POETIC INSPIRATION. 



1G9 



"No man felt mere kindly to- 

 wards his fellow-creatures, or took 

 less credit for it. When he indulged 

 in doubt and sarcasm, and spoke 

 contemptuously of things in general, 

 he did it, partly, no doubt, out of 

 actual dissatisfaction, but more per- 

 haps, than he suspected out of a 

 fear of being thought weak and 

 sensitive ; which is a blind that the 

 best men very commonly practise. 



" When I first saw this eminent 

 person, he gave me the idea of a 

 French Virgil. I found him as 

 handsome as the Abbe Delille is 

 said to have been ugly. But he 

 seemed to me to embody a French- 

 man'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 au- 

 thorship upo'fl 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 poet in his hand. 



" His skull was sharply cut and 

 fine, with a full share, according to 

 the phrenologists, both of the re- 

 flective and amative organs; and 

 his poetry will bear them out. 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, neverthe- 

 less, 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." 



" GERTRUDE OP WYOMING." 



Some fourteen or fifteen years 

 after the publication of Gertrude, 

 Campbell found himself engaged in 

 a correspondence with the son of 



Brandt, the Indian chief, who was 

 represented by the poet as the 

 leader of a savage party, whose 

 ferocity gave to war more than its 

 own horrors. Campbell had abused 

 him, almost in the language of an 

 American newspaper : 



" The mammoth comes, the foe, the 



monster Brandt, 

 With ail his howling, desolating band." 



It was rather a serious moment 

 when a gentleman with an English 

 name called on Campbell, demand- 

 ing, on the part of the son of Brandt, 

 some explanation of this language, 

 as applied to his father. A long- 

 letter from Campbell is printed in- 

 Stone's Life, of Brandt, addressed 

 to the Mohawk chief, Ahyonwalgs, 

 commonly called John Brandt, Esq., 

 of the Grand Eiver, Upper Canada, 

 in which he states the various au- 

 thorities which had misled him 

 into the belief of the truth of the 

 incidents on which his notion of 

 Brandt's character was founded, 

 and which, it seems, misrepresented 

 it altogether. 



It was, no doubt, a strange scene, 

 and the poet could with some truth 

 say, and with some pride, too, that 

 when he wrote his poem, it was 

 unlikely that he should ever have 

 contemplated the case of the son or 

 daughter of an Indian chief being 

 affected by its contents. He pro- 

 mises in future editions to correct 

 the involuntary error, and he does 

 so by saying, in a note, that the- 

 Brandt of the poem is a pure ami 

 declared character of fiction. 



This does not satisfy Mr. Stone's 

 sense of justice, who would have- 

 the tomahawk applied to the of- 

 fending rhyme, and who thinks 

 anything less than this is a repeti- 

 tion of the offence. 



POETIC INSPIRATION. 



We hear much about "poetic- 

 inspiration," and the " poet's eye in 

 a fiiio frenzy rolling;" but Sir 



