mare, where, murky as the gloom is, it is not dark enough to conceal the sneer of the central object-the poet himself— making mouths, which he imagines unseen, at the great funeral. Campbell's "Last Man" is very properly nameless his previous history unknown-the interest is given him by the circumstances in which he stands, and he rises to the grandeur of his position while feeling himself sole mourner at the obsequies of a world. Perhaps, to make him a Christian was an error, because, first, the whole idea of the poem is inconsistent with Christian truth; and, secondly, as a mere artistic matter, the dreary magnificence of the scene had been enhanced, had he been represented as the last projec tion of the entire human family, about to be sucked down into the sea of annihilation. The poem altogether discovers in our poet a new and extensive district in his mind, which he has never cultivated, but left shadowy, silent, and unbroken in the recesses of his spirit.

Had we been asked to give our vote for one best qualified to be the laureate of the rainbow, we should, even previous to experience, have preferred Campbell. His genius, pillared indeed on earth, yet rising by ethereal stages toward heaven, mildly reflective, rather than dazzlingly original, was just the genius to chant the praises of that fine old show of heaven, at which the "countryman stops to gaze," at the sight of which the little child claps his hands,—that arrowless bow which "encompasseth the sky with a glorious circle, and the hands of the Most High have bended it." On the green, glad, and glittering earth, and between the father Sun, and the fairest of his daughters, spanning the dark and dripping east, stands up the poet, and sings a strain which ascends like "a steam of rich distilled perfumes," which arrests and eternizes the brief beauty of the apparition, and which seems now the song of the earth's gratitude, and now the

voice of the sun's tenderness for his evanishing child. Campbell's "Rainbow" is not one of those "tearless rainbows, such as span the unclouded skies of Peristan," nor does it bear aloft his thoughts to that region where round the throne there appears a "rainbow like unto an emerald,”—his is of this "dear green earth,"—its beauty is the beauty of tears— it is the very rainbow which appeared in the departing clouds of the deluge, and

"As fresh in yon horizon dark,

As young its beauties seem,
As when the eagle from the ark
First sported in its beam."

It is not the rainbow as he has seen it shining above the Thames, and with hardly an eye among those of thousands marking its slighted loveliness: but the rainbow as he has seen it, binding Beneaw to Benvenue, Benmackdui to Cairngorm the delight of the solitary shepherd or huntsman on the hill. And as we said, that never shall a shell be seen without recalling to the enthusiast the lines of Landor, so we can at least answer for ourselves, that never do we behold a rainbow, whether bridging the Highland valley, or seen by our eye alone over the silent and smokeless morning city, without recalling the lines of Campbell; and never shall we think of his genius but (if we may use the words) as "clothed with a rainbow."

Our author's "Lines to Emigrants" are in the style of his earliest poem, but chastened down into severer beauty. In them he waives a white poetic hand to his departing brothers, and boldly furrows up, by the wing of his imagination, those primeval forests "where now the panther laps a lonely stream," and becomes a pioneer and prophet of the

glorious future ages which he is privileged to read in their germ

"As in a cradled Hercules we trace

The lines of empire in his infant face."

It is characteristic of Campbell, and how much does it say for his powers, that whatever he does is in its own line the best. Thus, next to "Scots wha hae," "Hohenlinden" is the best war-song ever written. It catches as in a cup the spirit of the "revelry" of war-that wild steam of intoxication which hovers over the battle-field, till the genuine soldier awakens from a fight as from a giddy and gorgeous dream, and, like Caliban, "cries to sleep again." And in his two celebrated sea-songs how proudly does he pace the deck! With what rough, tar-like confidence, does he face the terrors of the tempest of the sea-fight; and the "meteor flag of England," blazing over the smoke of battle, is a grander spectacle to him than a comet's hair, or than one of the serene and steadfast stars.

As a poet, he is already, what Byron is not-a classic secure of immortality-his works already exalted to the same shelf with those of Goldsmith, Collins, and Thomson.

His prose is liable to the charge of over ambition, if not of affectation, but is clear, energetic and felicitous. His critical dicta, as given forth in his "Specimens of the British Poets," in his "Life of Mrs. Siddons," "Sir Thomas Laurence," &c., have often a decisive vigour about them which reminds us of the oracularities of Dr. Johnson. He paints his author; and though you may dispute an opinion, who can deny a likeness?

Campbell, at college, was eminent for three things, his poverty, his wit, and his scholarship. A poor, little blackeyed boy, with his toes protruding through his shoes, he was

wont to haunt the stove in the logic class; and when driven from it by tall dunderheads from Belfast, used to pelt them with extempore epigrams till, to his infinite delight, he got them to chase him through the class-room; and then the little vagabond, wheeling round, regained his warm corner. It was a high moment for him when he was raised to the post of Lord Rector in his native university. Unbounded was the enthusiasm which prevailed. Such crowding! such cramming such questioning! "Have you seen him? and you? and you?" and after he was seen, and his fine, frank, inaugural address was delivered, "Does he come up to your expectations? isn't he a better speaker than we thought he had been? what fine dark eyes he has got!" And better still when he mingled so familiarly with his constituents, walking arm in arm with them, and giving them (trembling to the very toes,) the other and the other grasp of his warm right hand. What proud men we all were, when each of us received a copy of his first inaugural oration, with the magic words, "To so and so, from Thomas Campbell." We remember being in a debating society one evening, when the news arrived that the Lord Rector had unexpectedly come down from London on some matter affecting the interests of the students. It was an eccentric and chivalrous move on his part, and out rushed we in a body to meet and welcome him with respondent enthusiasm. We found him in his brother-in-law's, sipping his coffee, were most cordially received, and after some delightful chit-chat, and a warmhearted speech or two, left him in a transport of admiration. He, too, felt his fame; and never-not when composing the "Pleasures of Hope,"-did his blood boil higher; and never was his tongue half so eloquent, as in his meetings with, and his buoyant and cordial speeches to, the students of Glasgow. In memory of the halcyon days of the "Good Lord Rector,"

some of the cleverer of his admirers established a Campbell Club. He was the first poet we ever saw; and for us to meet, hear, feel the tingling touch of the author of "O'Connor's Child," was a "thing to dream of, not to see." Great as was the enthusiasm of all the red-gowned electors, there was none in whose heart it beat more warmly than in his, who now indites this feeble but sincere tribute to his fame.

Alas! since the above was written, the poet of Hope (who, doubly alas! had ere his death become the walking image of despondency) has departed from among us. And with him has passed away that era of literature which stretched between the fall of Pope and the rise of Wordsworth. In Westminster Abbey now lie entombed, not only the remains of a fine though frail spirit, but of one beautiful age of English poetry. Peace, but not oblivion, to their united manes!

LORD BROUGHAM.

BROUGHAM is an isthmus, uniting two times. He belongs. partly to the past, and partly to the present. In his habits, intellectual and moral, he is of the eighteenth century; in his views and deeper feelings he is the man of his own era. While Coleridge and Carlyle are the prophets of the coming age, the events of which will expound much that is obscure in their deliverances, Brougham seeks only, at the light of the past, to live and move in the present. Well aware of the feebleness of comparisons as gauges of character, we may yet call him a composite of Burke, Chatham, and Fox. Without the subtlety, profusion, and poetry of the first, he