convey the wounded in spring-waggons were killed in our sight." In a subsequent account of the event, he adds:—"This formed the most important epoch in my life, in point of impressions; but those impressions at seeing numbers of men strewn dead on the field, or, what was worse, seeing them in the act of dying, are so horrible to my memory that I study to banish them. At times, when I have been fevered and ill, I have awoke from nightmare dreams about these dreadful images."
Amidst these uncertainties produced by the war, the poet's rambles were brief and irregular. He returned to Hamburg, visiting Leipsic and a few other towns in his course northward, and finally settled for the winter at Altona. During his residence near the historic and picturesque banks of the Danube, he had composed, or revised for the press, fourteen poetical productions, of which, however, only four were ultimately published. His well-known delicacy, not to say fastidiousness of taste, will sufficiently account for this reticence. Altona was soon no safe residence, on account of Denmark's secret alliance with France; and the appearance of the British fleet off the Sound, gave sudden warning to our traveller to provide for his safety. He therefore embarked in a small trading vessel bound for Leith ; but in consequence of a chace from a Danish privateer, Campbell was landed at Yarmouth, to which the vessel fled for shelter. A trip to London naturally followed; and for the first time he visited the mighty metropolis, little guessing, as he paced along its apparently interminable streets, that he should afterwards see it expanded into twice its present amount. After a short stay in the capital, where his "Pleasures of Hope" was a passport to the best of London society, he directed his course homeward. Even yet the inconveniences of his visit to the seat of war had not ended. "Returning to Edinburgh by sea," he writes in his memoranda of 1801," a lady, passenger by the same ship, who had read my poems, but was personally unacquainted with me, told me, to my utter astonishment, that I had been arrested in London for high treason, was confined to the Tower, and expected to be executed ! I was equally unconscious of having either deserved or incurred such a sentence." He found, however, on reaching Edinburgh, that this ridiculous report was no matter to be laughed at, for it was already buzzed through the streets of the northern capital, and had reached the ears of his anxious mother, who now resided in the city. It was a wild period of rumour and suspicion, and he found that the fact of his having messed with the French officers at Ratisbon during the armistice, been introduced to the gallant Moreau, and sailed as fellow-passenger with an Irishman of the name of Donovan, had been amplified into a plot concerted between himself, Moreau, and the Irish at Hamburg, to land a French army in Ireland. He waited upon Mr. Clerk, the sheriff of Edinburgh, to refute this report, and testify his loyalty at head-quarters; but here he found, to his astonishment, that the sheriff believed in his guilt, and that a warrant was issued for his apprehension. This was intolerable, and Campbell could not help exclaiming, "Do I live to hear a sensible man like you, talking about a boy like me conspiring against the British empire ?" He offered himself for a strict examination previous to being sent to prison, and the inquisition was held amidst an array of clerks ready to note down his answers. A box of letters and papers which he had left at Yarmouth to be forwarded to Edinburgh, but which had been seized at Leith, was at the same time brought forward, opened, and carefully examined. But the contents soon put all suspicion to the rout: nothing in the whole col-
