Perhaps it was because he suspected a certain levity and thinness in his
genius that Campion was so contemptuous of his English verse. His songs he
dismissed as "superfluous blossoms of his deeper studies." It is as though
he thought, like Bacon, that anything written for immortality should be
written in Latin. Bacon, it may be remembered, translated his essays into
Latin for fear they might perish in so modern and barbarous a tongue as
English. Campion was equally inclined to despise his own language in
comparison with that of the Greeks and Romans. His main quarrel with it
arose, however, from the obstinacy with which English poets clung to "the
childish titillation of rhyming." "Bring before me now," he wrote, "any
the most self-loved rhymer, and let me see if without blushing he be able
to read his lame, halting rhymes." There are few more startling paradoxes
in literature than that it should have been this hater of rhymes who did
more than any other writer to bring the art of rhyme to perfection in the
English language. The bent of his intellect was classical, as we see in
his astonishing _Observations on the Art of English Poesy_, in which he
sets out to demonstrate "the unaptness of rhyme in poesy." The bent of his
genius, on the other hand, was romantic, as was shown when, desiring to
provide certain airs with words, he turned out--that seems, in the
circumstances, to be the proper word--"after the fashion of the time,
ear-pleasing rhymes without art." His songs can hardly be called
"pot-boilers," but they were equally the children of chance. They were
accidents, not fulfilments of desire. Luckily, Campion, writing them with
music in his head, made his words themselves creatures of music. "In these
English airs," he wrote in one of his prefaces, "I have chiefly aimed to
couple my words and notes lovingly together." It would be impossible to
improve on this as a description of his achievement in rhyme. Only one of
his good poems, "Rosecheek'd Laura," is to be found among those which he
wrote according to his pseudo-classical theory. All the rest are among