hman, much less the French
translator of Virgil. I found him as handsome, as the Abbe Delille is
said to have been ugly. But he seemed to me to embody a Frenchman's
ideal notion of the Latin poet; something a little more cut and dry than
I had looked for; compact and elegant, critical and acute, with a
consciousness of authorship upon him; a taste over-anxious not to commit
itself, and refining and diminishing nature as in a drawing-room mirror.
This fancy was strengthened in the course of conversation, by his
expatiating on the greatness of Racine. I think he had a volume of the
French poet in his hand. His skull was sharply cut and fine; with
plenty, according to the phrenologists, both of the reflective and
amative organs: and his poetry will bear them out. For a lettered
solitude, and a bridal properly got up, both according to law and
luxury, commend us to the lovely _Gertrude of Wyoming_. His face and
person were rather on a small scale; his features regular; his eye
lively and penetrating; and when he spoke, dimples played about his
mouth; which, nevertheless, had something restrained and close in it.
Some gentle puritan seemed to have crossed the breed, and to have left a
stamp on his face, such as we often see in the female Scotch face rather
than the male. But he appeared not at all grateful for this; and when
his critics and his Virgilianism were over, very unlike a puritan he
talked! He seemed to spite his restrictions; and, out of the natural
largeness of his sympathy with things high and low, to break at once out
of Delille's Virgil into Cotton's, like a boy let loose from school.
When I had the pleasure of hearing him afterward, I forgot his
Virgilianisms, and thought only of the delightful companion, the
unaffected philanthropist, and the creator of a beauty worth all the
heroines in Racine.

Campbell tasted pretty sharply of the good and ill of the present state
of society, and, for a bookman, had beheld strange sights. He witnessed
a battle in Germany from the top of a convent (on which battle he has
left us a noble ode); and he saw the French cavalry enter a town, wiping
their bloody swords on the horses' manes. He was in Germany a second
time--I believe to purchase books; for in addition to his classical
scholarship, and his other languages, he was a reader of German. The
readers there, among whom he is popular, both for his poetry and his
love of freedom, crowded about him with affectionate zeal; an