Unhappily he had neither health nor spirits to enjoy his improved fortunes. He had outlived all his own family; he was getting more and more depressed, more and more feeble. To leave London seemed ill-advised, but he was determined upon it, and having made excursions to Brittany and elsewhere in search of a place of retirement, he at length fixed on Boulogne.[3] There he arrived with his niece in July 1843. Redding saw him just before leaving and found him in good humour, though he appeared weak and looked far older than he was. He had sold a thousand volumes from his library, and injudiciously spent £500 on the purchase of an annuity, because he dreaded that he might run through the principal. Boulogne proved not uncongenial to his tastes—a gay place with many public amusements, the Opera and the ‘Comedie,’ as well as concerts and races. But he was never able to derive any pleasure from it. Even the books he had brought from London were never placed on their shelves.

He had still some work which he intended doing, particularly a treatise on ancient geography, but ‘incurable indolence’ overcame him, and he resigned himself to the arm-chair. He complained of weakness, and felt a gradually increasing disinclination for any kind of exertion. In March 1844 Beattie received from him the last letter he ever wrote. A rapid decay of bodily strength had set in, and he never rallied. He had frequently told Beattie, his ‘kind, dear physician,’ that if he ever fell seriously ill care should be taken to acquaint him with the fact. Beattie was accordingly summoned to Boulogne, but his services were unavailing, except in so far as he could make the closing days easier for the patient. When the end came, on the 15th of June, it came peacefully, so peacefully that those who were watching by the bedside hardly knew when the spirit had fled.

Thus died Thomas Campbell, the last of all his long family, ‘a lonely hermit in the vale of years.’ There was a story that a representative of the Glasgow Cemetery Company had waited on the poor enfeebled poet about a year before his death to beg his body for their new cemetery. However this may have been—and one would prefer not to believe the story—when Campbell wrote his ‘Field Flowers’ it seems clear that he contemplated a grave by the Clyde. Redding says: ‘He often spoke of our going down together to visit the scenery, and of his preference for it as a last resting-place.’ But the field-flowers, ‘earth’s cultur’less buds,’ were not to bloom on his grave. His body was brought to England, and on the 3rd of July was laid with great pomp in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, where a fine statue now marks his tomb. A deputation of Poles attended, and as the coffin was lowered a handful of earth from the grave of Kosciusko was scattered over the lid. It was a simple but touching tribute. Two points struck his intimate friends when they read the inscription on the coffin lid. He was described as LL.D., a distinction he detested, and as ‘Author of “The Pleasures of Hope,”’ which he detested too.

CHAPTER IX
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND PLACE AS A POET

Something of Campbell’s person and character will have already been gathered from the foregoing pages. His friends unite in praise of his eyes and his generally handsome appearance as a young man. Lockhart says that the eyes had a dark mixture of fire and softness which Lawrence’s pencil alone could reproduce. Patmore speaks of his ‘oval, perfectly regular’ features, to which his eyes and his bland smile gave an expression such as the moonlight gives to a summer landscape. The thinness of the lips is commented upon by several writers; and it is even said that Chantrey declined to execute a bust because the mouth could never look well in marble. Gilfillan observes that there was nothing false about him but his hair: ‘he wore a wig, and his whiskers were dyed’—to match the wig! Most of his acquaintances remark on the wig, which in his palmy days was ‘true to the last curl of studious perfection’; Lockhart alone declares that it impaired his appearance because his choice of colour was abominable. Byron’s picture of him as he appeared at Holland House in 1813 has often been quoted: ‘Campbell looks well, seems pleased and dressed to sprucery. A blue coat becomes him; so does his new wig. He really looked as if Apollo had sent him a birthday suit or a wedding garment, and was witty and lively.’

But the completest and most consistent description is to be found in Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography. Hunt says: ‘His skull was sharply cut and fine, with plenty, according to the phrenologists, both of the reflective and amative organs… His face and person were rather of a small scale; his features regular, his eye lively and penetrating; and when he spoke dimples played about his mouth, which, nevertheless, had something restrained and close in it. Some gentle puritan strain seemed to have crossed the breed and to have left a stamp on his face, such as we often see in the female Scotch face rather than on the male.’ After Mrs Campbell’s death in 1828 he lost something of his old finical neatness, but he continued to the last to be ‘curious in waistcoats and buttons.’ Madden speaks of him in his later years as ‘an elderly gentleman in a curly wig, with a blue coat and brass buttons, very like an ancient mariner out of uniform and his natural element.’ Before he left London for Boulogne, he would be seen in the streets with an umbrella tucked under his arm, his boots and trousers all dust and dirt, ‘a perfect picture of mental and bodily imbecility.’

The best portrait of Campbell is the well-known one by Sir Thomas Lawrence, engraved in most editions of his works. It was painted when he was about forty years of age, and represents him very much as Byron described him. Redding, who had good means of judging, says that, barring the lips, which were too thick, it was ‘the perfection of resemblance.’ Campbell was somewhat vain of his appearance, and would never have asked, like Cromwell, to be painted warts and all. He had, in particular, a sort of feminine objection to an artist making him look old. Late in life he sat to Park, the sculptor, when his desire to be reproduced en beau made him decline to take off his wig. Park made a very successful bust, but Campbell disliked it just because of its extreme truthfulness. In the Westminster Abbey statue by Marshall, the features, according to those who knew him, are preserved with happy fidelity, though the attitude is somewhat theatrical, and we get the notion of a much taller and more athletic figure.

Campbell’s social habits have been variously described. There can be no doubt that occasionally he took too much wine; so did most people at that time. Beattie makes a long story about it, pleading this and that in extenuation, but there is no need to enlarge on the matter now. It was merely, as Campbell said himself, a case of being unable to resist ‘such good fellows.’ He was never a solitary drinker, like De Quincey with his opium. When he was left a widower he went more into company than he had done before; and apart from his special temptations, there was the fact that with his excitable temperament his last defences were carried before a colder man’s outworks. Moreover, he found that wine gave an edge to his wit, and hence he may often have passed the conventional bounds in the mere endeavour to promote the hilarity of his friends.