Part 4

In the same year he spoke for Lord Melbourne, in the action (thought by some to be a political conspiracy[3]) which the Hon. G.C. Norton brought against the Whig premier for criminal conversation with his wife. At this time also he exerted himself for the reform of justice in the ecclesiastical courts, for the uniformity of the law of marriage (which he held should be a purely civil contract) and for giving prisoners charged with felony the benefit of counsel. His defence of _The Times_ newspaper, which had accused Sir John Conroy, equerry to the duchess of Kent, of misappropriation of money (1838), is chiefly remarkable for the Confession--"I despair of any definition of libel which shall exclude no publications which ought to be suppressed, and include none which ought to be permitted." His own definition of blasphemous libel was enforced in the prosecution which, as attorney-general, he raised against the bookseller H. Hetherington, and which he justified on the singular ground that "the vast bulk of the population believe that morality depends entirely on revelation; and if a doubt could be raised among them that the ten commandments were given by God from Mount Sinai, men would think they were at liberty to steal, and women would consider themselves absolved from the restraints of chastity." But his most distinguished effort at the bar was undoubtedly the speech for the House of Commons in the famous case of _Stockdale v. Hansard_, 1837, 7 C. and P. 731. The Commons had ordered to be printed, among other papers, a report of the inspectors of prisons on Newgate, which stated that an obscene book, published by Stockdale, was given to the prisoners to read. Stockdale sued the Commons' publisher, and was met by the plea of parliamentary privilege, to which, however, the judges did not give effect, on the ground that they were entitled to define the privileges of the Commons, and that publication of papers was not essential to the functions of parliament. The matter was settled by an act of 1840.

In 1840 Campbell conducted the prosecution against John Frost, one of the three Chartist leaders who attacked the town of Newport, all of whom were found guilty of high treason. We may also mention, as matter of historical interest, the case before the high steward and the House of Lords which arose out of the duel fought on Wimbledon Common between the earl of Cardigan and Captain Harvey Tuckett. The law of course was clear that the "punctilio which swordsmen falsely do call honour" was no excuse for wilful murder. To the astonishment of everybody, Lord Cardigan escaped from a capital charge of felony because the full name of his antagonist (Harvey Garnett Phipps Tuckett) was not legally proved. It is difficult to suppose that such a blunder was not preconcerted. Campbell himself made the extraordinary declaration that to engage in a duel which could not be declined without infamy (i.e. social disgrace) was "an act free from moral turpitude," although the law properly held it to be wilful murder. Next year, as the Melbourne administration was near its close, Plunkett, the venerable chancellor of Ireland, was forced by discreditable pressure to resign, and the Whig attorney-general, who had never practised in equity, became chancellor of Ireland, and was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Campbell of St Andrews, in the county of Fife. His wife, Mary Elizabeth Campbell, the eldest daughter of the first Baron Abinger by one of the Campbells of Kilmorey, Argyllshire, whom he had married in 1821, had in 1836 been created Baroness Stratheden in recognition of the withdrawal of his claim to the mastership of the rolls. The post of chancellor Campbell held for only sixteen days, and then resigned it to his successor Sir Edward Sugden (Lord St Leonards). The circumstances of his appointment and the erroneous belief that he was receiving a pension of L4000 per annum for his few days' court work brought Campbell much unmerited obloquy.[4] It was during the period 1841-1849, when he had no legal duty, except the self-imposed one of occasionally hearing Scottish appeals in the House of Lords, that the unlucky dream of literary fame troubled Lord Campbell's leisure.[5]

Following in the path struck out by Miss Strickland in her _Lives of the Queens of England_, and by Lord Brougham's _Lives of Eminent Statesmen_, he at last produced, in 1849, _The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England, from the earliest times till the reign of King George IV._, 7 vols. 8vo. The conception of this work is magnificent; its execution wretched. Intended to evolve a history of jurisprudence from the truthful portraits of England's greatest lawyers, it merely exhibits the ill-digested results of desultory learning, without a trace of scientific symmetry or literary taste, without a spark of that divine imaginative sympathy which alone can give flesh and spirit to the dead bones of the past, and without which the present becomes an unintelligible maze of mean and selfish ideas. A charming style, a vivid fancy, exhaustive research, were not to be expected from a hard-worked barrister; but he must certainly be held responsible for the frequent plagiarisms, the still more frequent inaccuracies of detail, the colossal vanity which obtrudes on almost every page, the hasty insinuations against the memory of the great departed who were to him as giants, and the petty sneers which he condescends to print against his own contemporaries, with whom he was living from day to day on terms of apparently sincere friendship.

These faults are painfully apparent in the lives of Hardwicke, Eldon, Lyndhurst and Brougham, and they have been pointed out by the biographers of Eldon and by Lord St Leonards.[6] And yet the book is an invaluable repertory of facts, and must endure until it is superseded by something better. It was followed by the _Lives of the Chief Justices of England, from the Norman Conquest till the death of Lord Mansfield_, 8vo, 2 vols., a book of similar construction but inferior merit.

It must not be supposed that during this period the literary lawyer was silent in the House of Lords. He spoke frequently. The 3rd volume of the _Protests of the Lords_, edited by Thorold Rogers (1875), contains no less than ten protests by Campbell, entered in the years 1842-1845. He protests against Peel's Income Tax Bill of 1842; against the Aberdeen Act 1843, as conferring undue power on church courts; against the perpetuation of diocesan courts for probate and administration; against Lord Stanley's absurd bill providing compensation for the destruction of fences to dispossessed Irish tenants; and against the Parliamentary Proceedings Bill, which proposed that all bills, except money bills, having reached a certain stage or having passed one House, should be continued to next session. The last he opposed because the proper remedy lay in resolutions and orders of the House. He protests in favour of Lord Monteagle's motion for inquiry into the sliding scale of corn duties; of Lord Normanby's motion on the queen's speech in 1843, for inquiry into the state of Ireland (then wholly under military occupation); of Lord Radnor's bill to define the constitutional powers of the home secretary, when Sir James Graham opened Mazzini's letters. In 1844 he records a solitary protest against the judgment of the House of Lords in _R._ v. _Millis_, 1844, 10 Cla. and Fin. 534, which affirmed that a man regularly married according to the rites of the Irish Presbyterian Church, and afterwards regularly married to another woman by an episcopally ordained clergyman, could not be convicted of bigamy, because the English law required for the validity of a marriage that it should be performed by an ordained priest.

On the resignation of Lord Denman in 1850, Campbell was appointed chief justice of the queen's bench. For this post he was well fitted by his knowledge of common law, his habitual attention to the pleadings in court and his power of clear statement. On the other hand, at _nisi prius_ and on the criminal circuit, he was accused of frequently attempting unduly to influence juries in their estimate of the credibility of evidence. It is also certain that he liked to excite applause in the galleries by some platitude about the "glorious Revolution" or the "Protestant succession." He assisted in the reforms of special pleading at Westminster, and had a recognized place with Brougham and Lyndhurst in legal discussions in the House of Lords. But he had neither the generous temperament nor the breadth of view which is required in the composition of even a mediocre statesman. In 1859 he was made lord chancellor of Great Britain, probably on the understanding that Bethell should succeed as soon as he could be spared from the House of Commons. His short tenure of this office calls for no remark. In the same year he published in the form of a letter to Payne Collier an amusing and extremely inconclusive essay on Shakespeare's legal acquirements. One passage will show the conjectural Drocess which runs through the book: "If Shakespeare was really articled to a Stratford attorney, in all probability, during the five years of his clerkship, he visited London several times on his master's business, and he may then have been introduced to the green-room at Blackfriars by one of his countrymen connected with that theatre." The only positive piece of evidence produced is the passage from Thomas Nash's "Epistle to the Gentlemen of the Two Universities," prefixed to Greene's _Arcadia_, 1859, in which he upbraids somebody (not known to be Shakespeare) with having left the "trade of Noverint" and busied himself with "whole Hamlets" and "handfuls of tragical speeches." The knowledge of law shown in the plays is very much what a universal observer must have picked up. Lawyers always underestimate the legal knowledge of an intelligent layman. Campbell died on the 23rd of June 1861. It has been well said of him in explanation of his success, that he lived eighty years and preserved his digestion unimpaired. He had a hard head, a splendid constitution, tireless industry, a generally judicious temper. He was a learned, though not a scientific lawyer, a faithful political adherent, thoroughly honest as a judge, dutiful and happy as a husband. But there was nothing admirable or heroic in his nature. On no great subject did his principles rise above the commonplace of party, nor had he the magnanimity which excuses rather than aggravates the faults of others. His life was the triumph of steady determination unaided by a single brilliant or attractive quality.

AUTHORITIES.--_Life of Lord Campbell, a Selection from his Autobiography, Diary and Letters_, ed. by Hon. Mrs Hardcastle (1881); E. Foss, _The Judges of England_ (1848-1864); W.H. Bennet, _Select Biographical Sketches from Note-books of a Law Reporter_ (1867); E. Manson, _Builders of our Law_ (ed. 1904); J.B. Atlay, _The Victorian Chancellors_, vol. ii. (1908).

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Two of his later acts, allowing the defendant in an action for libel to prove _veritas_, and giving a right of action to the representatives of persons killed through negligence, also deserve mention.

[2] Greville in his _Memoirs_ says that Campbell got this post on condition that he should not expect the ordinary promotion to the bench; a condition which, it if were so, he immediately violated by claiming the vice-chancellorship on the death of Sir John Leach. Pepys (Lord Cottenham) and Bickersteth (Lord Langdale) were both promoted to the bench in preference to Campbell.

[3] "There can be no doubt that old Wynton was at the bottom of it all, and persuaded Lord Grantley to urge it on for mere political purposes."--Greville, iii. 351.

[4] See thereon J.B. Atlay, _The Victorian Chancellors_ (1908), vol. ii. p. 174.

[5] In 1842 he published the _Speeches of Lord Campbell at the Bar and in the Home of Commons, with an Address to the Irish Bar as Lord Chancellor of Ireland_ (Edin., Black).

[6] It was of this book that Sir Charles Wetherell said, referring to its author, "and then there is my noble and biographical friend who has added a new terror to death." See _Misrepresentations in Campbell's "Lives of Lyndhurst and Brougham" corrected by St Leonards_ (London, 1869).

CAMPBELL, JOHN FRANCIS, of Islay (1822-1885), Gaelic scholar, was born on the 29th of December 1822, heir to the beautiful Isle of Islay, on the west coast of Argyllshire. Of this inheritance he never became possessed, as the estate had to be sold by his father, and he began life under greatly changed conditions. Educated at Eton and at Edinburgh University, he occupied at various times several minor government posts. His leisure was largely employed in collecting, translating and editing the folklore of the western Highlands, taken down from the lips of the natives. The results of his investigations were published in four volumes under the title _Popular Tales of the West Highlands_ (1860-1862), and form a most important contribution to the subject, the necessary precursor to the subsequent Gaelic revival in Great Britain. Campbell was also devoted to geology and other scientific pursuits, and he invented the sunshine recorder, used in most of the British meteorological stations. He died at Cannes on the 17th of February 1885.

CAMPBELL, JOHN McLEOD (1800-1872), Scottish divine, son of the Rev. Donald Campbell, was born at Kilninver, Argyllshire, in 1800. Thanks to his father he was already a good Latin scholar when he went to Glasgow University in 1811. Finishing his course in 1817, he became a student at the Divinity Hall, where he gained some reputation as a Hebraist. After further training at Edinburgh he was licensed as preacher by the presbytery of Lorne in 1821. In 1825 he was appointed to the parish of Row on the Gareloch. About this time the doctrine of Assurance of Faith powerfully influenced him. He began to give so much prominence to the universality of the Atonement that his parishioners went so far as to petition the presbytery in 1829. This petition was withdrawn, but a subsequent appeal in March 1830 led to a presbyterial visitation followed by an accusation of heresy. The General Assembly by which the charge was ultimately considered found Campbell guilty of teaching heretical doctrines and deprived him of his living. Declining an invitation to join Edward Irving in the Catholic Apostolic Church, he worked for two years as an evangelist in the Highlands. Returning to Glasgow in 1843, he was minister for sixteen years in a large chapel erected for him, but he never attempted to found a sect. In 1856 he published his famous book on _The Nature of the Atonement_, which has profoundly influenced all writing on the subject since his time. His aim is to view the Atonement in the light of the Incarnation. The divine mind in Christ is the mind of perfect sonship towards God and perfect brotherhood towards men. By the light of this divine fact the Incarnation is seen to develop itself naturally and necessarily as an atonement; the penal element in the sufferings of Christ is minimized. Subsequent critics have pointed out that Campbell's position was not self-consistent in the place assigned to the penal and expiatory element in the sufferings of Christ, nor adequate in its recognition of the principle that the obedience of Christ perfectly affirms all righteousness and so satisfies the holiness of God. In 1859 his health gave way, and he advised his congregation to join the Barony church, where Norman McLeod was pastor. In 1862 he published _Thoughts on Revelation_. In 1868 he received the degree of D.D. from Glasgow University. In 1870 he removed to Roseneath, and there began his _Reminiscences and Reflections_, an unfinished work published after his death by his son. Campbell was greatly loved and esteemed by a circle of friends, which included Thomas Erskine, Norman McLeod, Bishop Alexander Ewing, F.D. Maurice, D.J. Vaughan, and he lived to be recognized and honoured as a man whose opinion on theological subjects carried great weight. In 1871 a testimonial and address were presented to him by representatives of most of the religious bodies in Scotland. He died on the 27th of February 1872, and was buried in Roseneath churchyard. (D. Mn.)

CAMPBELL, LEWIS (1830-1908), British classical scholar, was born at Edinburgh on the 3rd of September 1830. His father, Robert Campbell, R.N., was a first cousin of Thomas Campbell, the poet. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy, and Glasgow and Oxford universities. He was fellow and tutor of Queen's College, Oxford (1855-1858), vicar of Milford, Hants (1858-1863), and professor of Greek and Gifford lecturer at the university of St Andrews (1863-1894). In 1894 he was elected an honorary fellow of Balliol. As a scholar he is best known by his work on Sophocles and Plato. His published works include: Sophocles (2nd ed., 1879); Plato, _Sophistes_ and _Politicus_ (1867), _Theaetetus_ (2nd ed., 1883), _Republic_ (with Jowett, 1894); _Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett_ (with E. Abbott, 1897), _Letters of B. Jowett_ (1899); _Life of James Clerk Maxwell_ (with W. Garnett, new ed., 1884); _A Guide to Greek Tragedy for English Readers_ (1891); _Religion in Greek Literature_ (1898); _On the Nationalisation of the Old English Universities_ (1901); Verse translations of the plays of Aeschylus (1890); Sophocles (1896); _Tragic Drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare_ (1904); _Paralipomena Sophoclea_ (1907). He died on the 25th of October 1908.

CAMPBELL, REGINALD JOHN (1867- ), British Congregationalist divine, son of a United Free Methodist minister of Scottish descent, was born in London, and educated at schools in Bolton and Nottingham, where his father successively removed, and in Belfast, the home of his grandfather. At an early age he taught in the high school at Ashton, Cheshire, and was already married when in 1891 he went to Christchurch, Oxford, where he graduated in 1895 in the honours school of modern history. He had gone to Oxford with the intention of becoming a clergyman in the Church of England, but in spite of the influence of Bishop Gore, then head of the Pusey House, and of Dean Paget (afterwards bishop of Oxford), his Scottish and Irish Nonconformist blood was too strong, and he abandoned the idea in order to take up work in the Congregational ministry. He accepted a call, on leaving Oxford, to the small Congregational church in Union Street, Brighton, and quickly became famous there as a preacher, so much so that on Joseph Parker's death he was chosen as his successor (1903) at the City Temple, London. Here he notably enhanced his popularity as a preacher, and became one of the recognized leaders of Nonconformist opinion. At the end of 1906 he attracted widespread attention by his vigorous propagation of what was called the "New Theology," a restatement of Christian beliefs to harmonize with modern critical views and beliefs, and published a book with this title which gave rise to considerable discussion.

CAMPBELL, THOMAS (1777-1844), Scottish poet, eighth son of Alexander Campbell, was born at Glasgow on the 27th of July 1777. His father, who was a cadet of the family of Campbell of Kirnan, Argyllshire, belonged to a Glasgow firm trading in Virginia, and lost his money in consequence of the American war. Campbell was educated at the grammar school and university of his native town. He won prizes for classics and for verse-writing, and the vacations he spent as a tutor in the western Highlands. His poem "Glenara" and the ballad of "Lord Ullin's Daughter" owe their origin to a visit to Mull. In May 1797 he went to Edinburgh to attend lectures on law. He supported himself by private teaching and by writing, towards which he was helped by Dr Robert Anderson, the editor of the _British Poets_. Among his contemporaries in Edinburgh were Sir Walter Scott, Henry Brougham, Francis Jeffrey, Dr Thomas Brown, John Leyden and James Grahame. To these early days in Edinburgh may be referred "The Wounded Hussar," "The Dirge of Wallace" and the "Epistle to Three Ladies." In 1799, six months after the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge, _The Pleasures of Hope_ was published. It is a rhetorical and didactic poem in the taste of his time, and owed much to the fact that it dealt with topics near to men's hearts, with the French Revolution, the partition of Poland and with negro slavery. Its success was instantaneous, but Campbell was deficient in energy and perseverance and did not follow it up. He went abroad in June 1800 without any very definite aim, visited Klopstock at Hamburg, and made his way to Regensburg, which was taken by the French three days after his arrival. He found refuge in a Scottish monastery. Some of his best lyrics, "Hohenlinden," "Ye Mariners of England" and "The Soldier's Dream," belong to his German tour. He spent the winter in Altona, where he met an Irish exile, Anthony McCann, whose history suggested "The Exile of Erin."[1] He had at that time the intention of writing an epic on Edinburgh to be entitled "The Queen of the North." On the outbreak of war between Denmark and England he hurried home, the "Battle of the Baltic" being drafted soon after. At Edinburgh he was introduced to the first Lord Minto, who took him in the next year to London as occasional secretary. In June 1803 appeared a new edition of the _Pleasures of Hope_, which some lyrics were added.