The old lady turned towards the poet and said, not without betraying a slight embarrassment: “An’ sae ye’re the great Thomas Campbell; are ye? I’m vera prood to meet ye, sir, and didna think when I left hame in the mornin’ that sic a great honour was to befa’ me.”
The poet felt much flattered by this tribute; but confusion took entire possession of him, as the worthy old soul continued: “There’s no a man in Ayrshire that has the great skill ye hae, Mr. Campbell, and I wad be greatly obleeged to ye if ye wad come and see my coo before ye leave this part o’ the country, an’ let me ken if ye can do onything for her. She’s a young beastie, and a guid beastie, and I shouldna like to lose her.”
There was an eminent veterinary surgeon, or cow doctor, in the neighbouring county of Dumfries, whose name was also Thomas Campbell, and the worthy woman had mistaken the poet for this celebrated and doubtless highly respectable person.
Of Campbell and Leyden, Gilfillan tells an interesting and instructive story in his Life of Sir Walter Scott. The former thought the latter boastful and self-asserting; Leyton thought Campbell jealous and envious. And there was perhaps a modicum of truth in their estimates of each other. Campbell had been unfortunate and not over well conducted in his youth; had been hindered by circumstances in his path to the pulpit; and this, along with poverty, had soured him. Yet he was a fine-hearted fellow in the main, as well as a thoroughly true one. Leyden had something of the self-glorification of the wild Indian chief, fond of showing his strings of scalps, and chanting fierce war-songs over his fallen foes; but he, too, was sincere, warm-hearted and guileless. When he read Campbell’s “Hohenlinden,” he said to Scott, “Dash it! I hate the fellow, but he has written the best verses I have read for ever so long;” to which Campbell replied, “I detest Leyden with all my soul, but I know the value of his critical approbation.”
Every Scottish reader is familiar with Burns’s weird and inimitable “Address to the Deil,” and some are aware that more than one of our native bards—from a desire to “give the deil his due,” as we may suppose—have essayed to catch up the grim humour of the original effusion, and compose a suitable reply to it. I have myself seen three efforts of the kind, each of them more or less clever: one by Ebenezer Picken, of Paisley, who died in 1816; and two of unknown authorship. For pungency of wit and skill of versification, one of the latter—cut from a Scottish newspaper published in Burns’s lifetime—indisputably “bears the gree,” and forms a not unworthy companion-poem to the original “Address.” It is somewhat lengthy, but its rarity, considered in conjunction with its merit, will justify its quotation in full:—
THE DEIL’S REPLY TO ROBERT BURNS.
O waes me, Rab! hae ye gane gyte;
What is’t that gars ye tak’ delight
To jeer at me, and ban, and flyte,
In Scottish rhyme,