[14.] Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), a noble poet and brilliant reviewer, was born in Glasgow in the year 1777. He was educated at the High School and the University of Glasgow. At the age of twenty-two, he published his Pleasures of Hope, which at once gave him a place high among the poets of the day. In 1803 he removed to London, and followed literature as his profession; and, in 1806, he received a pension of £200 a-year from the Government, which enabled him to devote the whole of his time to his favourite study of poetry. His best long poem is the Gertrude of Wyoming, a tale written in the Spenserian stanza, which he handles with great ease and power. But he is best known, and will be longest remembered, for his short lyrics—which glow with passionate and fiery eloquence—such as The Battle of the Baltic, Ye Mariners of England, Hohenlinden, and others. He was twice Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. He died at Boulogne in 1844, and was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.
[15.] Thomas Moore (1779-1852), poet, biographer, and historian—but most of all poet—was born in Dublin in the year 1779. He began to print verses at the age of thirteen, and may be said, like Pope, to have “lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.” He came to London in 1799, and was quickly received into fashionable society. In 1803 he was made Admiralty Registrar
at Bermuda; but he soon gave up the post, leaving a deputy in his place, who, some years after, embezzled the Government funds, and brought financial ruin upon Moore. The poet’s friends offered to help him out of his money difficulties; but he most honourably declined all such help, and, like Sir W. Scott, resolved to clear off all claims against him by the aid of his pen alone. For the next twenty years of his life he laboured incessantly; and volumes of poetry, history, and biography came steadily from his pen. His best poems are his Irish Melodies, some fifteen or sixteen of which are perfect and imperishable; and it is as a writer of songs that Moore will live in the literature of this country. He boasted, and with truth, that it was he who awakened for this century the long-silent harp of his native land—
“Dear Harp of my Country! in darkness I found thee,
The cold chain of silence had hung o’er thee long,
When proudly, my own Island Harp, I unbound thee,
And gave all thy chords to light, freedom, and song.”
His best long poem is Lalla Rookh.—His prose works are little read nowadays. The chief among them are his Life of Sheridan, and his Life of Lord Byron.—He died at Sloperton, in Wiltshire, in 1852, two years after the death of Wordsworth.
[16.] George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), a great English poet, was born in London in the year 1788. He was the only child of a reckless and unprincipled father and a passionate mother. He was educated at Harrow School, and afterwards at Trinity College, Cambridge. His first volume—Hours of Idleness—was published in 1807, before he was nineteen. A critique of this juvenile work which appeared in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ stung him to passion; and he produced a very vigorous poetical reply in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. After the publication of this book, Byron travelled in Germany, Spain, Greece, and Turkey for two years; and the first two cantos of the poem entitled Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were the outcome of these travels. This poem at once placed him at the head of English poets; “he woke one morning,” he said, “and found himself famous.” He was married in the year 1815, but left his wife in the following year; left his native country also, never to return. First of all he settled at Geneva, where he made the acquaintance of the poet Shelley, and where he wrote, among other poems, the third canto of Childe Harold and the Prisoner of Chillon. In 1817 he removed to Venice, where he
composed the fourth canto of Childe Harold and the Lament of Tasso; his next resting-place was Ravenna, where he wrote several plays. Pisa saw him next; and at this place he spent a great deal of his time in close intimacy with Shelley. In 1821 the Greek nation rose in revolt against the cruelties and oppression of the Turkish rule; and Byron’s sympathies were strongly enlisted on the side of the Greeks. He helped the struggling little country with contributions of money; and, in 1823, sailed from Geneva to take a personal share in the war of liberation. He died, however, of fever, at Missolonghi, on the 19th of April 1824, at the age of thirty-six.