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 critiques 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 have the pleasure of hearing him now, I forget his Virgilianisms, and think only of the delightful companion, the unaffected philanthropist, and the creator of a beauty worth all the heroines in Racine.

Mr. Campbell has tasted pretty sharply of the good and ill of the present state of society, and, for a book-man, has beheld strange sights.

He witnessed a battle in Germany from the top of a convent (on which battle he has written a noble ode); and he saw the French cavalry enter a town, wiping their bloody swords on the horses' manes. Not long ago he was in Germany again, I believe to purchase books; for in addition to his classical scholarship, and his other languages, he is 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; and they gave him, what he does not dislike, a good dinner. There is one of our writers who has more fame than he; but not one who enjoys a fame equally wide, and without drawback. Like many of the great men in Germany, Schiller, Wieland, and others, he has not scrupled to become editor of a magazine; and his name alone has given it among all circles a recommendation of the greatest value, and such as makes it a grace to write under him.

I remember, one day at Sydenham, Mr. Theodore Hook came in unexpectedly to dinner, and amused us very much with his talent

at extempore verse.

He was then a youth,

tall, dark, and of a good person, with small eyes, and features more round than weak; a face that had character and humour, but no refinement. His extempore verses were really surprising. It is easy enough to extemporize in Italian-one only wonders how, in a language in which every thing conspires to render versemaking easy and it is difficult to avoid rhyming, this talent should be so much cried up.but in English it is another matter. I know but of one other person besides Mr. Hook, who can extemporize in English; and he wants the power, perhaps the confidence, to do it in public. Of course, I speak of rhyming. Extempore blank verse, with a little practice, would be found as easy in English, as rhyming is in Italian. In Mr. Hook the faculty was very unequivocal. He could not have been aware of all the visitors, still less of the subject of conversation when he came in, and he talked his full share till called upon; yet he ran his jokes and his verses upon us all in the easiest manner, saying something characteristic of every body, or avoiding it with a pun, and

introducing so agreeably a piece of village scandal upon which the party had been rallying Mr. Campbell, that the poet, though not unjealous of his dignity, was perhaps the most pleased of us all. Mr. Hook afterwards sat down to the piano-forte, and enlarging upon this subject, made an extempore parody of a modern opera, introducing sailors and their clap-traps, rustics, &c. and making the poet and his supposed flame the hero and heroine. He parodied music as well as words, giving us the most received cadences and flourishes, and calling to mind (not without some hazard to his filial duties) the commonplaces of the pastoral songs and duetts of the last half-century; so that if Mr. Dignum, the Damon of Vauxhall, had been present, he would have doubted whether to take it as an affront or a compliment.

I have since been unable to help wishing, perhaps not very wisely, that Mr. Campbell would be a little less careful and fastidious in what he did for the public; for, after all, an author may reasonably be supposed to do best that which he is most inclined to do. It is our business to be grateful for what a poet sets

before us, rather than to be wishing that his peaches were nectarines, or his Falernian Champagne. Mr. Campbell, as an author, is all for refinement and classicality, not however without a great deal of pathos and luxurious fancy. His merry jongleur, Mr. Hook, has as little propensity, perhaps, as can be imagined, to any of these niceties: yet I confess, from the mere pleasure of the recollection of the evening I passed with him, I have been unable to repress a wish, as little wise as the other; to wit, that he had stuck to his humours and farces, for which he had real talent, instead of writing politics.

Among the visitors at Sydenham, was Mr. Mathews the comedian. I have had the pleasure of seeing him there more than once, and of witnessing his imitations, which, admirable as they are on the stage, are still more so in a private room. Once and away his wife used to come with him, with her handsome eyes; and charitably make tea for us. The other day I had the pleasure of seeing them at their own table; and I thought that while Time, with unusual courtesy, had spared the sweet