bell writes slowly, and
it takes him some time to get under way; and just as he has
fairly begun, out comes one of their poems, that sets the world
agog and quite daunts him, so that he throws by his pen in
despair.'

"I pointed out the essential difference in their kinds of
poetry, and the qualities which insured perpetuity to that of
her husband. 'You can't persuade Campbell of that,' said she.
'He is apt to undervalue his own works, and to consider his own
little lights put out whenever they come blazing out with their
great torches.'

"I repeated the conversation to Scott some time afterward, and
it drew forth a characteristic comment.

"'Pooh!' said he, good humoredly, 'how can Campbell mistake the
matter so much. Poetry goes by quality, not by bulk. My poems
are mere cairngorms, wrought up, perhaps, with a cunning hand,
and may pass well in the market as long as cairngorms are the
fashion; but they are mere Scotch pebbles after all; now Tom
Campbell's are real diamonds, and diamonds of the first water.'

"I have not time at present to furnish personal anecdotes of my
intercourse with Campbell, neither does it afford any of a
striking nature. Though extending over a number of years, it
was never very intimate. His residence in the country, and my
long intervals of absence on the Continent, rendered our
meetings few and far between. To tell the truth, I was not much
drawn to Campbell, having taken up a wrong notion concerning
him from seeing him at times when his mind was ill at ease, and
preyed upon by secret griefs. I had thought him disposed to be
querulous and captious, and had heard his apparent discontent
attributed to jealous repining at the success of his poetical
contemporaries. In a word, I knew little of him but what might
be learned in the casual intercourse of general society,
whereas it required the close communion of confidential
friendship to sound the _depths of his character and know the
treasures of excellence_ hidden beneath its surface. Besides,
he was dogged for years by certain malignant scribblers, who
took a pleasure in misrepresenting all his actions, and holding
him up in an absurd and disparaging point of view. In what this
hostility originated I do not know, but it must have given much
anno