The Emperor was rather suspiciously fond of declaring, "I mean what I say, and what I promise I will perform." Some of his speeches were emphatic enough. "I esteem England highly, but as for what the French say of me I care not; I spit upon it." He felt awkward in evening dress; he was so accustomed to wear military uniform that without it he said he felt as if they had taken off his skin. To humour him, uniform was worn every evening at Windsor during his stay. Among his camp habits was one which he had formed in his youth and kept up to the last: it was that of sleeping every night on clean straw stuffed into a leathern case. The first thing his valets did on being shown their master's bedroom in Windsor Castle was to send out for a truss of straw for the Emperor's bed. The last thing got for him at Woolwich was the same simple stuffing for his rude mattress. On the 15th of June, 1844, Thomas Campbell, author of the "Pleasures of Hope," "Ye Mariners of England," &c., died at Boulogne at the age of sixty-seven. Although he had not quite reached the threescore and ten, the span of man's life on earth, he had long survived the authors, Scott, Byron, &c., with whom his name is linked. He was one of many well-known men in very different spheres who passed away in 1844. Sir Augustus Callcott, the painter; Crockford with his house of Turf celebrity; Beckford, the eccentric author of "Vathek," and the owner of the art-treasures of Fonthill; Lord Sidmouth, the well-known statesman of the "Addington Administration;" Sir Francis Burdett, who in recent times was lodged in the Tower under a charge of high treason. In the same year an attempt was made to honour the memory of a greater poet than Thomas Campbell, one whose worldly reward had not been great, whose history ended in a grievous tragedy. The Scotchmen of the day seized the opportunity of the return of two of Robert Burns's sons from military service in India to give them a welcome home which should do something to atone for any neglect and injustice that had befallen their father. The festival was not altogether successful, as such festivals rarely are, but it excited considerable enthusiasm in the poet's native country, especially in his county of Ayrshire. And when the lord of the Castle of Montgomery presided over the tribute to the sons of the ploughman who had "shorn the harvest" with his Highland Mary on the Eglinton "lea-riggs," and Christopher North made the speech of the day, the demonstration could not be considered an entire failure. Scotch hearts warmed to the belief that the Queen understood and admired Burns's poetry, and proud reference was made to the circumstance that during one of her Highland excursions she applied the famous descriptive passage in the "Birks of Aberfeldy" to the scene before her: The braes ascend like lofty wa'e, The foamy stream deep roaring fa's, O'erhung with fragrant spreading shaws, The birks of Aberfeldy.