The Professor’s verdict may be taken as a type of Campbell’s whole career at College: it was a case of ‘much commendation’ all through. At the close of his third session he was awarded a prize for a poetical ‘Essay on the Origin of Evil,’ which, if we are to credit his own statement, gave him a celebrity throughout the entire city, from the High Church down to the bottom of the Saltmarket. The students, who spoke of him as the Pope of Glasgow, even talked of it over their oysters at Lucky MacAlpine’s in the Trongate. In the Greek class he took the first prize for a rendering of certain passages from the ‘Clouds’ of Aristophanes, which Professor Young declared to be the best essay that had ever been given in by a student at the University. This was not bad for a youth of fifteen. Hamilton Paul says that Campbell carried everything before him in the matter of his ‘unrivalled translations,’ until his fellow-students began to regard him as a prodigy, and copy him as a model. In Galt’s Autobiography there is a story—he heads it ‘A Twopenny Effusion’—to the effect that the students bore the cost of printing an Ossianic poem of Campbell’s which was hawked about at twopence; but as Galt erroneously says that Campbell published ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ by subscription, we may regard the story as at least doubtful. Campbell called Galt a ‘dirty blackguard’ for retailing it.
But it was not alone by his proficiency in the classics that Campbell compelled attention. At this time he showed a turn for satire, of which he never afterwards gave much evidence, and his lampoons upon characters in the College and elsewhere were the theme of constant merriment in the quadrangle. Beattie has a good deal to say about these effusions, but if we may judge by a sample which Redding has preserved, their cleverness was better than their taste. It was legitimate enough, perhaps, to rail at the length of an elderly city parson’s sermons, to make fun of his oft-recurring phrase, ‘the good old-way’; but the worthy man, about to marry a young wife, could hardly be expected to relish this kind of thing:
So for another Shunamite
He hunts the city day by day,
To warm his chilly veins at night
In the good old way.
Adam Smith contended that it was the duty of a poet to write like a gentleman. If as a student Campbell had always written like a gentleman, there would have been less of that posthumous resentment of which his biographer complains. Nevertheless, his popularity as a playful wit must have been very pleasant to him at the time. ‘What’s Tom Campbell been saying?’ was a common exclamation among the students as they gathered of mornings round the stove in the Logic classroom. And Tom Campbell, if he had been saying nothing of particular note, would take his pencil and write an impromptu on the white-washed wall. Presently a ring would be formed round it, ‘and the wit and words passing from lip to lip generally threw the class into a roar of laughter.’ It is but right to say, however, that these impromptus were invariably produced with a view to something else than praise. The stove was usually encircled by a body of stout, rollicking Irish students, and Campbell found that the only sure means of getting near it was by ‘drafting the fire-worshippers’—in other words, by making them give warmth in exchange for wit. One cold December morning it was whispered that a libel on old Ireland had been perpetrated on the wall. The Irishmen rushed forth in a body, and while they read, apropos of a passage they had just been studying in the class—
Vos, Hiberni, collocatis,
Summum bonum in—potatoes,