REDDING'S MEMOIRS OF CAMPBELL. * Mn. REDDING has collected into two

volumes, with some addi- tions as he intimates in his preface, the reminiscences of Thomas Campbell, which he published in the New Monthly Magazine not long after the poet's death. The work contains a good deal of in- teresting matter, and will serve the purpose for which alone Mr. Redding professes to have written it, that namely of supplying the poet's future biographer with "incidents and characteristics available from no other source" ; but this, we think, is not enough. Having catered largely for the "future biographer" fourteen or fifteen years ago, surely he ought to have cared for the pleasure and profit of readers of the present generation, when he set about reproducing his materials after so long a lapse of time. He ought to have expended some literary labour in giving them an appearance of organic arrangement, and dressing them in language which, if not positively excellent, should have at least the negative merit of freedom from gross slovenliness. This he has not done, and therefore his book can be regarded as nothing better than an unsorted heap of raw materials. Few transient gleams of grace or vivacity relieve the lumbering monotony of its style ; the principal changes it displays are from tedious meaiocrity to flippancy, turgidity, slip-slop, or bad grammar. We are bound in courtesy to suppose that "the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains," but we are not bound to for- give him for not having taken more pains ; and Mr. Redding is the less entitled to forbearance on this score because he is an un- sparing castigator of others for faults which he himself habitually commits. He is indignant at the defilement of the English tongue by slang phrases and others which writers of mark have • Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs of Thomas Campbell, Author of " The Pleasures of Hope," &c. By Cyrus Redding, Author of " Fifty Years' Recollec- tions, Literary and Personal," 80. In two volumes. Published by Skeet.

not scrupled to borrow from the penny-a•liners ; and in- the work before ns he repeatedly uses the word. " party " just as City gents do, making it synonymous with "person." Mr. Redding is professedly a laudator temporis acti, and it might have been excusable in him, writing fifteen years ago, when Mr. Tennyson's fame was yet young, to express himself as fol- lows—if only he had put his thoughts in better constructed

language. With the Pleasures of Hope the existing school of poetry claims little affinity. To polish and refine the verses which inspiration, real or fancied, produces, is out of fashion. Like the cheap goods of modern manufacturers, not made to last, but sell, quantity and celerity of production And most favour in the discerning' public." How grossly inapplicable is all this to the present day, when poetry is notoriously far from finding ready and indiscriminate favour IN " the public. The appearance of such a passage in what purports to be a new book, published in November 1859, shows how little its author is addicted to the practice of revision—how little he has profited by the example of his deceased friend which he extols so highly. Some of the specimens he has given of Campbell's care in that respect are very interesting, but there are one or two of them in which he has not done the poet justice :— " He made a number of alterations in his verses ; he sometimes printed for correction only, and kept them by him. From a copy of the Soldier's Dream,' after its first publication, it is evident he made the following— Our bugles had sung, for the night-cloud had lour'd,- to- Our bugles sang truce, for the night-cloud had lour'd.

The allusion in the second version is evidently to the pause in a conflict, while in the first it is the common go to bed,' in the soldier's phra- seology, sounded in the evening of the day. The last line in the second stanza ran,

And twice ere the cock crew I dream'd it again,— it was altered to— And thrice ere the morning I dream'd it again.

The third stanza was written-

Methonght from the battle-field's dreadful array, Far, far I had roam'd on a desolate track,

Till nature and sunshine disclosed the sweet way

To the house of my fathers that welcomed me back.

It was changed thus-

Methought from the battle-field's dreadful array, Far, far I had roam'd on a desolate track,

'7,1cas autumn, and sunshine disclosed the sweet way To the horn of my fathers that welcomed me back."

Where would have been Campbell's refinement of taste if he had retained so bad a phrase as that in the third line of this stanza, " disclosed the sweet way " ? The epithet " sweet" is here nothing but a stopgap to fill up the metre, and is utterly un.- poetical as expressing no thought of which the soldier would have been conscious at the moment. He felt only that his foot was on the way that led to his home, and his eagerness to reach it would have been too intense to leave him leisure for bestowing any dainty. epithet on the road which, when once recognized, his swift imagination had already overleaped to its gaol. In later editions of the poem the line stands thus- "'Twas autumn, and sunshine arose on the way

To the home of my fathers that welcomed me back."

The poet's instinct told him that if the soldier had been capable of reflecting on the sweetness of the way, he would not have " flown " but trudged leisurely along it, and stopped at every alehouse beside it to freshen up his mild emotions.

Some of Mr. Redding's criticisms on Campbell's lines are shrewd and pertinent, but we think he, is hypercritical in the following extract from a conversation of his on the Pleasures of Hope with its author.

" This seemed to please Campbell, especially when I added that I had acquired nearly the whole of his poem by heart before I was twenty years of age, little thinking we should ever be personally acquainted. I remarked, too, that even then being pretty well versed in natural history, I had dis- covered his introduction of tigers to the shores of Lake Erie, and hymns to South America, exclusively Asiatic and African animals, that it should have been jaguars. Yes,' said the poet, but the Yankees call them tigers.'

" There is another point, too, which I remember struck me, and does still, as being obscure, and vet in sound really noble. He inquired to what I alluded. I replied to the pilot:—

Now on Atlantic waves he rides afar, Where Andes, giant of the western star, With meteor standard to the winds unfurl'd, Looks from his throne of clouds o'er half the world !'

" To what part of the passage do you object ? '

" I replied, To making Andes a giant and in the singular number. It was a plural Spanish word. Los Andes, the Andes—as Cotopaxi, Chim- borazo, and a hundred others-

" Giants of the western star."

Again, the giant

" Looks from his throne of clouds o'er half the world."

Is not this defective ? Mountains are not " enthroned" in clouds ; they are " crowned with clouds," as Shakespeare's—" cloud-capped towers." A mountain throned on a cloud would be a false image. If the line stood, for example, the giants-

" Look, with their crown of clouds, o'er half the world,"

it would explain what I intended to convey.'

" Campbell replied, There was some ground for what I remarked in the confusion of the metaphor, but it had stood through so many editions, it would not do to alter it now.'

" Knowing his tenacity about his poems, and his inveterate hostility to altering anything of his own that had been published for a considerable time, I said no more. His hostility to Hazlitt for detecting a borrowed line came to my remembrance."

Hazlitt's unpardonable offence was that in a critique full of the highest encomiums on the Pleasures of Hope, he mentioned his discovery that the best line in the poem,

"Like angel visits, few and far between," A

was borrowed, unintentionally no doubt, from Blair's Grave= "Like angel visits, short and far between."

With respect to his fine lines about Andes, poor Tom might have made a better defence than he did. His critic confounded together two distinct modes of personification, either of which a poet may apply to a mountain. He may ascribe attributes of per-

sonality to the physical mass itself, as Byron has done in Man-

fred :— " Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains; They crowned him long ago, In a robe of mist, in a wreath of clouds, With a diadem of snow.

Around his waist are forests braced, The avalanche in his hand ; But ere it fall, that thunderingball Must wait for my command."

Or he may choose a human form to represent the being and qualities of the mountain, as the whole mass of the waters and all their phenomena were emblemed to Greek imagination in the person of their king, Poseidon. This is what Campbell has done for the South American cordilleras ; and treating them as an organic unity he had a right to give to their ideal representative the name familiar to Englishmen, and to use that name as a noun singular without regard to Spanish grammar, since such a use of it is not repugnant to the generality of English ears. And then having made his giant, and not havin# made him a cripple, why should he not allow him to choose his own favourite seat, and keep his state in the manner he liked best, on a throne of clouds, upon the highest summit of his mountain kingdom ?

Campbell sold the copyright of the Pleasures of Hope to Mun- dell and Co. of Edinburgh for a number of copies equivalent to about 50/. ; but after the sale of the first edition that liberal firm paid him of their own free will 251. for every thousand copies subsequently issued by them. They also allowed him to print by subscription a quarto edition, the seventh, for his own benefit ; and on the whole he received. not less than 9001. for this poem of eleyen hundred lines. The late John Murray agreed to pay him 5001. for his Specimens of the British Poets, and doubled that sum of his own accord upon the completion of the work. Campbell therefore had not much reason from the results of his own deal- ings with publishers to toast, as he did at a trade dinner in " the Row," " the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte—who shot a book- seller." His history as a poet is well summed up in the following extract :—

" The muse of Campbell belonged to that order in genius which is unable to sustain long its intensity of action. As with the execution of his two longer poems, the Pleasures of Hope, Gertrude of Wyoming, and three or four of his noble odes, in regard to quantity and excellence, so it was with the dura- tion of his power in working out the best things he was able to execute. His productionsbefore the Pleasures of Hope were published, were not of much more moment than those published after that poem, his Odes, and Gertrude of Wyoming, of course taking into account his additional experience. The poetical works, therefore, upon which his well-earned fame reposes were published between 1799 and 1809, or in about ten years of a life extended to sixty-seven. It is evident that his poetical power decreased before middle life. The circumstances which attend upon the early or later development of genius are singular. Milton began at eighteen, and continued to sixty- four ; Walker from eighteen to eighty, with no perceptible diminution of ability ; Dryden from twenty-six to seventy ; Pope from twelve to forty ; Cowley from ten to forty-nine ; Campbell,' says Scott, broke out at once, like the Irish rebels, a hundred thousand strong' ; he might have added that, like theirs, his progressive power slackened in proportion to the ardour of the onset."