Thomas Campbell (1733–1795) was an Irish Protestant clergyman, best known as a travel writer and for his accounts of the circle of Samuel Johnson.
[1] In 1777 he published (anonymously in London)[2] A Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland in a series of letters to John Watkinson, M.D.
[1] In 1789 Campbell published ‘Strictures on the Ecclesiastical and Literary History of Ireland till the Introduction of the Roman Ritual, and the Establishment of Papal Supremacy by Henry II.’ To this was added a ‘Sketch of the Constitution and Government of Ireland down to 1783.’ The book is controversial in tone, and is directed against O'Conor, Colonel Vallancey, and other antiquaries.
He considered the book as a fragment of a large work he meditated, and for which he obtained help from Edmund Burke, whom he visited at Beaconsfield.
Burke, he says, lent him four volumes of manuscripts, and advised him to be ‘as brief as possible upon everything antecedent to Henry II.’[1] Campbell also wrote a portion of the memoir of Goldsmith which appeared in Bishop Thomas Percy's edition of the poet published in 1801.
It was discovered behind an old press in the offices of the supreme court at Sydney, New South Wales, having been carried to Australia by a nephew at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
A popular preacher himself, Campbell went to hear Dr. William Dodd and other pulpit orators of the day: his remarks are uncomplimentary.