In 1803 Campbell married his cousin, Matilda Sinclair. The marriage was a happy one; Washington Irving speaks of the lady's personal beauty, and says that her mental qualities were equally matched with it. "She was, in fact," he adds, "a more suitable wife for a poet than poets' wives are apt to be; and for once a son of song had married a reality and not a poetical fiction." For seventeen years he supported himself and his family by what was for the most part task-work, not always well paid, and made more onerous by the poor state of his health. In 1801 Campbell's father died, an old man of ninety-one, and with him ceased the small benevolent-society pensions that, with what Thomas and the eldest son living in America could contribute, had hitherto kept the parents in decent comfort. But soon after Thomas's marriage and the birth of his first child, the American brother failed, so that the pious duty of supporting the aged mother now came upon the poet alone. He accepted the addition to his burden as manfully as was to be expected of so generous a nature, but there is no doubt that he was in great poverty for a few years. Although often despondent, and with good reason, his natural cheerfulness and his good sense always came to the rescue, and in his lowest estate he retained the respect and the affection of his many friends. In 1805 Campbell received a pension of £200, which netted him, when fees and expenses were deducted, £168 a year. Half of this sum he reserved for himself and the remainder he divided between his mother and his two sisters. In 1809 he published 'Gertrude of Wyoming,' which had been completed the year before. It was hailed with delight in Edinburgh and with no less favor in London, and came to a second edition in the spring of 1810. But like most of Campbell's more pretentious poetry, it has failed to keep its place in the world's favor. The scene of the poem is laid in an impossible Pennsylvania where the bison and the beaver, the crocodile, the condor, and the flamingo, live in happy neighborhood in groves of magnolia and olive; while the red Indian launches his pirogue upon the Michigan to hunt the bison, while blissful shepherd swains trip with maidens to the timbrel, and blue-eyed Germans change their swords to pruning-hooks, Andalusians dance the saraband, poor Caledonians drown their homesick cares in transatlantic whisky, and Englishmen plant fair Freedom's tree! The story is as unreal as the landscape, and it is told in a style more labored and artificial by far than that of Pope, to whom indeed the younger poet was often injudiciously compared. Yet it is to be noted that Campbell's prose style was as direct and unaffected as could be wished, while in his two best lyrical poems, 'Ye Mariners of England,' and the first cast of 'The Battle of the Baltic,' he shows a vividness of conception and a power of striking out expression at white heat in which no one of his contemporaries excelled him.