As a critic, Campbell had great acquirements and gifts.  These were displayed in his elaborate Specimens of the British Poets, published in 1819, and in his Lectures on Poetry before the Surrey Institution in 1820.  In 1827 he was elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow; but afterwards his literary efforts were by no means worthy of his reputation.  Few have read his Pilgrim of Glencoe; and all who have, are pained by its manifestation of his failing powers.  In fact, his was an unfinished fame—­a brilliant beginning, but no continuance.  Sir Walter Scott has touched it with a needle, when he says, “Campbell is in a manner a bugbear to himself; the brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his after efforts.  He is afraid of the shadow which his own fame casts before him.”  Byron placed him in the second category of the greatest living English poets; but Byron was no critic.

He also published a Life of Petrarch, and a Life of Frederick the Great; and, in 1830, he edited the New Monthly Magazine.  He died at Boulogne, June 15th, 1844, after a long period of decay in mental power.

SAMUEL ROGERS.—­Rogers was a companion or consort to Campbell, although the two men were very different personally.  As Campbell had borrowed from Akenside and written The Pleasures of Hope, Rogers enriched our literature with The Pleasures of Memory, a poem of exquisite versification, more finished and unified than its pendent picture; containing neither passion nor declamation, but polish, taste, and tenderness.

Rogers was born in a suburb of London, in 1762.  His father was a banker; and, although well educated, the poet was designed to succeed him, as he did, being until his death a partner in the same banking-house.  Early enamored of poetry by reading Beattie’s Minstrel, Rogers devoted all his spare time to its cultivation, and with great and merited success.

In 1786 he produced his Ode to Superstition, after the manner of Gray, and in 1792 his Pleasures of Memory, which was enthusiastically received, and which is polished to the extreme.  In 1812 appeared a fragment, The Voyage of Columbus, and in 1814 Jacqueline, in the same volume with Byron’s Lara. Human Life was published in 1819.  It is a poem in the old style, (most of his poems are in the rhymed pentameter couplet;) but in 1822 appeared his poem of Italy, in blank verse, which has the charm of originality in presentation, freshness of personal experience, picturesqueness in description, novelty in incident and story, scholarship, and taste in art criticism.  In short, it is not only the best of his poems, but it has great merit besides that of the poetry.  The story of Ginevra is a masterpiece of cabinet art, and is universally appreciated.  With these works Rogers contented himself.  Rich and distinguished, his house became a place of resort to men of distinction and taste in art:  it was filled with articles of vertu; and Rogers the poet lived long as Rogers the virtuoso.  His breakfast parties were particularly noted.  His long, prosperous, and happy life was ended on the 18th December, 1855, at the age of ninety-two.