When Campbell said farewell to the Grammar School prior to entering his name at College, it was observed of him that no boy of his age had ever left more esteemed by his classfellows or with better prospects at the University. His first College session began in October 1791. At that time the University was located in the High Street, the classic Molendinar, as yet uncovered, finding a way to the Clyde through its park and gardens. Johnson thought it was ‘without a sufficient share in the magnificence of the place’; and not unlikely the scarlet gowns worn by the students were in Campbell’s day pretty much what they were when Wesley reported them ‘very dirty, some very ragged, and all of coarse cloth.’ But there must have been something very pleasant about the quaint old world life which was then lived in and around the College Squares. Close upon four hundred students used to gather about the time-honoured courts, the windows of the professors’ houses looking down upon them from the north side; and the memories of many generations must have gone some little way to atone for the lack of ‘magnificence’ so much deplored by the great Cham of literature.

The list of professors in 1791, when Campbell entered, did not include any name of outstanding note. His father’s old friend, Dr Reid, now a veteran of eighty-one, had retired, though he was still living in the Professors’ Court, and had been succeeded by Professor Arthur, a scholar of respectable ability and varied acquirements, for whom Campbell expressed a sincere admiration. The Greek class was taught by Professor Young, a character of the Christopher North and John Stuart Blackie type, ‘a strangely beautiful and radiant figure in the then grave and solemn group of Glasgow professors.’ William Richardson filled the Humanity—in other words the Latin—Chair, and filled it with some distinction too, in his curled wig, lace ruffles, knee breeches and silk stockings. Richardson was not of those who combine plain living with high thinking. Dining out was his passion. It is told of him that one evening, when the turtle soup was unusually fine, he exclaimed, after repeated helpings, ‘I know there is gout in every spoonful, but I can’t resist it.’ For all this, he was a good scholar and an expert teacher, enjoying some repute as one of Mackenzie’s coadjutors in The Mirror; a poet, too, and the author of one or two books which were read in their day. The Logic class was in the hands of Professor Jardine, ‘the philosophic Jardine,’ as Campbell calls him—‘a most worthy, honest man, neither proud nor partial.’ Campbell says he could not boast of deriving any great advantage from Jardine’s class, but he ‘found its employment very agreeable’ nevertheless, and he seems to have honestly liked the professor. The Law Chair was occupied by Professor Millar, a violent democrat, who, in the dark days of Toryism, ‘did much in Glasgow to inoculate Jeffrey and the academic Liberals with zealous views of progress.’ Campbell regarded him as the ablest of all the professors; and although he was not a regular student of law, he attended some of the lectures, and was inclined to credit Millar with influencing his views on what he termed the ascendency of freedom.

Such were the men under whose direction the poet completed his education. Of fellow-students with whom he was intimate it is not necessary to say much. Perhaps the best known was Hamilton Paul, a jovial youth with a talent for verse, who afterwards, when minister of Broughton, narrowly escaped censure from the Church courts for an attempt to palliate the shortcomings of Burns by indiscreet allusions to his own clerical brethren. Paul and Campbell were frequently rivals in competing for academical rewards offered for the best compositions in verse, and in one case at least Campbell was beaten. It was Paul who founded the College Debating Club, which usually met in his lodgings and occasionally continued its debates till midnight; and in some published recollections of the Club’s doings he bears testimony to Campbell’s great fluency as a speaker. Another fellow-student was Gregory Watt, a son of the famous engineer. Campbell described him as ‘unparalleled in his early talent for eloquence,’ as literally the most beautiful youth he had ever seen; and he declared afterwards that if Watt had lived he must have made a brilliant figure in the House of Commons. Then there was James Thomson, a kindred genius, known familiarly as the ‘Doctor,’ with whom he formed a life-long friendship, and to whom some of the most intimate of his letters are addressed. It was to the order of this early friend that two marble busts of the poet were executed by Bailey, one of which he presented to Glasgow University; and it was he who also commissioned the well-known portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, which accompanies most editions of Campbell’s works. Unfortunately, Campbell just missed Jeffrey, the ‘great little man,’ who spent two happy years (1788-1790) at the old College, and, like Campbell himself, was subsequently made its Lord Rector.

Campbell’s career at the University, allowing for certain differences of detail, was very much what it had been at the Grammar School. That is to say, he fought shy of drudgery, put on a spurt now and again, distinguished himself in the classics, wrote verse, and indulged freely in the customary frolics of the typical student. He confessed in after life that he was much more inclined to sport than study; and although he admitted having carried away one or two prizes, he admitted also that he was idle in some of the classes. The fact remains notwithstanding, that he constantly outstripped his competitors, who, as Beattie has it, steadily plodded on in the rear, ‘the very personifications of industry.’ In his first year he took one prize for Latin and another for some English verses, besides securing a bursary on Archbishop Leighton’s foundation. Next session he had more academical honours. In the Logic class he received the eighth prize for ‘the best composition on various subjects,’ and was made an examiner of the exercises sent in by the other students of the class—certainly a high compliment to a youth of his years. One of the essays, on the subject of Sympathy, is printed by Beattie with the Professor’s note appended. From this note it appears that the occult art of pointing was not the only matter which required the attention of the student. Professor Jardine might have passed over the amazing statement that ‘God has implanted in our nature an emotion of pleasure on contemplating the sufferings of a fellow-creature’; but it was impossible that he should overlook such spellings as ‘agreable,’ ‘sympathyze,’ and ‘persuits.’ Still, ‘upon the whole,’ said Jardine, ‘the exercise is good, and entitles the author to much commendation.’

The Professor’s verdict may be taken as a type of Campbell’s whole career at College: it was a case of ‘much commendation’ all through. At the close of his third session he was awarded a prize for a poetical ‘Essay on the Origin of Evil,’ which, if we are to credit his own statement, gave him a celebrity throughout the entire city, from the High Church down to the bottom of the Saltmarket. The students, who spoke of him as the Pope of Glasgow, even talked of it over their oysters at Lucky MacAlpine’s in the Trongate. In the Greek class he took the first prize for a rendering of certain passages from the ‘Clouds’ of Aristophanes, which Professor Young declared to be the best essay that had ever been given in by a student at the University. This was not bad for a youth of fifteen. Hamilton Paul says that Campbell carried everything before him in the matter of his ‘unrivalled translations,’ until his fellow-students began to regard him as a prodigy, and copy him as a model. In Galt’s Autobiography there is a story—he heads it ‘A Twopenny Effusion’—to the effect that the students bore the cost of printing an Ossianic poem of Campbell’s which was hawked about at twopence; but as Galt erroneously says that Campbell published ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ by subscription, we may regard the story as at least doubtful. Campbell called Galt a ‘dirty blackguard’ for retailing it.

But it was not alone by his proficiency in the classics that Campbell compelled attention. At this time he showed a turn for satire, of which he never afterwards gave much evidence, and his lampoons upon characters in the College and elsewhere were the theme of constant merriment in the quadrangle. Beattie has a good deal to say about these effusions, but if we may judge by a sample which Redding has preserved, their cleverness was better than their taste. It was legitimate enough, perhaps, to rail at the length of an elderly city parson’s sermons, to make fun of his oft-recurring phrase, ‘the good old-way’; but the worthy man, about to marry a young wife, could hardly be expected to relish this kind of thing:

Adam Smith contended that it was the duty of a poet to write like a gentleman. If as a student Campbell had always written like a gentleman, there would have been less of that posthumous resentment of which his biographer complains. Nevertheless, his popularity as a playful wit must have been very pleasant to him at the time. ‘What’s Tom Campbell been saying?’ was a common exclamation among the students as they gathered of mornings round the stove in the Logic classroom. And Tom Campbell, if he had been saying nothing of particular note, would take his pencil and write an impromptu on the white-washed wall. Presently a ring would be formed round it, ‘and the wit and words passing from lip to lip generally threw the class into a roar of laughter.’ It is but right to say, however, that these impromptus were invariably produced with a view to something else than praise. The stove was usually encircled by a body of stout, rollicking Irish students, and Campbell found that the only sure means of getting near it was by ‘drafting the fire-worshippers’—in other words, by making them give warmth in exchange for wit. One cold December morning it was whispered that a libel on old Ireland had been perpetrated on the wall. The Irishmen rushed forth in a body, and while they read, apropos of a passage they had just been studying in the class—

the young satirist had taken the best place at the stove!

Campbell’s third session at the University was eventful in several respects. To begin with, it was then—in the spring of 1793—that he made that first visit to Edinburgh to which he so often referred afterwards. It was a time of intense political excitement. ‘The French Revolution,’ to quote the poet’s words, ‘had everywhere lighted up the contending spirits of democracy and aristocracy’; and being, in his own estimation, a competent judge of politics, Campbell became a pronounced democrat. Muir and Gerald were about to stand their trial for high treason at Edinburgh, and Campbell ‘longed insufferably’ to see them—to see Muir especially, of whose accomplishments he had heard a ‘magnificent account.’ He had an aunt in Edinburgh ready to welcome him; and so, with a crown piece in his pocket, he started for the capital, doing the forty-two miles on foot. Next morning found him in court. The trial was, he says, an era in his life. ‘Hitherto I had never known what public eloquence was, and I am sure the Justiciary Scotch lords did not help me to a conception of it, speaking, as they did, bad arguments in broad Scotch. But the Lord Advocate’s speech was good—the speeches of Laing and Gillies were better; and Gerald’s speech annihilated the remembrances of all the eloquence that had ever been heard within the walls of that house.’ In the opinion of eminent English lawyers Gerald had not really been guilty of sedition, and certainly Muir never uttered a sentence in favour of reform stronger than Pitt himself had uttered. Nevertheless, in spite of their solemn protests and their fervent appeals to the jury, they were both sentenced to transportation, and were sent in irons to the hulks.

The trial and its sequel made a deep impression on the young democrat. When he returned to Glasgow he could think and speak of nothing else. His old gaiety had quite deserted him, and instead of frolics and flute-playing and ‘auld farrant stories’ by the fireside, there were tirades about ‘the miserable prospects of society, the corrupt state of modern legislature, the glory of ancient republics, and the wisdom of Solon and Lycurgus.’ Never, surely, was any philosopher of fifteen so harassed by political cares and apprehensions. But the gloomy fit did not last long. Campbell had to think of making a living for himself, and he began by casting about for something to fill up his college vacations.

It does not appear that he went to the University with any definite object in view, but the question of a profession had long since become a pressing consideration. Naturally he looked first towards the Church, but his father, unlike the majority of Scots parents about that time, did not encourage him in the notion of wagging his head in a pulpit; and so, after toying with theology—he studied Hebrew and wrote a hymn—he turned his attention in other directions. He thought of law, and spent some time in the office of a city solicitor. Then he thought of business, and filled up a summer recess in the counting-house of a Glasgow merchant, ‘busily employed at book-keeping and endeavouring to improve this hand of mine.’ Next he tried medicine, but had to give it up because he could not bear to witness the surgical operations. Finally he fell back on the last resource of the University man without a profession, and became a tutor. According to Dr Holmes, the natural end of the tutor is to die of starvation. Campbell’s dread was that he would die of dulness: he had engaged to go to the farthest end of the Isle of Mull—

It turned out to be not quite so bad as he anticipated, though, in truth, the reality proved much less pleasant than the retrospect. In the meantime he had a very sprightly journey from Glasgow in the company of Joseph Finlayson, an old classfellow who was also going to taste the bitterness of a Highland tutorship. The pair started on the 18th of May 1795. At Greenock they spent a long evening on the quay, ‘for economy’s sake,’ and distinguished themselves by saving a boy from drowning. Campbell thought it pretty hard that two such heroes should go supperless to bed; so they repaired to the inn, ate—according to their own account—dish after dish of beefsteaks, and drank tankards of ale that set them both singing and reciting poetry like mad minstrels of the olden time. Next day, leaving their trunks to be sent by land to Inverary, they crossed the Firth of Clyde to Argyllshire, the jolliest boys in the whole world. Campbell says he had still a half-belief in Ossian, and an Ossianic interest in the Gaelic people; but this did not reconcile him to the Highland beds, in which ‘it was not safe to lay yourself down without being troubled with cutaneous sensations next morning.’ Nor did the bill of fare at the Highland inns please the travellers any better. It lacked variety. Everywhere it was ‘Skatan agas, spuntat agas, usquebaugh’—herrings and potatoes and whisky. But the roaring streams, and the primroses, and the ‘chanting cuckoos’ made up for all the discomfort. Campbell, as he expresses it, felt a soul in every muscle of his body, and his mind was filled with the thought that he was now going to earn his bread by his own labour.

The two young fellows parted at Inverary, and Campbell went on by way of Oban to Mull, reaching his destination after losing himself several times on the island, the entire length of which he says he traversed. His engagement was with a distant relative of his own, a Mrs Campbell, a ‘worthy, sensible widow lady,’ who treated him with thoughtful sympathy and consideration. What kind of tutor he made does not appear, but he evidently had the best intentions and a humane regard for his pupils. ‘I never beat them,’ he remarks, ‘remembering how much I loved my father for having never beaten me.’

We know very little about this part of Campbell’s career beyond what is told in his own letters. He expected to find in Mull ‘a calm retreat for study and the Muses,’ and he was not disappointed. At first, naturally enough, he felt very dejected. The house of Sunipol, where he taught, is on the northern shore of the island, from which a magnificent prospect of thirteen of the Hebrides group, including Staffa and Iona, can be obtained. The scenery, on Campbell’s own admission, is ‘marked by sublimity and the wild majesty of nature,’ but unhappily in bad weather—and there is not much good weather in Mull—the island is ‘only fit for the haunts of the damned.’ There was plenty to feed the fancy of a poet; and yet, ‘God wot,’ says Campbell, ‘I was better pleased to look on the kirk steeples and whinstone causeways of Glasgow than on all the eagles and wild deer of the Highlands.’ His trunk was some days late in arriving, and as there was no writing paper in the island he was driven to the expedient of scribbling his thoughts on the wall of his room! However, he soon got reconciled to his forlorn condition; nay, in time he ‘blessed the wild delight of solitude.’ He diverted himself by botanising, by shooting wild geese, and, poet like, by rowing about in the moonlight; and we hear of an excursion to Staffa and Iona which filled him with hitherto unexperienced emotions of pleasure.

There is even a whisper of a little love affair. A certain Caroline Fraser, a daughter of the minister of Inverary, came to visit at Sunipol. She was, according to Beattie, who knew her, a girl of ‘radiant beauty,’ and Campbell, being himself well-favoured in the matter of looks—he is described at this time as ‘a fair and beautiful boy, with pleasant and winning manners and a mild and cheerful disposition’—it was only natural that the pair should draw together. It was to this lady that the poem in two parts, bearing her Christian name, was addressed. The first part, beginning ‘I’ll bid the hyacinth to blow,’ was written in Mull; the second, ‘Gem of the crimson-coloured even,’ in the following year, when the young tutor was frequently able to avail himself of the hospitality of the ‘adorable Miss Caroline’s’ family. Verses were also addressed to ‘A Rural Beauty in Mull,’ but there is nothing to show that the ‘young Maria’ thus celebrated was anything more than a poetic creation. Of what may be called serious work during the course of the Mull tutorship we do not hear much. An Elegy, written in low spirits soon after he landed, was highly praised by Dr Anderson, the editor of the ‘British Poets,’ who predicted from it that the author would become a great poet; but Campbell showed himself a better critic when he characterised it as ‘very humdrum indeed.’ Many of his leisure hours were filled up with translations of his favourite classics, notably with what he calls his old comedy of the ‘Clouds’ of Aristophanes, but of these it is unnecessary to speak. The real effect of the Mull residence upon his poetic product was not felt until later. It might be too much to say that ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter,’ ‘Lochiel,’ and ‘Glenara’ would never have been written but for the author’s sojourn in the Highlands, but the imagery of these and other pieces is clearly traceable to the promptings of island solitude; and much as Campbell disliked his isolation at the time, it undoubtedly proved of the greatest poetic service to him. Meanwhile, after five months of the wilderness, the exile became irksome, and he returned to Glasgow, glad to behold the kirk steeples and to feel his feet not on the ‘bent’ of Mull, but on the pavement of his native city.

Campbell now entered on his last session at the University. There is no detailed account of his studies this session, but he remarks himself, in his high-flown style, that the winter was one in which his mind advanced to a more expansive desire of knowledge than he had ever before experienced. He mentions especially the lectures of Professor Millar on Heineccius and on Roman Law. ‘To say that Millar gave me liberal opinions would be understating the obligation which I either owed, or imagined I owed to him. He did more. He made investigations into the principles of justice and the rights and interests of society so captivating to me that I formed opinions for myself and became an emancipated lover of truth.’ The impulse which Millar’s lectures gave to his mind continued long after he heard them. At the time, they seem to have turned his thoughts very seriously towards the law as a profession. ‘Poetry itself, in my love of jurisprudence and history,’ he says, ‘was almost forgotten. At that period, had I possessed but a few hundred pounds to have subsisted upon studying law, I believe I should have bid adieu to the Muses and gone to the Bar; but I had no choice in the matter.’ As it was, the Muses during this session, and for some time after, appear to have received but scant attention. For a whole year he wrote nothing but the lines on Miss Broderick which still retain a place among his published works, and the two poems which gained him his parting prizes at the University. The latter were, it is assumed, sketched out in Mull. One was a translation from the ‘Choephoroe,’ the other of a Chorus in the ‘Medea’ of Euripides, the only prize piece which he afterwards included among his printed poems.

During the whole of this last session at the University he supported himself by private tuition. Among other pupils he had the future Lord Cunninghame of the Court of Session, who indeed boarded with the Campbell family in order to have the benefit of reading Greek with the son. Cunninghame says that Campbell left on his mind a deep impression, not merely of his abilities as a classical scholar, but of the elevation and purity of his sentiments. He read much in Demosthenes and Cicero, and enlarged on their eloquence and the grandeur of their views. It was by these ancient models that he tested the oratory of the moderns. He would repeat with the greatest enthusiasm the most impassioned passages of Lord Chatham’s speeches on behalf of American freedom, and Burke’s declamation against Warren Hastings was often on his lips. He was firmly convinced at this time that the rulers of the universe were in league against mankind, but he looked forward with some hope to the joyful day when the wrongs of society would be vindicated, and freedom again assume the ascendant. Lord Cunninghame draws a charming picture of the fireside politicians, with Campbell at their head, discussing the French Revolution, and defending their ultra-liberal opinions against the assaults of outsiders. For his age the poet probably took the world and the powers that be much too seriously; but his early political leanings are not without a certain significance in view of his after interest in the cause of liberty.

His last session at the University ended, Campbell, in June 1796, returned to Argyllshire, again as a tutor. This time his engagement was at Downie, near Lochgilphead. The house stood in a secluded spot on the shore of that great arm of the sea known as the Sound of Jura. The view to be obtained from its neighbourhood made a wonderful combination of sea and mountain scenery; but, like Sunipol, the place was altogether too dull for the city-bred youth. Campbell speaks of himself as living the life of a poor starling, caged in by rocks and seas from the haunts of man; as ‘lying dormant in a solitary nook of the world, where there is nothing to chase the spleen,’ and where the people ‘seem to moulder away in sluggishness and deplorable ignorance.’ Still, it was not quite so bad as Mull. For one thing, Inverary was comparatively near, and Hamilton Paul was there, as well as the adorable Caroline, to whose charms Paul, as appears from a poetical tribute, had also succumbed. Campbell, we may be sure, was oftener at Inverary than his letters show, for the ‘Hebe of the West’ clearly had magnetic powers of a quite unusual kind.

Paul has a lively account of the last day he spent with his friend at Inverary. It was the occasion of a ‘frugal dinner,’ when two old college companions joined the tutors around the table at the Inverary Arms. ‘Never,’ says Paul, ‘did schoolboy enjoy an unexpected holiday more than Campbell. He danced, sang, and capered, half frantic with joy. Had he been only invested with the philabeg, he would have exhibited a striking resemblance to little Donald, leaping and dancing at a Highland wedding.’ The company had a delightful afternoon together, and on the way home Campbell worked himself up into a state of ecstacy. He ‘recited poetry of his own composition—some of which has never been printed—and then, after a moment’s pause, addressed me: “Paul, you and I must go in search of adventures. If you will personate Roderick Random, I will go through the world with you as Strap.” “Yes, Tom,” said I, “I perceive what is to be the result: you are to be a poet by profession.”’

Campbell’s greatest difficulty at present was to settle upon any profession; but if his penchant for reciting poetry in the open air could have made him a poet, then indeed was his title clear. He told Scott some years after this that he repeated the ‘Cadzow Castle’ verses so often, stamping and shaking his head ferociously, while walking along the North Bridge of Edinburgh, that all the coachmen knew him by tongue, and quizzed him as he passed. The habit was mad enough in Edinburgh; in the Highlands it evidently suggested something like lunacy. His successor in the tutorship says that in Campbell’s frequent walks along the shore he was often observed by the natives to be ‘in a state of high and rapturous excitement,’ of the cause and tendency of which they formed very strange and inconsistent ideas.

If the simple natives had suspected that the tutor was in love, they might, without knowing their Shakespeare, have paid less heed to these manifestations. Campbell had told Paul some time before that a poet should have only his muse for mistress; but it was easier to preach the precept than to practise it. It is in a letter to his friend Thomson that we first hear of this amourette. Speaking of a temporary brightening of his prospects, he says: ‘To console me still further (but Thomson, I challenge your secrecy by all our former friendship), my evening walks are sometimes accompanied by one who, for a twelvemonth past, has won my purest but most ardent affection.

You may well imagine how the consoling words of such a person warm my heart into ecstacy of a most delightful kind. I say no more at present; and, my friend, I rely on your secrecy.’ Campbell’s secret has been kept, for the identity of this particular Amanda has never been disclosed. Can it have been the adorable Caroline herself? Whoever she was, she had, if we may trust Beattie, a very favourable influence in promoting Campbell’s appeals to the muse. Defeated in all other prospects, he took refuge in ‘the enchanted garden of love,’ and, in the interchange of mutual affection, found compensation for all his disappointments.

But Campbell had his duties as a tutor to attend to. His pupil was the future Sir William Napier of Milliken, a great-great-grandson of the celebrated Napier of Merchiston. He was now about eight years old, and was living with his mother at Downie, his grandfather’s estate. His father, Colonel Napier, returned from the West Indies shortly after Campbell entered on his engagement. Campbell describes him as ‘a most agreeable gentleman, with all the mildness of a scholar and the majesty of a British Grenadier.’ The Colonel took an eager interest in the tutor’s welfare, and did all he could to settle him in some permanent employment. ‘He has,’ says Campbell to Thomson, ‘been active to consult, to advise, to recommend me, with warmth and success, and that to friends of the first rank.’ With a local physician he united to obtain for him a favourable situation in the office of a leading Edinburgh lawyer, but unfortunately a combination of circumstances baffled the poet’s aims in this direction; and, the term of his engagement having expired, he returned once more to Glasgow, in a state of the greatest concern about his future. ‘I will,’ he declared, with that unnecessary rhetoric to which he was prone, ‘I will maintain my independence by lessening my wants, if I should live upon a barren heath.’