come. He gave a dinner in Campbell's honor, and introduced him
to his friends with a bumper to the author of 'The Pleasures of Hope.'

It seemed the natural thing for a young man so successfully launched
in the literary coteries of Edinburgh and Glasgow to pursue his
advantage in the larger literary world of London. But Campbell judged
himself with humorous severity. "At present," he writes in a letter,
"I am a raw Scotch lad, and in a company of wits and geniuses would
make but a dull figure with my northern brogue and my 'braw Scotch
boos.'" The eyes of many of the young men of the time were turned
toward Germany, where Goethe and Schiller, Lessing and Wieland, were
creating the golden age of their country's literature; and Campbell,
full of youthful hope and enthusiasm, and with a little money in his
pocket, determined to visit the Continent before settling down to work
in London. In 1800 he set out for Ratisbon, which he reached three
days before the French entered it with their army. His stay there was
crowded with picturesque and tragic incidents, described in his
letters to friends at home--"in prose," as his biographer justly says,
"which even his best poetry hardly surpasses." From the roof of the
Scotch Benedictine Convent of St. James, where Campbell was often
hospitably entertained while in Ratisbon, he saw the battle of
Hohenlinden, on which he wrote the poem once familiar to every
schoolboy. Wearied with the bloody sights of war, he left Ratisbon and
the next year returned to England. While living at Altona he wrote no
less than fourteen of his minor poems, but few of these escaped the
severity of his final judgment when he came to collect his verses for
publication. Among these few the best were 'The Exile of Erin' and the
noble ode 'Ye Mariners of England,' the poem by which alone, perhaps,
his name deserves to live; though 'The Battle of the Baltic' in its
original form 'The Battle of Copenhagen'--unfortunately not the one
best known--is well worthy of a place beside it.

On his return from the Continent, Campbell found himself received in
the warmest manner, not only in the literary world but in circles
reckoned socially higher. His poetry hit the taste of all the classes
that go to make up the general reading public; his harp had many
strings, and it rang true to all the notes of patriotism, humanity,
love, and feeling. "His happiest moments at this period," says his
biographer, "seem to have been pa