Under his improved prospects he seems to have had some difficulty in settling down to his old literary tasks. We hear of him working again at the eternal ‘Specimens,’ but otherwise his pen seems to have lain idle. The American heir was coming over in August to take possession of the Ascog estates; and Campbell hoped to reap some additional pecuniary advantages for himself and his sisters. The heir was a cousin of the poet and a brother of the Attorney-General for Virginia. Beattie suggests that if Campbell’s elder brother had been aware of the law which rendered aliens to the Crown of Great Britain incapable of inheriting entailed property, and had made up his title as the nearest heir, he might have been proprietor of the old estates, which were afterwards sold for £78,000. But no such luck was to befall the Campbell family. The heir came into possession, and neither Campbell nor his sisters benefited further by his stroke of fortune. Campbell reported that he was an amiable gentleman, but, so far as he could see, was not inclined to be generous. Very likely he considered that Campbell had been well provided for already. At any rate the poet had to content himself, as he might well do, with his pension and his legacy and continue his literary cobbling as before.
His interests now became somewhat more varied. His surviving son had been sent to school, but having had to be removed on account of his health, Campbell set to teach the boy himself. He got up at six every morning and by seven was hammering Greek and Latin into the youth’s head. It was all nonsense, he declared, but in his son’s interests he dared not act up to his theory, which was to leave Greek and Latin, and instruct him in ‘other things.’ In Campbell’s view it was a vestige of barbarism that ‘learning’ only means, in its common acceptation, a knowledge of the dead languages and mathematics. Later on he speaks of his intention to drill the lad in ‘epistolary habits,’ but this intention he was, alas! never able to realise.
While the Greek and Latin lessons were going on, some of Campbell’s friends were busy with plans for his benefit. Scott, avowedly anxious to have his personal society, proposed that he should allow himself to be engineered—it was a delicate matter of supplanting an inefficient professor—into the Rhetoric Chair in Edinburgh University. The post was a tempting one, worth from £400 to £500 a year; but nothing is left to show how Campbell took the suggestion. In 1834 he was again urged to appear as a candidate for an Edinburgh professorship, but declined because he expected to live only ten years longer, and it would take him half that time to prepare his lectures. It is not unlikely that he would have regarded the present proposal with favour, but his thoughts were immediately turned in a different direction by the disinterested action of another friend. The Royal Institution had just been opened in Liverpool, and Roscoe was anxious that Campbell should give a dozen lectures there. Some preliminary hitch occurred about the fee, but this was got over, and Campbell ultimately drew no less a sum than £340 from the course. Considering that the lectures were practically those already delivered at the Royal Institution of London, he might compliment himself on being remarkably well paid; yet it is said that when he was afterwards pressed to deliver a second course at Liverpool, presumably on the same terms, he declined.
Campbell made his appearance in Liverpool at the end of October 1818. The lecture-room, wrote one of the listeners some thirty years later, was ‘crowded by the élite of the neighbourhood.’ The lecturer’s prose ‘was declared to be more poetic than his poetry; his glowing imagination gave a double charm to those passages from the poets which he cited as illustrations. The effect and animation of his eye, his figure, his voice, in reciting these passages are still vividly remembered.’ From Liverpool he went on to Birmingham, where he received £100 for repeating the lectures there. At Birmingham ‘it pleased fate that Thomas should take the measles,’ and Campbell himself had to get blisters applied to his chest to relieve his breathing. Under the circumstances he could not be expected to visit much; but he was introduced to Miss Edgeworth, who captivated him by the unassuming simplicity of her manner, and he ‘met L—d [Lloyd], the quondam partner of L—b [Lamb] in poetry—an innocent creature, but imagines everybody dead.’ He called upon Gregory Watt’s father—the James Watt—with whom, though he was then eighty-three, he says he spent one of the most amusing days he ever had with a man of science and a stranger to his own pursuits.
Suggestions had reached him from Glasgow and Edinburgh that he should deliver his lectures in these towns, but although, with his usual facility, he had come to think that lecturing was likely to be his metier, at present he literally had not a voice to exert without imminent hazard. And there was another danger. ‘I know well,’ he says, ‘what would happen from the hospitality of Glasgow or Edinburgh… I should enjoy the hospitality to the prejudice of my health. For though I now abstain habitually from even the ordinary indulgence in eating and taking wine, yet the excitement of speaking always hurts me.’ And so, partly to avoid the conviviality which Dickens and Thackeray enjoyed later as lecturers in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Campbell declined the invitations from the north, and went home to Sydenham.
While he was absent on this literary tour, the long-delayed ‘Specimens of the British Poets’—Miss Mitford makes very merry over the time spent on the work—had at length been published in seven octavo volumes. It proved only a moderate success. The plan was well conceived, but Campbell committed the initial mistake of deciding to print, not the best specimens of his authors, but only such pieces mainly as had not been printed by Ellis and by Headley. Of Sir Philip Sidney, for example, he says: ‘Mr Ellis has exhausted the best specimens of his poetry; I have only offered a few short ones.’ The absurdity of this procedure need not be pointed out. People do not go to a book of specimens for examples of a writer in his second-best manner. They want the cream of a poet, not, as Campbell has too often given them, the skimmed milk of his genius.
But the work was faulty on other grounds. Its biographical and bibliographical information was notoriously incorrect and imperfect. Campbell had no taste for the drudgery of antiquarian research: not in his line, he boldly announced, was the labour of trying to discover the number of Milton’s house in Bunhill Fields. His facts as a natural consequence were never to be depended upon. In the ‘Specimens’ the inaccuracies are more than usually abundant, and would, even if the work were otherwise satisfactory, entirely discount its value. ‘Read Campbell’s Poets,’ said Byron in his Journal; ‘marked the errors of Tom for correction.’ Again: ‘Came home—read. Corrected Tom Campbell’s slips of the pen.’ Some of Tom’s errors were, no doubt, mere slips; but more were clearly attributable to ignorance and laziness. If, for example, he had been at the trouble to take his Shakespeare from the shelf he would never have been guilty of such a misquotation as the following:
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet.
The work absolutely bristles with errors of this kind. Of the introductory essay and the prefatory notices of the various writers it is possible to speak somewhat more favourably. The essay, though written in an affected style, is still worth reading, especially the portions dealing with Milton and Pope. The lives, again, are marked by a fair appreciation of the powers of the respective poets, from the point of view of the old school; and although there is nothing subtle in the criticisms, there is welcome evidence of that sympathetic spirit which loves poetry for its own sake. This is the most that can be said for a work which Lockhart unaccountably eulogised as ‘not unworthy to be handed down with the classical verse of its author.’ No second edition of it was called for before 1841, when Campbell had some difference with Murray about its revision. Murray’s original agreement with Campbell had been for £500, but when the work was completed he doubled that sum and added books to the value of £200 which Campbell had borrowed. This munificent generosity Campbell rewarded by refusing to correct his own errors, though he was offered a handsome sum to do so; and the result was that he had to submit to the ‘Specimens’ being silently revised by another hand. The incident, which is not a little damaging to Campbell’s character, proves again that Campbell was treated by the booksellers far more liberally than he deserved.