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Career. Campbell was born and educated in Glasgow, and was early distinguished for his proficiency in classical studies. His first publication, The Pleasures of Hope, at once gave him rank as a poet of mark. Being on a visit to the continent, he was a spectator of the battle of Hohenlinden, and commemorated the scene in the brilliant poem with which we are all familiar. While abroad, he wrote two other of his most popular lyrics, Ye Mariners of England, and The Exile of Erin. On returning to Scotland, he wrote Lochiel's Warning; subsequently appeared Gertrude of Wyoming; The Battle of the Baltic; The Piigrim of Glencoe, and other Poems.

As a lyric and didactic poet, Campbell has few superiors in English literature. Several of his poems seem absolutely perfect.

Campbell has written voluminously in prose also. Lectures on Poetry; Specimens of the British Poets, with Biographical and Critical Notices, 7 vols., 8vo; Life of Mrs. Siddons; Life and Times of Petrarch; Life of Shakespeare; A Poet's Residence in Algiers; Letters from the South. He edited also, for a time, the Metropolitan Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine. His Lectures on Poetry and the critical remarks in his Selections from the Poets, form together a most valuable body of poetical criticism by one who was himself a great master of the art of poetry.

In 1827 he was elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. “It was deep snow when he reached the college-green; the students were drawn up in parties, pelting one another; the poet ran into the ranks, threw several balls with unerring aim, then summoning the scholars around him in the hall, delivered a speech replete with philosophy and eloquence.”— Allan Cunningham.

Rogers.

Samuel Rogers, 1763-1855, the banker, poet, art collector, and giver of breakfasts, is as well known by his Pleasures of Memory as is Campbell by the Pleasures of Hope.

Career. Rogers was the son of a banker, and inherited, with his younger brother, a profitable business, from the active management of which he retired when little more than thirty, The remaining sixty years of his protracted life were passed in the cultivation of letters, the arts, and society. He gathered around his social board all that was genial and distinguished in each successive generation. Like Henry Crabb Robinson, he remained a bachelor. Indeed, there is throughout the lives of both a striking parallelism. There is, however, this difference, that Rogers is known chiefly by his original works, Robinson by his diary. Rogers, it is true, published a volume of Recollections, but they are not equal in continuity and fulness to Robinson's celebrated journal.

Works.-Rogers evinced poetical talents while still very young. He published a series of eight papers, the Scribbler, in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1781. In 1786 appeared An Ode to Superstition, in which were prefigured the poet's peculiar qualities. In 1792 appeared The Pleasures of Memory, which was at once warmly received by critic and public. Byron, in 1809, in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, pronounced it and l'ope's Essay on Man "the most didactic poems in our language," and, in 1813, dedicated his Giaour to Rogers. Sir James Mackintosh and Professor Wilson were also among the conspicuous admirers of the Pleasures of Memory. Jacqueline, a pastoral tale, was published with Byron's Lara, in 1813. Human Life appeared in 1819. Rogers's chief work, however, is his Italy, published 1822-3. Appearing anonymously, it was ascribed by some to Southey.

Estimate of his Poetry.-Rogers's poetry has lost in favor. The present generation demands something stronger and deeper than easy descriptions and commonplace reflections. Rogers is a finished versifier, and his lines betray a cultured mind. Especially in his Italy does he show himself to be a man of great liberality in his judgments of what might have been distasteful to him as an Englishman and a Protestant. There can be no doubt that he has exercised a wholesome influence, indirectly, upon the development of English literature, by widening the range of its sympathies and its culture. When we compare him, however, with his really great contemporaries, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, we can scarcely fail to perceive that he was lacking in real poetic inspiration.

Southey.

Robert Southey, 1774-1843, was another of the great literary celebrities in the earlier part of the present century. His fame and fortunes are intimately associated with those of Coleridge and Wordsworth. He was not equal to either of them in genius, but he had abilities of a high order. He was methodical and unwearied in labor, and he made himself, while he lived, a magnate in the world of letters.

Career. Southey was educated by his aunt, Miss Tyler, an eccentric lady who had a passion for the theatre. At a very early age, Southey became familiar with Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, and the great body of English dramatists. Sent to Westminster School, he was expelled for a satire on corporal punishment, published in the school paper. He afterwards went to Oxford, and embraced enthusiastically radical and Unitarian doctrines. It was at this time that he wrote the notorious "Wat Tyler," which was not published, however, until much later, and then surreptitiously. At the University he made the acquaintance of Coleridge. His aunt, a Tory, turned him away on account of his religious and political heresies. He formed, with Coleridge, the plan of founding a "pantisocracy" in Pennsylvania,

already referred to, but, as neither of them had any money, was abandoned.

the plan

In 1795, Southey, who had just married Miss Fricker, joined his uncle, Rev. Mr. Hill, then chaplain to the British embassy in Portugal, and remained on the Peninsula some six months. It was at this time that he laid the foundation for his knowledge of the Romance languages and literature.

He returned to England, and, after essaying the study of the law for a brief period, finally settled down to literary occupation. He fixed his residence in 1803 at Greta Hall, not far from Wordsworth, in that lovely region which has become famous under the name of the "lake district" of England. Here, in literary labor and seclusion, he passed the remainder of his days.

The once enthusiastic radical and Unitarian now became the staunch supporter of Church and State. Southey was sincere and unselfish, however, in his conversion, and a generous friend to Coleridge, and many other needy poets and writers.

Southey's intercourse with Wordsworth was interrupted only by death. In 1839 he married his second wife, Miss Bowles, also a writer. Soon after that, his mind gave way under the strain to which it had been put by protracted literary cares, and the remaining three years of his life were passed in hopeless imbecility.

His Literary Character. — Southey's works are extremely voluminous, both in prose and verse, and cover a wide range of subjects. Southey the poet, so famous in his day, and ranked with Wordsworth, Byron, Scott, and Coleridge, is now comparatively ignored. His extravagance and want of naturalness are repugnant to the tastes of this realistic age. His poems abound in beautiful and striking passages, but are faulty in conception and tedious in execution. Some of his prose works, on the contrary, such as the Life of Nelson and The Life of Wesley, will always rank among English prose classics. The Doctor is a queer book, full of whimsicalities and bits of wisdom, but, as a whole, rather tiresome. No one of Southey's professedly literary works, however, surpasses in interest his Correspondence. His Wat Tyler, a Jacobinical effusion of Southey's Oxford days, was published in 1817, surreptitiously, after the author had changed his views: it created much excitement, and was even denounced in Parliament.

Works. The list of his principal works would probably embrace the following: in verse, Joan of Arc, Thalaba, The Cid (translated from the Spanish), The Curse of Kehama, Roderick, the Last of the Goths; in prose, a History of the Peninsular War, History of Brazil, Essays, Moral and Political. The Doctor, Espriella's Letters from England (a pretended translation from the Spanish), and the lives of Nelson, Wesley, Kirke White, and Cowper. In addition to these and other long pieces, Southey is the author of many short poems and sketches.

His Rank as a Writer. — In his life, opinions, and writings, Southey is a type of literary England during and after the Napoleonic wars. He was classified with

Coleridge and Wordsworth by the Edinburgh Review, under the so-called "lake poets." The epithet, although at first sight appropriate, the trio residing in the lake district and associating with one another intimately for years, is substantially incorrect and unfortunate. It would be impossible to find in English history any other three contemporaries that have so few features in common and who have borrowed so little inspiration one from the other.

"An English worthy, doing his duty for fifty noble years of labor, day by day storing up learning, day by day working for scant wages, most charitable out of his small means, bravely faithful to the calling which he had chosen, refusing to turn from his path for popular praise or prince's power; -I mean Robert Southey. We have left his old political landmarks miles and miles behind; we protest against his dogmatism; nay, we begin to forget it and his politics; but I hope his life will not be forgotten, for it is sublime in its simplicity, its energy, its honor, its affection! In the combat between Time and Thalaba, I suspect the former destroyer has conquered; Kehama's curse frightens very few readers now; but Southey's private letters are worth piles of epics, and are sure to last among us as long as kind hearts like to sympathize with goodness and purity and love and upright life." —Thackeray.

MRS. CAROLINE ANNE SOUTHEY, 1787-1854, better known as Caroline Bowles, is favorably known as a writer both of prose and verse.

Mrs. Southey was the daughter of Captain Charles Bowles. She was married to Robert Southey in 1839. She cultivated authorship both before and after marriage, contributing chiefly to Blackwood's Magazine. The best known of her prose writings are four tales,-The Young Grey-Head, The Murder Glen, Walter and William, and The Evening Walk. Her poems also are very popular, such as Autumn Flowers, Solitary Hours, etc.

"If Mrs. Norton is the Byron, Mrs. Southey (Caroline Bowles) is the Cowper of our modern poetesses. She has much of that great writer's humor, fondness for rural life, melancholy pathos, and moral satire. She has also Cowper's pre-eminently English manner in diction and thought."- Hartley Coleridge.

Coleridge.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834, was, of all the contemporary writers, the man most endowed by nature with genius. But the fitful and irregular character of his mental action prevented his accomplishing any great and completed work commensurate with his acknowledged genius. His poetic fame rests on two poems, both of singular, almost supernatural power; yet one, Christabel, is only a fragment, the other, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, more nearly complete in itself, is only a part of an incompleted whole. The like is true of his prose writings, they are, at the best, only splendid fragments.

Career. Coleridge was at first a pupil of Christ Hospital, where he gained distinction for scholarship, as he did afterwards when a student at Cambridge. But being disappointed in a love-affair while at the University, he left the place without graduation, and enlisted by stealth in the army, under an assumed name. A scrap of Latin which he scribbled on the stable-wall of the barracks betrayed his disguise, and led to his being released from his false position and restored to his friends.

Soon after, in 1794, he became intimate with Southey. Both of them at that time were ardent republicans, and admirers of the French Revolution. Both also were Unitarians in religion. Needy, restless, and full of the spirit of adventure, the young poets devised a scheme of emigrating with some friends to America, and there founding on the bank of the Susquehanna a utopian republic, or Pantisocracy, the distinguishing feature of which should be a community of goods. Having no money to carry out the romantic project, Coleridge began writing for the Morning Post; he published also a volume of poems, and gave lectures at Bristol, on moral and political subjects. He and Southey also married sisters, the Misses Fricker of Bristol. Coleridge at this time preached occasionally for the Unitarians at Bristol.

Through the liberality of Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood, the wellknown potters, Coleridge was enabled in 1798 to go to Germany, where he studied with great diligence in the University of Göttingen. On returning to England, he settled at Keswick, in the Lake District of Westmoreland, where also Southey and Wordsworth resided. Hence these three friends have been called the Lake Poets.

A few years later, Coleridge renounced Unitarianism, and adopted the creed of the Anglican Church; he made a like change in his political opinions, having become disgusted with the excesses of the French Republicans.

In 1808 Coleridge lectured on Shakespeare and the Fine Arts, in the Royal Institution, London. He began soon after a periodical, The Friend. His habits of living being irregular, and his health failing, he fell into the way of taking opium, which added greatly to his other infirmities, and made him for years a most pitiable spectacle. He was rescued from this condition, however, and spent his declining years in the hospitable refuge of a generous physician, Dr. Gilman, of London.

Estimate of Him. -The universal testimony of competent judges is that Coleridge's natural endowments were of the very highest order. Method and industry, such method and industry as mark the career of Tennyson, of Milton, and of Shakespeare, would have made him the equal, possibly the superior, of any of these great men. Even from the desultory and fitful efforts of his genius which remain, he must

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