flowed merrily and long; the discourse kept pace with it; and next
morning, in returning to town, we felt ourselves very thirsty. A pump by
the road-side, with a plash round it, was a bewitching sight.

They who knew Mr. Campbell only as the author of _Gertrude of Wyoming_,
and the _Pleasures of Hope_, would not have suspected him to be a merry
companion, overflowing with humor and anecdote, and any thing but
fastidious. These Scotch poets have always something in reserve. It is
the only point in which the major part of them resemble their
countrymen. The mistaken character which the lady formed of Thomson from
his _Seasons_ is well known. He let part of the secret out in his
_Castle of Indolence_; and the more he let out, the more honor it did to
the simplicity and cordiality of the poet's nature, though not always to
the elegance of it. Allan Ramsay knew his friends Gay and Somerville as
well in their writings, as he did when he came to be personally
acquainted with them; but Allan, who had bustled up from a barber's shop
into a bookseller's, was "a cunning shaver;" and nobody would have
guessed the author of the _Gentle Shepherd_ to be penurious. Let none
suppose that any insinuation to that effect is intended against
Campbell. He was one of the few men whom I could at any time have walked
half a dozen miles through the snow to spend an evening with; and I
could no more do this with a penurious man than I could with a sulky
one. I know but of one fault he had, besides an extreme cautiousness in
his writings, and that one was national, a matter of words, and amply
overpaid by a stream of conversation, lively, piquant, and liberal, not
the less interesting for occasionally betraying an intimacy with pain,
and for a high and somewhat strained tone of voice, like a man speaking
with suspended breath, and in the habit of subduing his feelings. No man
felt more kindly toward his fellow-creatures, or took less credit for
it. When he indulged in doubt and sarcasm, and spoke contemptuously of
things in general, he did it, partly, no doubt, out of actual
dissatisfaction, but more perhaps than he suspected, out of a fear of
being thought weak and sensitive; which is a blind that the best men
very commonly practice. He professed to be hopeless and sarcastic, and
took pains all the while to set up a university (the London).

When I first saw this eminent person, he gave me the idea of a French
Virgil. Not that he was like a Frenc