etraying an
intimacy with pain, and for a high and somewhat strained tone of voice,
like a man speaking with suspended breath, and in the habit of subduing
his feelings. No man, I should guess, feels more kindly towards his
fellow-creatures, or takes less credit for it. When he indulges in doubt
and sarcasm, and speaks contemptuously of things in general, he does it,
partly, no doubt, out of actual dissatisfaction, but more perhaps than
he suspects, out of a fear of being thought weak and sensitive--which is
a blind that the best men very commonly practise. Mr. Campbell professes
to be hopeless and sarcastic, and takes pains all the while to set up an
university.

"When I first saw this eminent person, he gave me the idea of a French
Virgil: not that he is like a Frenchman, much less the French translator
of Virgil. I found him as handsome as the Abbe Delille is said to have
been ugly. But he seemed to me to embody a Frenchman's ideal notion of
the Latin poet; something a little more cut and dry than I had looked
for; compact and elegant, critical and acute, with a consciousness of
authorship upon him; a taste over-anxious not to commit itself, and
refining and diminishing nature as in a drawing-room mirror. This fancy
was strengthened in the course of conversation, by his expatiating on
the greatness of Racine. I think he had a volume of the French Tragedian
in his hand. His skull was sharply cut and fine; with plenty, according
to the phrenologists, both of the reflective and amative organs; and his
poetry will bear them out. For a lettered solitude and a bridal properly
got up, both according to law and luxury, commend us to 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 Vi