Up to his death on the 23d of April 1850, Wordsworth lived a quiet and dignified life at Rydal, evincing little apparent sympathy with the arduous duties and activities of the every-day world. At times he exhibited an impatience at the changes which were passing over society, deteriorating his mountains, and invading the solitude of his lakes with the noise of railway trains; but in many parts of his works he shows that he had a perfect appreciation of the great destinies of machinery, and was only afraid that in the hurry to get rich by its means, important social interests should be neglected and ruined. The public feeling at his death was the best proof of the universal consciousness that a great English poet had then taken his departure. Shace his death, 'The Prelude,' already alluded to, has been given to the world. This poem may be said to be the exercise by which he set himself to scrutinise his own soul, and measure its capabilities for the production of the great poem of The Recluse.' It was begun in 1799, and finished in 1805. It is thus the product of the most vigorous period of his poetical life, and as it lay by him unpublished to the end of his career, it had the benefit of all the improvements that a ripe and highly-polished taste could devise. It is in everyway worthy of the poet, and is as pure, clear, and sparkling as a diamond. The style is remarkably chaste, vigorous, and musical, and the sentiments are uniformly pleasing and dignified. The poem is, besides, interesting from its singular character and subject. It is something to be thus admitted to the arcana of a poet's development, and it may be observed that Wordsworth appears in this production to lay bare his innermost thoughts and feelings with accuracy and honesty. He commences with his childhood, and traces his spiritual conditions through his schoolboy and college career, to his return from France.

Wordsworth's prose writings were confined to one or two critical essays on his own theories, a political pamphlet, a letter on Currie's Life of Burns,' am Essay on Epitaphs,' and a Description of the Country of the Lakes. They evince, however, great skill in prose composition, and are miformaly conched in a clear, manly, and highly-polished English style.

To sum up what has been already said of his poetic character and position:-His devotion to external nature had the power and pervasivemess of a passion; his perception of its most minute beauties was exquisitely fine; and his portraitures, both of landscapes and figures, were so distinctly outlined as to impress them on the mind almost as vividly and deeply as the sight of them could have done. Yet his pictures, so to speak, are inodorous, and there is a certain want of richness, which may arise from his deficiency in the sense of smell. He was defective in the stronger passions, and hence, in the minuteness of his portraitures of chamracter, be failed to produce rear human beings capable of stirring the blood; and what was even more serious, he himself was incapacitated from feeling a genial and warm sympathy in the struggles of modern man, on whom he rather looked as from a distant height with the commiseration of some loftier nature. From the characteristics enumerated arose the great faults of his works. His landscape paintings are often much too minute. He dwells too tediously on every small object and detail, and from his overintense appreciation of them, which magnifies their importance, rejects all extrinsic ornaments, and occasionally, though exceptionally, adopts a

style bare and meagre, and even phrases tainted with mean associations. Hence all his personages-being without reality-fail to attract, and even his strong domestic affections, and his love for everything pure and simple, do not give a sufficient human interest to his poems. His prolixity and tediousness are aggravated by a want of artistic skill in construction; and it is owing to this that he is most perfect in the sonnet, which renders the development of these faults an impossibility, while it gives free play to his naturally pure, tasteful, and lofty diction. His imagination was majestic; his fancy lively and sparkling; and he had a refined and Attic humour, which, however, he seldom called into exercise. He was naturally conservative; and after the heat of youth cooled down, he became more and more in harmony with the system of the conservative party in church and state, modified so much in appearance by his peculiar tendencies, as to simulate the features of a peculiar religious and philosophical creed. As might have been anticipated, he spent most of his life in retirement, and left the solitudes of the lakes principally to wander through other solitudes elsewhere. Indeed as a whole range of signs in algebra is often expressed by a single sign, so the activities of Wordsworth's life may be aptly enough expressed as the continuous development of a passion for nature, while the entire cycle of his poetry is the efflux of this in song. This occupied him wholly even in those fervent years when youth is generally stirred by more social passions. It was through the agency of this that the old institutions of his country, and the old legends and manners of his district, took so firm a hold of his heart, and made him peculiarly the poet of the old English spirit, in contradistinction to the new influences invading it from abroad or developing from itself. With volcanic power in the heat of his earlier days it drove him into the wild mountains of Wales, and into the recesses of the Alps; and gradually abating its impetus, and contracting its successive sweeps as the chill of age came on, at last left him to die in peace by those beloved lakes among which he was born. With much that might with advantage be curtailed or altogether forgotten, the poems of William Wordsworth, though never likely to be extensively popular, will ever occupy a place in literature next to the highest.

THOMAS CAMPBELL.

THE

HE biography of a literary man is to be found in the history of his works: startling incident and romantic adventure are not to be expected. The development of the progress of genius can alone supply the record of its existence. That of a poet ranking so high as Thomas Campbell discovers no exception to this general law.

He was born on the 27th of July 1777, in his father's house, situated in the High Street, Glasgow, subsequently demolished. The poet's father was Alexander, the youngest of three brothers, the sons of Archibald Campbell of Kirnan, belonging to a family which had been long settled at a place of that name, on the borders of Inverary. The estate produced a small independent rental, and came by inheritance to Robert Campbell, the eldest son of Archibald, and the poet's uncle, who ultimately sold it, and died in London. The name of the second son was Archibald he went out to Jamaica as a Presbyterian clergyman, and removing from that island to Virginia, in the United States, died there very much esteemed by all who knew him. Through his descendants a legacy of four thousand five hundred pounds came eventually to the subject of this memoir.

Alexander Campbell went in early life to America. By trade a merchant, he was still connected with that country after his return to Glasgow. Here he carried on his business in partnership with Daniel Campbell, who, though of the same name, was not a relative of the family. This Daniel's sister became afterwards the wife of Alexander, and the poet's mother. Her name was Margaret, and he was married to her at Glasgow in 1756, when he was forty-nine and she had just numbered her twentieth year. The business of the partnership flourished until the American war broke out. In 1775, Alexander, then in his sixty-fifth year, found his house ruined, as was the case with numerous other firms similarly connected with the colonies at the commencement of that unnatural contest. Alexander Campbell was an acute and well-informed man, religiously disposed, and of mild manners. He was sixty-seven when the poet, his youngest child, was born, and he died in Edinburgh, in March 1801, aged ninety-one.

Margaret Campbell, the poet's mother, was born in 1736, and died in February 1812, aged seventy-six. She was a woman of a decided character, in person thin, with dark eyes and hair, comely, shrewd, of a friendly cha

racter among her neighbours, but at home, and in her family, a firm disciplinarian. She was an excellent domestic manager, and conducted herself with exemplary judgment and good conduct under the severe trial of her husband's failure, two years before the poet's birth, at a time when she naturally looked forward, as well as her husband, to that ease and tranquillity which are so desirable in the downfall of life.

The family of Alexander and Margaret Campbell consisted, according to some accounts, of only ten children, but, more correctly, of eleven, one having died in infancy. The eldest, and last surviving except the poet, named Mary, died in Edinburgh in 1843, aged eighty-six. There were two other daughters, Isabella and Elizabeth, who both died in Edinburgh-the former in 1837, aged seventy-nine; the last in 1829, aged sixty-four. The sons were seven-Archibald, who died in Virginia in 1830, had been a planter in Berbice; Alexander, who returned from Berbice to Glasgow, died there in 1826; John, who having settled at Demerara, died there in 1806; Daniel, who died an infant; Robert, who went to the United States, a merchant, and married a daughter of the well-known Patrick Henry in Virginia, and died in 1807; James, drowned while bathing in the Clyde in 1783; Daniel, born in 1773, who was a cotton-manufacturer in Glasgow, but making little progress in business, went to France, and managed a considerable manufactory at Rouen, whence no account of his death ever reached his family; and lastly, Thomas, the poet, the survivor of them all, and the favourite of his parents.

The poet was named Thomas after Dr Reid, the professor of moral philosophy in the university of Glasgow, who officiated at the font. Thomas was the Benjamin of his parents; the more beloved, perhaps, for coming apart from the rest of the family under their fallen fortunes. He was the favourite son of both his parents, whose regrets at their misfortunes his playfulness and active disposition helped them at times to beguile. He was taught to read by his favourite sister, who was nineteen years his senior. In the eighth year of his age, in 1785, he was sent to the grammar school in Glasgow, then under the care of Mr Alison, who was noted for his ability in teaching the classics. A generous system of encouragement was all that was required to give young Campbell an ardent thirst after excellence: he was ambitious in the right way, but highly sensitive. His father assisted him in his tasks; and his progress was commensurate with the sanguine hopes of his instructors; but by the excitement produced through emulation it was found that his health suffered. He was removed, therefore, from school into country air for a short time, which had the desired effect, and he returned to his studies with renewed vigour. His course was highly satisfactory. At eleven years of age he began to compose verses, crude enough, it is true; but among others were stanzas on a parrot, equal at all events to those which Samuel Johnson made upon his duck. Somewhat lame in metre, they indicated the tendency of the youthful mind, but by no means rivalled what others have produced at the same age, giving little promise of the appearance in another decade of the Pleasures of Hope,' in which the lines are so exquisitely modulated. His translations from the Greek in his twelfth year are remarkable only for being made at that early age. His attachment to

Greek poetry beginning thus early, he soon obtained prizes for his proficiency in translation-his first being gained in 1789, when he was in his twelfth year.

The father of the poet, as before observed, was strictly religious, and early imbued his son with the same feeling. Young Campbell soon became a reader of some of the more noted divines, and their lessons frequently raised a conflict in his mind between his boyish follies and his sense of religious obligation. He was of a joyous temperament, the sallies of which were often daunted by the whispers of conscience through the impressions thus effected. Even thus young, and under such impressions, he and his schoolfellows would commit lapses occasionally that excited the reprobation of their friends; and getting tired of the long sermons of one of the clergymen under whom they sat, young Campbell and his companions turned some of the good man's repetitions into a lampoon. His schoolfellows were not exempted from his turn for playful satire; some specimens of which, as well as his school exercises and translations, have been preserved through the partiality of friends. They exhibit a great superiority over the productions of the generality of schoolboys at so early an age; marking a certain precocity of intellect, and a power of close application, however desultory, rare in youth of so vivacious a temperament.

In his thirteenth year the poet quitted the grammar school for the university. There he gained three prizes the first year: one for Latin, another for English verse, and a third a bursary on Leighton's foundation. The last was not won without a severe struggle in competition with one considered a good scholar, and very much his senior in years. This struggle involved a competition in construing and writing Latin before the entire faculty. At the university he read some of the more celebrated of the English authors, both in poetry and prose; and bore off prizes for exercises and translations in Greek as well as Latin. These successes were the more extraordinary, as, from his necessities, owing to the scanty income of his parents, he had not only the labour of his own studies upon his hands, but he had to instruct others. His own studies were quite sufficient to try the constitution, and to exhaust the mental efforts of one so delicate in bodily frame; but he was obliged, to the neglecting of several heads of study, to give elementary instruction to the younger lads: to exhaust himself in teaching while he should have been learning. This drudgery reacted upon the poet in after-life, and when he had attained middle age, stamped upon him a reluctance to mental exertion which it was at times impossible for him to overcome.

In the midst of this toil the poet went on with his metrical compositions, both original and translated. It was in 1791, and in his thirteenth year, that he himself confessed to his first published lines, entitled 'Morven and Fillan:' he styled them 'Ossianic Verses.' His next printed production consisted of Verses on the Queen of France,' published, he said, in a Glasgow newspaper when he was fifteen; and in his eighteenth year he brought out Love and Madness.' The 'Pleasures of Hope' appeared before he had completed his twenty-second year.

Not only was young Campbell successful in gaining classical honours: he obtained a prize in the logic class under Professor Jardine, and was