Thomas Campbell. J. Cuthbert Hadden

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СКАЧАТЬ within the walls of that house.’ In the opinion of eminent English lawyers Gerald had not really been guilty of sedition, and certainly Muir never uttered a sentence in favour of reform stronger than Pitt himself had uttered. Nevertheless, in spite of their solemn protests and their fervent appeals to the jury, they were both sentenced to transportation, and were sent in irons to the hulks.

      The trial and its sequel made a deep impression on the young democrat. When he returned to Glasgow he could think and speak of nothing else. His old gaiety had quite deserted him, and instead of frolics and flute-playing and ‘auld farrant stories’ by the fireside, there were tirades about ‘the miserable prospects of society, the corrupt state of modern legislature, the glory of ancient republics, and the wisdom of Solon and Lycurgus.’ Never, surely, was any philosopher of fifteen so harassed by political cares and apprehensions. But the gloomy fit did not last long. Campbell had to think of making a living for himself, and he began by casting about for something to fill up his college vacations.

      It does not appear that he went to the University with any definite object in view, but the question of a profession had long since become a pressing consideration. Naturally he looked first towards the Church, but his father, unlike the majority of Scots parents about that time, did not encourage him in the notion of wagging his head in a pulpit; and so, after toying with theology—he studied Hebrew and wrote a hymn—he turned his attention in other directions. He thought of law, and spent some time in the office of a city solicitor. Then he thought of business, and filled up a summer recess in the counting-house of a Glasgow merchant, ‘busily employed at book-keeping and endeavouring to improve this hand of mine.’ Next he tried medicine, but had to give it up because he could not bear to witness the surgical operations. Finally he fell back on the last resource of the University man without a profession, and became a tutor. According to Dr. Holmes, the natural end of the tutor is to die of starvation. Campbell’s dread was that he would die of dulness: he had engaged to go to the farthest end of the Isle of Mull—

      Where the Atlantic wave

      Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.

      It turned out to be not quite so bad as he anticipated, though, in truth, the reality proved much less pleasant than the retrospect. In the meantime he had a very sprightly journey from Glasgow in the company of Joseph Finlayson, an old classfellow who was also going to taste the bitterness of a Highland tutorship. The pair started on the 18th of May 1795. At Greenock they spent a long evening on the quay, ‘for economy’s sake,’ and distinguished themselves by saving a boy from drowning. Campbell thought it pretty hard that two such heroes should go supperless to bed; so they repaired to the inn, ate—according to their own account—dish after dish of beefsteaks, and drank tankards of ale that set them both singing and reciting poetry like mad minstrels of the olden time. Next day, leaving their trunks to be sent by land to Inverary, they crossed the Firth of Clyde to Argyllshire, the jolliest boys in the whole world. Campbell says he had still a half-belief in Ossian, and an Ossianic interest in the Gaelic people; but this did not reconcile him to the Highland beds, in which ‘it was not safe to lay yourself down without being troubled with cutaneous sensations next morning.’ Nor did the bill of fare at the Highland inns please the travellers any better. It lacked variety. Everywhere it was ‘Skatan agas, spuntat agas, usquebaugh’—herrings and potatoes and whisky. But the roaring streams, and the primroses, and the ‘chanting cuckoos’ made up for all the discomfort. Campbell, as he expresses it, felt a soul in every muscle of his body, and his mind was filled with the thought that he was now going to earn his bread by his own labour.

      The two young fellows parted at Inverary, and Campbell went on by way of Oban to Mull, reaching his destination after losing himself several times on the island, the entire length of which he says he traversed. His engagement was with a distant relative of his own, a Mrs. Campbell, a ‘worthy, sensible widow lady,’ who treated him with thoughtful sympathy and consideration. What kind of tutor he made does not appear, but he evidently had the best intentions and a humane regard for his pupils. ‘I never beat them,’ he remarks, ‘remembering how much I loved my father for having never beaten me.’

      We know very little about this part of Campbell’s career beyond what is told in his own letters. He expected to find in Mull ‘a calm retreat for study and the Muses,’ and he was not disappointed. At first, naturally enough, he felt very dejected. The house of Sunipol, where he taught, is on the northern shore of the island, from which a magnificent prospect of thirteen of the Hebrides group, including Staffa and Iona, can be obtained. The scenery, on Campbell’s own admission, is ‘marked by sublimity and the wild majesty of nature,’ but unhappily in bad weather—and there is not much good weather in Mull—the island is ‘only fit for the haunts of the damned.’ There was plenty to feed the fancy of a poet; and yet, ‘God wot,’ says Campbell, ‘I was better pleased to look on the kirk steeples and whinstone causeways of Glasgow than on all the eagles and wild deer of the Highlands.’ His trunk was some days late in arriving, and as there was no writing paper in the island he was driven to the expedient of scribbling his thoughts on the wall of his room! However, he soon got reconciled to his forlorn condition; nay, in time he ‘blessed the wild delight of solitude.’ He diverted himself by botanising, by shooting wild geese, and, poet like, by rowing about in the moonlight; and we hear of an excursion to Staffa and Iona which filled him with hitherto unexperienced emotions of pleasure.

      There is even a whisper of a little love affair. A certain Caroline Fraser, a daughter of the minister of Inverary, came to visit at Sunipol. She was, according to Beattie, who knew her, a girl of ‘radiant beauty,’ and Campbell, being himself well-favoured in the matter of looks—he is described at this time as ‘a fair and beautiful boy, with pleasant and winning manners and a mild and cheerful disposition’—it was only natural that the pair should draw together. It was to this lady that the poem in two parts, bearing her Christian name, was addressed. The first part, beginning ‘I’ll bid the hyacinth to blow,’ was written in Mull; the second, ‘Gem of the crimson-coloured even,’ in the following year, when the young tutor was frequently able to avail himself of the hospitality of the ‘adorable Miss Caroline’s’ family. Verses were also addressed to ‘A Rural Beauty in Mull,’ but there is nothing to show that the ‘young Maria’ thus celebrated was anything more than a poetic creation. Of what may be called serious work during the course of the Mull tutorship we do not hear much. An Elegy, written in low spirits soon after he landed, was highly praised by Dr. Anderson, the editor of the ‘British Poets,’ who predicted from it that the author would become a great poet; but Campbell showed himself a better critic when he characterised it as ‘very humdrum indeed.’ Many of his leisure hours were filled up with translations of his favourite classics, notably with what he calls his old comedy of the ‘Clouds’ of Aristophanes, but of these it is unnecessary to speak. The real effect of the Mull residence upon his poetic product was not felt until later. It might be too much to say that ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter,’ ‘Lochiel,’ and ‘Glenara’ would never have been written but for the author’s sojourn in the Highlands, but the imagery of these and other pieces is clearly traceable to the promptings of island solitude; and much as Campbell disliked his isolation at the time, it undoubtedly proved of the greatest poetic service to him. Meanwhile, after five months of the wilderness, the exile became irksome, and he returned to Glasgow, glad to behold the kirk steeples and to feel his feet not on the ‘bent’ of Mull, but on the pavement of his native city.

      Campbell now entered on his last session at the University. There is no detailed account of his studies this session, but he remarks himself, in his high-flown style, that the winter was one in which his mind advanced to a more expansive desire of knowledge than he had ever before experienced. He mentions especially the lectures of Professor Millar on Heineccius and on Roman Law. ‘To say that Millar gave me liberal opinions would be understating the obligation which I either owed, or imagined I owed to him. He did more. He made investigations into the principles of justice and the rights and interests of society so captivating to me that I formed opinions for myself and became an emancipated lover of truth.’ The impulse which Millar’s lectures gave to his mind continued long after СКАЧАТЬ