Autograph Manuscript, by the Scottish romantic poet Thomas Campbell, of his essay 'Remarks on the Geography of the Ancients'.

32pp, 8vo. In very good condition, on lightly-aged laid Whatman paper with watermarked date 1830. Ruled in pencil by Campbell, and written out in his attractive calligraphic hand. With occasional emendations, and with an entire revision of the twentieth page made by overlaying another leaf of paper over the top of the original with wafers in each corner. (The two versions can be separated from one another with ease.) Campbell's essay was the leading article in the first issue of 'The Metropolitan', published in London by James Cochrane and Co. Campbell possessed a high reputation as a scholar. As his entry in the Oxord DNB states, he was 'tempted by the possibility in 1804 of a professorial chair at the University of Vilna, then under Russian rule. But he prudently decided that his interest in the regeneration of Poland would make such a post unacceptably perilous. [...] In 1812 Campbell found a new source of income as a result of the expanding demand for public lectures, and gave a successful series at the Royal Institution on poetry. Later he was received enthusiastically in Liverpool and Birmingham, and Scott suggested he should allow himself to be offered a chair at Edinburgh University.'