If Thomas Campbell[18] had never written anything more than that page-long story of the “Battle of Hohenlinden,” his name would have gone into all the anthologies, and his verse into all those school-books where boys for seventy years now have pounded at his martial metre in furies of declamation. And yet this bit of martial verse, so full of the breath of battle, was, at the date of its writing, rejected by the editor of a small provincial journal in Scotland--as not coming up to the true poetic standard![19] I have spoken of Campbell as a Scotsman; though after only a short stay in Scotland--following his university career at Glasgow--and a starveling tour upon the Continent (out of which flashed “Hohenlinden”)--he went to London; and there or thereabout spent the greater part of the residue of a long life. He had affiliations of a certain sort with America, out of which may possibly have grown his _Gertrude of Wyoming_; his father was for much time a merchant in Falmouth, Virginia, about 1770; being however a strong loyalist, he returned in 1776. A brother and an uncle of the poet became established in this country, and an American Campbell of this stock was connected by marriage with the family of Patrick Henry. The first _coup_ by which Campbell won his literary spurs, was a bright, polished poem--with its couplets all in martinet-like order--called the _Pleasures of Hope_. We all know it, if for nothing more, by reason of the sympathetic allusion to the woes of Poland: “Ah, bloodiest picture in the book of time! Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime; Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe, Strength in her arms nor mercy in her woe! Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear, Closed her bright eye and curbed her high career, Hope for a season bade the world farewell, And freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!” Even at so late a date as the death of Campbell (1844), when they buried him in Westminster Abbey, close upon the tomb of Sheridan, some grateful Pole secured a handful of earth from the grave of Kosciusko to throw upon the coffin of the poet. But in addition to its glow of liberalism, this first poem of Campbell was, measured by all the old canons of verse, thoroughly artistic. Its pauses, its rhymes, its longs and shorts were of the best prize order; even its errors in matters of fact have an academic tinge--as, for instance,-- “On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along!”