When he returned to town, in January 1825, it was to take part in what he afterwards called the only important event in his career. This was the founding of the London University, the idea of which he appears to have conceived during his recent intercourse with the Professors of Bonn. The scheme was discussed at various private and public conferences during the spring and summer, and the financial basis of the undertaking being apparently assured, Campbell proceeded to Berlin in September to ascertain how far the University there might serve as a model for London. He spent a week in the Prussian capital, which he compares unfavourably with London in everything but cookery, and came away with ‘every piece of information respecting the University,’ and every book he wished for. At Hamburg he was given a public dinner by eighty English residents, and was driven about the town by his old protégé, the ‘Exile of Erin.’ Back in London, he appeared at a meeting in support of the Western Literary and Scientific Institution, and in an eloquent speech declared that if his plan of a Metropolitan University succeeded he would ask for no other epitaph on his grave than to be celebrated as one of its originators. The plan, fortunately, did succeed, and although Lord Brougham, to serve his own political ambitions, tried to rob him of the honour, there cannot be a doubt that it rightly belongs to Campbell. Moreover, King’s College would never have existed but for the London University, so that Campbell, as he used to remark, did a double good.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of 1826, he was interesting himself in certain domestic affairs. He was having a spacious study constructed, and he proposed to treat himself to a new carpet and some elegant leather chairs. Every volume was to be removed from the drawing-room; and henceforth he was to smoke in a garret, not in his study. His fancy also rioted by anticipation in ‘a geranium-coloured paper with gold leaves to harmonise with the glory of my gilded and red-bound books.’ But there his purse and his vanity were at loggerheads. While the masons were hammering in the house, the Glasgow students had decided to ask Campbell to allow himself to be put forward as their Lord Rector. At first he complied, but as the time approached he began to waver in his decision. He was not well, his son’s malady distressed him, and his pecuniary affairs—thanks in a great measure to his own reckless extravagance—were again in deep water. Writing on November 6 (1826) he says: ‘I got in bills on Saturday morning for the making up of my new house, treble the amount expected; and also confirmation of an acquaintance being bankrupt, for whom I had advanced the deposits on three shares in the London University. I could not now accept the Rectorship if it were at my option. If I travelled it must be on borrowed money. Friends I have in plenty who would lend, but I fear debt as I do the bitterness of death.’ This seemed decisive enough, and yet nine days later the Principal of Glasgow University was announcing to him that he had been elected Lord Rector by the unanimous vote of the four ‘nations.’
The rival candidates were Mr Canning and Sir Thomas Brisbane, and the contest had proved more than usually exciting, from the fact that all the professors except Millar and Jardine were opposed to Campbell on the not very solid ground of ‘political distrust.’ Some enemy even sought to damage his cause by circulating a report that his mother had been ‘a washerwoman in the Goosedubs of Glasgow.’ Wilson, referring in the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ to this incident, remarked that in England such baseness would be held incredible; but Wilson forgot that the fight was practically a political one, and in politics any stick is, or was, good enough to beat a dog with. Campbell’s triumph was, however, all the greater that it was achieved under such conditions; and we can easily imagine the glow of pride with which he went down to Glasgow in the succeeding April (1827).
He landed on the 9th of the month, after a journey which he had cause to remember from the circumstance that Matilda brought ‘seventy parcels of baggage,’ and on the 12th he delivered his inaugural address in the old College Hall. There is abundant evidence of his high spirits in an incident recorded by Allan Cunningham. Snow lay on the ground at the time, and when Campbell reached the College Green he found the students pelting each other. ‘The poet ran into the ranks, threw several snowballs with unerring aim, then, summoning the scholars around him in the Hall, delivered a speech replete with philosophy and eloquence.’ The snowballing was not very dignified perhaps, but it was strictly in character, and must have added immensely to Campbell’s popularity with the ‘darling boys’ of his Alma Mater. The Rectorial address was received with intense enthusiasm. One listener describes it as elegant and highly poetical, and says that it was delivered with great ease and dignity. Another, a student, writes: ‘To say we applauded is to say nothing. We evinced every symptom of respect and admiration, from the loftiest tribute, even our tears—drawn forth by his eloquent recollections of olden times—down to escorting him with boisterous noise along the public streets.’
Campbell remained in Glasgow until the 1st of May, banqueting with the Professors and the Senatus (who, by the way, created him an LL.D., a title which he never used), hearing explanations by the Faculty, and coaching himself up in University ordinances and finance. For Campbell filled the Rectorial office in no sinecure fashion. Perhaps, as Redding says, he made more of the post than it was worth, out of a little harmless vanity and somewhat of local attachment. But at any rate he did not spare himself. He got his inaugural address printed, and sent every student a copy of it, inscribed with his autograph. He wrote a series of Letters on the Epochs of Greek and Roman Literature, which, after running through the New Monthly, he presented to the students in volume form. He investigated the rights of the students too, and secured them many advantages of which they had been unjustly deprived. All these duties he performed in person, thus involving several special journeys to Glasgow; so that, on the whole, it may safely be said that he conducted himself like a model Lord Rector.
The result was seen in his re-election, not only for a second but for a third term, which was almost unprecedented, and indeed was said to be contrary to the statutes and usage of the University. His popularity with the students all through was very great. They founded a Campbell Club in his honour; commissioned a full-length portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence; and presented him with a silver punch-bowl, which figures in his will as one of his ‘jewels.’ When he was elected for the third time they went wild with delight. Campbell was staying with his cousin, Mr Gray, in Great Clyde Street, a few paces from the river. There the students gathered to the number of fourteen hundred, and a speech being called for, Campbell appeared at the window. ‘Students,’ he said, ‘sooner shall that river’—pointing to the Clyde—‘cease to flow into the sea, than I, while I live, will forget the honour this day done to me.’ There is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. At this stage an old washerwoman passing on the outskirts of the crowd was arrested by the sight of what she conceived to be a lunatic speaking from a window. ‘Puir man!’ she remarked to a student, ‘can his freends no tak’ him in?’ A royal time it must have been for the poet in Glasgow altogether. He was naturally much attached to the city, and although he complains of feeling melancholy while walking about his old haunts, yet it was a melancholy not without alleviations. The Rectorship had been ‘a sunburst of popular favour,’ the ‘crowning honour’ of his life; and as for Glasgow itself, why it flowed with ‘syllogisms and ale.’
The third year of Campbell’s Rectorship expired in the autumn of 1829, but meanwhile, in May 1828, he had lost his wife. Mrs Campbell had been ailing for some time, and his anxiety on her account darkens all the correspondence of the period. For several months he acted both as housekeeper and sick-nurse, and seldom crossed his door except to get something for the invalid. Mrs Campbell’s death was an irreparable loss to him. She had been an affectionate, even a childishly adoring wife (she used to take visitors upstairs on tiptoe to show the poet ‘in a moment of inspiration’!) and it does not surprise us to read of the bereaved husband relieving his feelings with tears at the sight of a trinket or a knot of ribbon that belonged to her. Mrs Campbell had tributes from many quarters. Redding said that no praise could be too high for her good management and her general conduct in domestic life. Mrs Grant of Laggan, writing of Campbell’s pecuniary embarrassments, remarked that ‘his good, gentle, patient little wife was so frugal, so sweet-tempered, that she might have disarmed poverty of half its evils.’ It was maliciously hinted in Scotland that she lived unhappily with her husband, but upon that point we may safely accept the testimony of Redding. ‘I never,’ he says, ‘found Mrs Campbell out of temper. I never saw a remote symptom of disagreement, though I entered the poet’s house for years at all times, without ceremony. I believe the tale to be wholly a fiction.’
Mrs Campbell’s death sent the poet out into the world and into company very different from that with which he had been used to associate. Redding makes touching reference to the change at his fireside. The recollection of Mrs Campbell’s uniform cheerfulness and hospitality, the sight of her tea-table without her presence, her vacant chair, that inexpressible lack of something which long custom had made like second nature—these things gave to Campbell’s home a melancholy colouring which his old friends never cared to contemplate. ‘Man,’ says Lytton, ‘may have a splendid palace, a comfortable lodging, nay, even a pleasant house, but man has no home where the home has no mistress.’ Henceforward Campbell had practically no home. He moved about from house to house, always seeking the comfort which he never found, his books and his papers and his general belongings getting ever into a greater state of confusion for want of the hand that had so quietly and skilfully ordered his domestic affairs.
The literary product of these years of bereavement and the Glasgow Rectorship was naturally very slight. Indeed the letters to the students, already mentioned, formed almost the only writings of any importance. In concert with the elder students he projected a Classical Encyclopædia, but for some unexplained reason the project was allowed to drop. The victory of Navarino in October 1827 produced some stanzas which he not inaptly called ‘a rumble-tumble concern,’ and the ‘Lines to Julia M——,’ as well as the short lyric, ‘When Love came first to Earth,’ seem to have been written in 1829. It was, however, an essentially barren period, unmarked by a single piece above the average of the third-rate writer.