One says it regretfully, but it is the sober truth that Campbell became now a greater hack than ever. He declared in the frankest possible manner that he did not mean to think of poetry any more; he meant to make money, a desire which was very near his heart all along. He had been working fourteen hours a day for some time, but the weak flesh began to complain, and four hours had to be cut off. In 1810 he lost his youngest child, Alison, and overwhelmed himself with grief. Before he had recovered from the shock his mother passed away in Edinburgh. She had been suffering from paralysis, and so far as we can learn Campbell had nothing more touching to say of her death than to express his ‘sincere acquiescence’ in the dispensation of Providence.
One or two little incidents helped to revive his spirits after the snapping of these sacred ties. He had been presented to the Princess of Wales by Lady Charlotte Campbell, who thoughtfully, as he tells a correspondent—but why thoughtfully?—kept the Princess from making an ‘irruption’ into his house. The Princess summoned him to Blackheath, where he had the felicity of dancing a reel with her, and thus ‘attained the summit of human elevation.’ An onlooker remarked upon this performance that Campbell had ‘the neat national trip,’ but we have no other evidence of his dancing accomplishments. Campbell was delighted with himself; but he soon discovered that his good luck in making a royal acquaintance might prove embarrassing. He had unthinkingly remarked to the Princess that he loved operas to distraction. ‘Then why don’t you go to them?’ she inquired. Campbell made some excuse about the expense, and next day a ticket for the season arrived. ‘God help me!’ he says, in recounting the incident, ‘this is loving operas to distraction. I shall be obliged to live in London a month to attend the opera-house—all for telling one little fib.’
As a matter of fact, Campbell had now something more serious to think about than attending the Opera. He had been engaged, at his own suggestion, to give a course of lectures on Poetry at the Royal Institution, the fee to be one hundred guineas for the course. When Scott heard of the undertaking he expressed the hope that Campbell would read with fire and feeling, and not attempt to correct his Scots accent. But Campbell did not agree with Scott on the latter point. He tells Alison that he has taken great pains with his voice and pronunciation, and has laboured hard to get rid of his Caledonianisms. Sydney Smith, he says, patronised him more than he liked about the lectures, and gave him what, in Campbell’s case, was clearly a wise hint against joking. In truth he seems to have had more than enough of advice from his friends, but he went his own way, and he was amply justified by the result.
The first lecture, delivered on the 24th of April 1812, proved a great success. According to a contemporary account, the hall was crowded, and the ‘eloquent illustrations’ of the lecturer received the warmest praise. Campbell says his own expectations were more than realised, though he had been so far from a state of composure that he playfully threatened to divorce his wife if she attended! At the close of the lecture distinguished listeners pressed around him with compliments. ‘Byron, who has now come out so splendidly, told me he heard Bland the poet say, “I have had more portable ideas given me in the last quarter of an hour than I ever imbibed in the same portion of time.” Archdeacon Nares fidgetted about and said: “that’s new; at least quite new to me.”’ And so on. Campbell’s friends were less critical than kind. The modern reader of his lectures will not find anything so new as Nares found, nor anything so very portable as Bland carried away. The lectures form a sort of chronological, though necessarily imperfect, sketch of the whole history of poetry, from that of the Bible down to the songs of Burns. The scheme was magnificent, but it was too vast for one man, especially for a man of Campbell’s flighty humour, and he broke away from it before he had well begun. What he has to say about Hebrew and Greek verse is of some value, but generally speaking the thought and the criticism are quite commonplace. Madame de Staël, it is true, told Campbell that, with the exception of Burke’s writings there was nothing in English so striking as these lectures. But then it was Madame de Staël who solemnly declared that she had read a certain part of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ twenty times, and always with the pleasure of the first reading! She must have known how well praise agreed with the poet. A second course of lectures was delivered at the same institution in 1813, but of these it is not necessary to say more than that, in the conventional language of the day, they were ‘applauded to the echo.’
Towards the close of 1813 Campbell’s health got ‘sadly crazy’ again, and he went to Brighton for sea bathing. There he soon found his lost appetite: the fish, he wrote, was delicious, and the library quite a pleasant lounge with the added luxury of music. He called upon Disraeli, ‘a good modest man,’ and was invited to dine with him. He was also introduced to the venerable Herschel and his son, the one ‘a great, simple, good old man,’ the other ‘a prodigy in science and fond of poetry, but very unassuming.’ The astronomer seemed to him like ‘a supernatural intelligence,’ and when he parted with him he felt ‘elevated and overcome.’ In such lofty language does Campbell intimate his very simple pleasures and experiences.
But the Brighton holiday was only the prelude to one much longer and much more interesting. During the short-lived peace of 1802 Campbell had often expressed a wish to visit the scenes of the Revolution and above all the Louvre; and now that the abdication of Buonaparte, the capture of Paris, and the presence of the allied armies had drawn thousands of English subjects to the French capital, he resolved to carry out the long-cherished plan. On the 26th of August 1814, he was writing from Dieppe, where one of the rabble called after him: ‘Va-t’-en Anglais! vous cherchez nous faire perir de faim.’ On the way to Paris he halted for two days at Rouen, where he found his brother Daniel—‘poor as ever’—with whom he had parted at Hamburg in 1800. Landing in Paris, he met Mrs Siddons, and in her company visited the Louvre and the Elysian Fields, which he held to be as contemptible in comparison to Hyde Park and the Green Park as the French public squares and buildings are superior to those of London.
At the Louvre, where he spent four hours daily, he grandiloquently says he was struck dumb with emotion, his heart palpitated, and his eyes filled with tears at the sight of that ‘immortal youth,’ the Belvidere Apollo. Next to the Louvre in interest, he mentions the Jardin des Plantes, ‘a sight worth travelling to see.’ The Pantheon he describes as ‘a magnificent place,’ adding that the vaults of Voltaire and Rousseau are the only cleanly things he has seen in Paris; so neat and tidy that they remind him rather of a comfortable English pantry than of anything of an awe-inspiring nature. Versailles is ‘very splendid indeed,’ but the palace is ‘not large enough for the basis, and the trees are clipped with horrible formality.’ He is not lost in admiration of the French women. ‘There are two sorts of them—the aquiline, or rather nut-cracker faces, and the broad faces; both are ugly.’ On the other hand, he finds that the handsomest Englishmen are inferior to the really handsome Frenchmen. The Englishman always looks very John Bullish; and nothing that the French say flatters him so much as when they declare that they would not take him for un Anglois. The Opera he describes as ‘a set of silly things, but with some exquisite music’; the French acting in tragedy he does not relish, but their comic acting is perfection. Of notable people whom he met he mentions the elder Schlegel, Humboldt, Cuvier, Denon the Egyptian traveller—‘a very pleasing person’—and the Duke of Wellington. To the latter he was introduced merely as ‘Mr Campbell,’ and the Duke afterwards told Madame de Staël that he ‘thought it was one of the thousands of that name from the same country; he did not know it was the Thomas.’ Schlegel he describes as a very uncommon man, learned and ingenious, but a visionary and a mystic. He and Humboldt, ‘after much entreaty,’ made him repeat ‘Lochiel.’ When Schlegel came to England, he was generally Campbell’s guest, and the two, notwithstanding that their characters and tastes were so dissimilar, appear to have entertained a sincere regard for each other.
After a two months’ stay in Paris, Campbell returned to England, with, as Beattie pompously phrases it, a rich and varied fund of materials for reflection. He found his work much in arrear, and had just begun to make some headway with it when the unlooked-for intelligence reached him that by the death of his Highland cousin, MacArthur Stewart of Ascog, he had fallen heir to a legacy of nearly £5000. The will described him as ‘author of “The Pleasures of Hope”‘; but it was not for the honours of authorship that he was rewarded. ‘Little Tommy, the poet,’ said the testator, ‘ought to have a legacy because he was so kind as to give his mother sixty pounds yearly out of his income.’
Stewart died at the end of March 1815, and by the middle of April Campbell was in Edinburgh—whither he had gone to look after his interests—feeling ‘as blythe as if the devil were dead.’ After seeing his old friends in the capital, he went to Kinniel on a visit to Dugald Stewart, and then, taking the Canal boat from Falkirk, set out for Glasgow, where he made a round of his relations. He spent a very happy time altogether, and when he returned to Sydenham, it was, as he thought, to look out on a future of prosperity and comparative ease. A few days after his arrival, Waterloo decided the fate of Europe, and for a time he did nothing but speak and write of the prodigies of British valour performed on that field. Some tributary stanzas written to the tune of ‘The British Grenadiers’ show that while he did not fancy being taken for an Englishman in Paris, he was very proud to appear as a John Bull jingo at home.