this day, Campbell is spoken of by the world as having been Lady
Byron's confidant at this time. This simply shows how very trustworthy
are the general assertions about Lady Byron's confidants.

The final result of the matter, so far as Campbell was concerned, is
given in Miss Martineau's sketch, in the following paragraph:--

'The whole transaction was one of poor Campbell's freaks. He excused
himself by saying it was a mistake of his; that he did not know what
he was about when he published the paper.'

It is the saddest of all sad things to see a man, who has spoken from
moral convictions, in advance of his day, and who has taken a stand for
which he ought to honour himself, thus forced down and humiliated, made
to doubt his own better nature and his own honourable feelings, by the
voice of a wicked world.

Campbell had no steadiness to stand by the truth he saw. His whole story
is told incidentally in a note to 'The Noctes,' in which it is stated,
that in an article in 'Blackwood,' January 1825, on Scotch poets, the
palm was given to Hogg over Campbell; 'one ground being, that he could
drink "eight and twenty tumblers of punch, while Campbell is hazy upon
seven."'

There is evidence in 'The Noctes,' that in due time Campbell was
reconciled to Moore, and was always suitably ashamed of having tried to
be any more generous or just than the men of his generation.

And so it was settled as a law to Jacob, and an ordinance in Israel, that
the Byron worship should proceed, and that all the earth should keep
silence before him. 'Don Juan,' that, years before, had been printed by
stealth, without Murray's name on the title-page, that had been denounced
as a book which no woman should read, and had been given up as a
desperate enterprise, now came forth in triumph, with banners flying and
drums beating. Every great periodical in England that had fired moral
volleys of artillery against it in its early days, now humbly marched in
the glorious procession of admirers to salute this edifying work of
genius.

'Blackwood,' which in the beginning had been the most indignantly
virtuous of the whole, now grovelled and ate dust as the serpent in the
very abjectness of submission. Odoherty (Maginn) declares that he would
rather have written a page of 'Don Juan' than a ton of 'Childe Harold.'
{95a} Timothy Tickler informs Christopher North that he means to tender
Murray, as Emperor of the North, an interleaved cop