He rang the bell more than once with increased force. At last, surprised and annoyed by so unseasonable a peal, the servant appeared. The poet was sitting with one foot on the bed and the other on the floor, with an air of mixed impatience and inspiration. ‘Sir, are you ill?’ inquired the servant. ‘Ill! never better in my life. Leave the candle and oblige me with a cup of tea as soon as possible.’ He then started to his feet, seized hold of the pen, and wrote down the ‘happy thought,’ but as he wrote changed the words ‘events to come’ into ‘coming events,’ as it now stands in the text.
This is not exactly a case of mons parturit murem; it is more like the woman in the parable who beat up all her friends to rejoice with her in the discovery of her trinket; still more like the proud bantam who disturbs the whole neighbourhood for joy that a chick has been egged into the world. It would be difficult indeed to find a more striking example of much ado about nothing.
Sometime during the month of August Campbell had an intimation from Lord Minto that he was coming to Edinburgh, and would expect the poet to accompany him when he went south. Minto came, and Campbell left with him. In a letter to Scott Campbell says he must make the stay a short one, because he has arranged to take lessons in drawing from Nasmyth, but of that scheme nothing further is heard. Redding avers that Campbell could not use a pencil in the delineation of the simplest natural object, and instances an attempt to draw a cat which looked very like a crocodile. On the way to Minto the party halted at Melrose to allow Campbell to inspect the Abbey, with which he says he was pleased to enthusiasm. Scotland in the eleventh century, he exclaims sarcastically, could erect the Abbey of Melrose, and in the nineteenth could not finish the College of Edinburgh. He comments upon the fine, wild, yet light outline of its architecture, and says his mind was filled with romance at beholding ‘in the very form and ornaments of the pile, proofs of its forest origin that lead us back to the darkest of Gothic ages.’ When they arrived at Minto they were welcomed by Scott, among other visitors; and Campbell retired early to spend the evening with Hawkins’ Life of Johnson, in which he found ‘some valuable stuff in the midst of superabundant nonsense.’
On the whole, he does not seem to have been very happy at Minto during this visit. Lord Minto’s politeness, he tells Alison, only twitches him with the sin of ingratitude for not being more contented under his hospitable roof. But a lord’s house, fashionable strangers, luxuriously-furnished saloons, and winding galleries where he can hardly find his own room, make him as wretched as he can be, ‘without being a tutor.’ Everyone, it is true, treats him civilly; the servants are assiduous in setting him right when he loses his way; but degraded as he is to a state of second childhood in this ‘new world,’ it would be insulting his fallen dignity to smile hysterically and pretend to be happy. All of which is sheer fudge—nothing more than the splenetic utterance of an enfant gaté.
Happily, Campbell had business at home, and there was no reason why he should sit by the waters of Minto and sigh when he thought of Edinburgh. The new edition of his poems was now in the press, and he returned to the capital to revise the proofs. While he was thus engaged, other work of a less agreeable kind divided his attention. An Edinburgh bookseller had commissioned him to prepare ‘The Annals of Great Britain,’ a sort of continuation of Smollett, which he contracted to finish in three volumes octavo, at £100 per volume. The work was to be ‘anonymous and consequently inglorious’—a labour, in fact, ‘little superior to compilation, and more connected with profit than reputation.’ It was a distinct drop for the author of ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ and he knew it. Indeed, such was his sensitiveness on the point that he bound his employer to secrecy, and tried to hide the fact from even his most intimate friends. One cannot help comparing this behaviour with that of Tennyson; Campbell falling, even in his own estimation, below his very moderate level, deliberately doing work of which he was ashamed; Tennyson, perhaps going to the other extreme, sacrificing his worldly happiness and, it is to be feared, in part the health of the woman he loved, to the pursuit of his ideals. But Tennyson was a poet.
‘The Annals of Great Britain’ was not published until some years after this, but the book may be dismissed at once. It was little more than a dry catalogue of events chronologically arranged, a mere piece of journeyman’s work done to turn a penny, without accuracy of information or the slightest regard for style. Campbell told Minto that the publisher did not desire that he should make the work more than passable, and it is barely passable. It is quite forgotten now; indeed, a writer in Fraser’s Magazine for November 1844 declares that even then the most intelligent bookseller in London was unaware of its existence. Redding says that the author’s own library was innocent of a copy.
While Campbell was hammering away at this perfunctory performance in Edinburgh, some whisper of honours and independence awaiting him in London seems to have reached his ears. It was only a whisper, but the time had clearly come when he must make up his mind once for all about the future. By his own admission, poetry had now deserted him; he had lost both the faculty and the inclination for writing it. Dull prose, he saw, must henceforward be his stand-by. As a market for dull prose, London undoubtedly ranked before Edinburgh; and so he took the plunge, though he had no fixed engagement in London, no actual business there except to superintend the printing of his poems. It was a bold venture, but in the end it probably turned out as well as any other venture would have done.
On the way south he was again the guest of Currie at Liverpool, where he remained ‘drinking with this one and dining with that one’ for ten days. Then he visited the pottery district of Staffordshire, where an old college friend was employed. It was his first real experience of the ‘chaos of smoke,’ and he did not like it. The country, he remarked, for all its furnaces, was not a ‘hot-bed of letters,’ though he had met with a character who enjoyed a reputation for learning by carrying a Greek Testament to church. The people were a heavy, plodding, unrefined race, but they had good hearts, and what was just as important, they gave good dinners. ‘These honest folks showed me all the symptoms of their affection that could be represented by the symbols of meat and drink, and if ale, wine, bacon, and pudding could have made up a stranger’s paradise I should have found it among the Potteries.’ One untoward thing happened: Campbell lost his wig. For it should have been mentioned that just before he left Edinburgh, finding that his hair was getting alarmingly thin, he had adopted the peruke, which he continued to wear for the rest of his life. A bewigged poet of twenty-five must have been a somewhat singular spectacle in those days, but Campbell made up for the antiquated head-gear by a notable spruceness in other ways. He wore a blue coat with bright, gilt buttons, a white waistcoat and cravat, buff nankeens and white stockings, with shoes and silver buckles—a perfect scheme of colour.
In this gay attire, though ‘agonised’ by the want of his wig, he arrived in London on the 7th of March (1802). Telford at once took charge of him by making him his guest at the Salopian Hotel, Charing Cross. Of Telford’s admiration for Campbell as a poet we have already learnt something; his opinion of Campbell as a man was apparently not quite so enthusiastic. Nothing is recorded of Campbell’s conduct during the former visits to London, but what are we to infer from the fact that Telford and Alison now united to ‘advise and remonstrate with the young poet, at a moment when he was again surrounded by all the seductive allurements of a great capital’? Alison sent him a letter of paternal counsel for the regulation of his life and studies; and Telford confided to Alison that he had asked Campbell to live with him in order to have him constantly in check. If Campbell really had any leaning towards social or other extravagances, it was promptly counteracted by an event of which we shall have to speak presently.