By all accounts he had not the best of tempers; indeed he admitted that to many people he had been ‘irritable, petulant, and overbearing.’ Of personal quarrels, however, he had very few; and although he said that he had been several times on the point of sending challenges, he was not once concerned in a duel. His chivalry led him to take the then bold step of defending Lady Byron’s character against the strictures of her husband, and when the press abused him he regarded it as a compliment. Of his kind-heartedness there are many proofs, apart from the generous way in which he dealt with his widowed mother and his sisters. No man was more ready to perform a good deed. His charities were varied and widespread. He held the view that in tales of distress one can never believe too much, and naturally he was often imposed upon. When he was in the country he seldom wrote without some confidential communication in the way of largess, often in a pecuniary form. On one occasion he sent Redding a couple of pounds for a poor unfortunate whom he had been trying to reclaim. He made strenuous efforts to get the child of a couple who had been condemned to death adopted by some kindly person; and there is a story of him weeding out hundreds of volumes from his library to help a penniless widow to stock a little book shop. When subscriptions were being asked for a memorial to Lord Holland, he excused himself by saying that he must give all he could spare to the Mendicity Society.
At the same time, in money matters he was almost criminally careless. The British Consul at Algiers said that his servant might have cheated him to any extent. He disliked making calculations of cash received or paid away, and there were times when he knew nothing of the real state of his finances. He would profess to be in great distress about money when, as a matter of fact, he had a roll of bank notes in his pocket. In 1841 Beattie, while he was absent at Wiesbaden, found in an old slipper at the bottom of a cupboard in his house a large number of notes twisted into the form of ‘white paper matches.’ When reproached with this piece of imprudence Campbell, admitting that the security was ‘slippery,’ remarked that ‘it must have happened after putting on my night-cap.’ At certain periods of his life, notably after his wife’s death, he was positively miserly, but even then he had his wayward fits of generosity. He would throw away pounds one day, and the next day grudge sixpences. Very often he forgot what he had spent or given in charity, but he never forgot what he owed.
One of the most charming traits in his character was his love for children. As he put it in his ‘Child Sweetheart,’ he held it a religious duty
To love and worship children’s beauty.
They’ve least the taint of earthly clod—
They’re freshest from the hand of God.
He could not bear to see a child crossed, to hear it cry, or have it kept reluctantly to books. Once at St Leonards he drew a little crowd around him on the street while trying to soothe a sick baby. What he called ‘infantile female beauty’ especially attracted him: ‘he-children,’ he said, not very elegantly, ‘are never in beauty to be compared with she ones.’ He saw a remarkably pretty little girl in the Park, and was afterwards so haunted by the vision that he actually inserted an advertisement in the Morning Chronicle with the view of making her acquaintance. Hoaxes were the natural result. One reply directed him to the house of an old maid—‘a wretch who,’ as he used to say with peevish humour, ‘had never heard of either me or my poetry.’ Campbell was a man of sixty when this incident occurred. His friends not unreasonably suspected his sanity; but he was only putting into practice the theory which he propounded in the lines just quoted.
Politically Campbell was a Whig of the Whigs, with rancorous prejudices which sometimes led him into unpleasant scrapes. On the question of Freedom he held very pronounced opinions. He was called the bard of Hope, but he was the bard of Liberty too. He abhorred despotism of all kinds. ‘Let us never think of outliving our liberty,’ he once wrote. The emancipation of the negroes he termed ‘a great and glorious measure.’ He does not seem to have been a perfervid Scot, though he speaks of something offending his tartan nationality. We are told that he never spared the disadvantages of his country’s climate, nor the foibles of the Lowlanders, whatever these may have been; but just as Johnson loved to gird at Garrick, though allowing no one else to censure him, so Campbell would not permit his native country to be attacked by another. He once rejected an otherwise suitable paper for the New Monthly because something which the writer had said about Edinburgh did not meet with his approval.
Of his religious views very little is to be learnt, certainly nothing from his poems. Beattie says that as a young man he suffered great anxiety on the subject of religion, and spent much time in its investigation before he arrived at ‘satisfactory conclusions.’ What these conclusions were does not exactly appear. Redding expressly affirms that he was sceptical, adding that he was very cautious in discussing religious subjects with strangers. His freedom from bigotry was generally remarked: he condemned every form of intolerance, and never cared to ask a man what his creed was. He told his nephew Robert, who seems to have had some misgivings on the point, that he could get no harm by attending a Roman Catholic Church. ‘God listens to human prayers wherever they are offered up.’ The Catholics might be mistaken, but persecution was not a necessary part of their system; and if it were, did not Calvin and the Kirk of Geneva, ‘which is the mother of the Scotch Kirk,’ get Servetus burnt alive for being a heretic? Campbell himself seldom went to church in London, but when he was in Scotland he did as the Scots did, and heroically sat out the sermon. It is clear that his countrymen, of whose rigid righteousness he had many good stories, did not regard him as heterodox, otherwise the General Assembly would never have asked him, as they did in 1808, to make a new metrical version of the Psalms ‘for the benefit of the congregations.’ Nor is it certain that he was really sceptical, though it is very likely that he hesitated upon some points of dogma. It is, however, only in his later years that we get any indication of his religious sensibility, and then only of the vaguest kind. When Mrs Campbell died he exclaimed, as if he had doubted the fact before, ‘There must be a God; that is evident; there must be an all-powerful, inscrutable God.’ Again, when speaking of the sufferings of the Poles, he remarked: ‘There is a Supreme Judge, and in another world there will be rewards and punishments.’ But we are not justified in forming any conclusion about his settled religious convictions from emotional outbursts resulting from special circumstances and in the shadow of the tomb. In all likelihood he paid the conventional observance to religion, and, if he thought about doctrines at all, took care not to shock his family and prejudice his popularity with any expression of heterodoxy.
Campbell’s literary pasturage does not appear to have been very wide or very rich. Robert Carruthers, of Inverness, who wrote an interesting account of some mornings spent with him, says his library was not extensive. There were one or two good editions of the classics, a set of the ‘Biographie Universelle,’ some of the French, Italian, and German authors, the Edinburgh Encyclopædia, and several standard English works, none very modern. Apparently he made no attempt to keep abreast of current literature; he stuck by his old favourites, and would often be found poring over Homer or Euripides. In his early days Milton, Thomson, Gray, and Goldsmith were his idols among the poets. Goldsmith, it was said, he could never read without shedding tears, another instance of his tendency to snivel. Thomson’s ‘Castle of Indolence’ is frequently mentioned with approbation in his letters—‘it is a glorious poem,’ he said to Carruthers—and seems, indeed, to have been to some extent the model of his ‘Gertrude.’ Allan Ramsay he called one of his prime favourites, but, strange to say, he does not appear to have regarded Burns with any special enthusiasm. Certainly he told the poet’s son that Burns was the Shakespeare of Scotland, and ‘Tam-o’-Shanter’ a masterpiece; but, on the other hand, he contended—unaccountably enough, for surely Burns’ nationality was the very fount of his inspiration—that Burns was ‘the most un-Scotsman-like Scotsman that ever existed’; and in conversation he was known to have denounced his own countrymen for their extravagant adulation of the Ayrshire poet.