Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs of Thomas Campbell
Preface
LITERARY REMINISCENCES
AND
MEMOIRS
OF
THOMAS CAMPBELL
AUTHOR OF “THE PLEASURES OF HOPE,”
&c. &c.
BY
CYRUS REDDING,
AUTHOR OF “FIFTY YEARS’ RECOLLECTIONS, LITERARY
AND
PERSONAL,” &c.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
LONDON:
CHARLES J. SKEET, PUBLISHER,
10 KING WILLIAM STREET.
CHARING CROSS.
1860.
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Billing, Printer, 103, Hatton Garden, London, and Guildford, Surrey.
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TO THE READER.
“Public men can scarcely
be described with impartiality by cotemporaries, they can only add their personal knowledge
to that of others,” wrote one who had some experience in the literary world.
There is much truth in the remark. Time must lessen the tendency to panegyric or censure,
before impartiality can be maintained, and the future writer select from the different personal
statements which he finds transmitted to his hands, those facts upon which he can deliver to
the world that final biography, which shall stand the test of impartial criticism. In regard to
autobiography, on which so many place implicit credit, it is best designated in its connexion
with impartiality, by the proverb, “it ![]()
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is a sorry bird that fouls
its own nest.” For one writer who states the truth of himself, is independent of
self-love, and cold upon the subject, in which the indulgence of warmth is most venial, there
are ten who conceal, discolour, or favour themselves, results as consequential in human
character as the vanity that is more or less a part of the common nature of mankind.
No more is intended in the present volumes than to aid in recording some
remembrances of one of our best poets, during an interval of time when he was in the height of
his reputation, and when no one except the writer possessed the means of observing his
progress, for many consecutive years of uninterrupted and exclusive literary confidence. In
this record the writer has endeavoured to be impartial, to detail faults as well as virtues,
when no motive for discolouring facts can possibly exist, death having shrouded in impervious
darkness all of a ![]()
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distinguished man of genius but his poetical labours.
It was at the request of several persons numbered among the friends of
Campbell, and not of his own accord alone, that the
writer collected some of his notes, published before, relative to the poet, and made the
additions found in these pages. In the few notes put together by the poet himself, just before
his decease, in which memory and judgment seem too often at fault, written many years
subsequent to the period to which these pages more directly refer, there is an absence of the
characteristics of the better part of his career, and incidents are misrepresented, marking too
strongly the inconsistency of our common nature in ripening the genius of one distinguished
individual at a period before that of another is matured. In one case maintaining it to the
last hour of the longest life, and in another making its intensity disappear before the middle
age of humanity.
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This work then is contributive to the labour of the future biographer,
communicating incidents and characteristics available from no other source. The author only
hopes that those whose art, Dr. Johnson tells the world,
“is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small
expense,” will consider that his aim has not been to do that which is reserved
for some future pen, but to supply what no one else could give in relation to a poet whose
works are imperishable, and whose history on that account cannot fail to interest the present
time, and will still more interest posterity.
Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
Scottish poet and man of letters; author of
The Pleasures of Hope
(1799),
Gertrude of Wyoming (1808) and lyric odes. He edited the
New Monthly Magazine (1821-30).
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
English man of letters, among many other works he edited
A Dictionary
of the English Language (1755) and Shakespeare (1765), and wrote
Lives of the Poets (1779-81).
