, whether domestic life, replete with power and beauty. taking it in its parts or as a whole, in pre- It is like a long fit of inspiration,—a checkferring it to any didactic poem of equal length ered melody of transcendent excellence, passin the English language. No poet, at such an age after passage presenting only an everage, ever produced such an exquisite specimen varying and varied tissue of whatever is beau of poetical mastery,- that is, of fine concep- tiful and sublime in the soul of man and the tion and of high art combined. Sentiments aspects of nature." tender, energetic, impassioned, eloquent, and

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