Personal Recollections of Lamb Hazlitt And Others

osed, to his refined literary tastes and fastidious personal habits, as it certainly was to the general tone of his intellectual character; for the person to whom I refer, though possessing considerable talents and extensive influence in connection with the newspaper press, was a man of coarse mjnd, and of almost ostentatiously profligate personal habits. Not but there were features in Campbell's mind and character capable of accounting for this temporary intimacy. In the first place, it must be admitted that, notwithstanding the excessive fastidiousness of his taste and habits in all matters connected with his position and reputation as the first of living poets (for such at that time he was considered), Campbell partook of that propensity to which another kind of kings are said to be addicted â?? that of a lurking fondness for " low company ;" not " low " in this case, in the ordinary sense of the term, as implying persons of low condition and mean mental endowments, but as indicating that freedom from conventional restraints which always springs from a low tone of moral sentiment, when accompanied by an open and bold-faced repudiation of those principles of personal conduct which form thebasis of all cultivated society. And Campbell's mind had a .strong tendency to throw off the restraints in question, without the strength of will to do so, even if his high tone of moral feeling had not stood in the way of the stepâ??which it certainly would have done. T...