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 Virgilianisms, and think only of the
delightful companion, the unaffected philanthropist, and the creator
of a beauty worth all the heroines in Racine.
"Mr. Campbell has tasted pretty sharply of the good and ill of the
present state of society, and for a book-man has beheld strange sights.
He witnessed a battle in Germany from the top of a convent (on which
battle he has written a noble ode); and he saw the French cavalry enter
a town, wiping their bloody swords on the horses' manes.
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