monthly nurse, and as overflowing and brazen as

any newspaper you may name.

But here and there, even amid his dreariest

pages, you see, quivering some gleams of his old strange power - a thrust of keen thought that bewilders you by its penetration - a glowing fancy that translates one to wondrous heights of poetic vision; and oftener yet, and over and over, shows that mastery of the finesse of language by which he commands the most attenuated reaches of his thought, and whips them into place with a snap and a sting.

Yet, when all is said, I think we must count the best that he wrote only amongst the curiosities of literature, rather than with the manna that fell for fainting souls in the wilderness.

De Quincey died in Edinburgh, in 1859, aged seventy-four.

IN

CHAPTER II.

our last chapter we took a breezy morning

walk amid the Lake scenery of Englandmore particularly that portion of it which lies between the old homes of Wordsworth and of Southey; we found it a thirteen-mile stretch of road, coiling along narrow meadows and over gray heights- beside mountains and mountain tarns - with Helvellyn lifting mid-way and Skiddaw towering at the end. We had our talk of Dr. Southey-so brave at his work-so generous in his home charities-so stiff in his Churchism and latter-day Toryism - with a very keen eye for beauty; yet writing poems-stately and masterful-which long ago went to the topshelves, and stay there.

We had our rough and ready interviews with that first of "War Correspondents" - Henry

Crabb Robinson-who knew all the prominent men of this epoch, and has given us such entertaining chit-chat about them, as we all listen to, and straightway forget. Afterwards we had a look at that strange, intellectual, disorderly creature De Quincey — he living a long while in the Lake Country-and in his more inspired moments seeming to carry us by his swift words, into that mystical region lying beyond the borders of what we know and see. He swayed men; but he rarely taught them, or fed them.

Christopher North.

We still linger about those charmingest of country places; and by a wooden gateway-adjoining the approach to Windermere Hotel enter upon the "Elleray woods," amid which lived eighty years ago that stalwart friend of De Quincey's, whose acquaintance he made among the Lakes, and who, like himself, was a devoted admirer of Wordsworth. Indeed, I think it was at the home of the latter that De Quincey first encountered the tall, lusty John Wilson - brimful of enthusiasm and all country ardors; brimful,

*

JOHN WILSON.

41

too, of gush, and all poetic undulations of speech. He was a native of Paisley - his father having been a rich manufacturer there and had come to

spend his abundant enthusiasms and his equally abundant moneys between Wordsworth and the mountains and Windermere. He has his fleet of yachts and barges upon the lake; he knows every pool where any trout lurk - every height that gives far-off views. He is a pugilist, a swimmer, an oarsman-making the hills echo with his jollity, and dashing off through the springy heather with that slight, seemingly frail De Quincey in his wake-who only reaches to his shoulder, but who is all compact of nerve and muscle. For Greek they are fairly mated, both by love and learning; and they can and do chant together the choral songs of heathen tragedies.

This yellow-haired, blue-eyed giant, John Wil

* John Wilson, b. 1785; d. 1854; better known as Christopher North, his pseudonym in Blackwood. The Isle of Palms, 1811; The City of the Plague, 1816; Recreations of Christopher North, 1842. In 1851 a civil-list pension of £300 was conferred upon him. His younger brother James Wilson was a well-known naturalist, and author of The Rod and the Gun.

son-not so well-known now as he was sixty years ago we collegians greatly admired in that far-off day. He had written the Isle of Palms, and was responsible for much of the wit and dash and merriment which sparkled over the early pages of Blackwood's Magazine-in the chapters of the Noctes Ambrosiana and in many a paper besides : -he had his first university training at Glasgow ; had a brief love-episode there also, which makes a prettily coy appearance on the pleasant pages of the biography of Wilson which a daughter (Mrs. Gordon) has compiled. After Glasgow came Oxford; and a characteristic bit of his later writing, which I cite, will show you how Oxford impressed him :

"Having bidden farewell to our sweet native Scotland, and kissed ere we parted, the grass and the flowers with a show of filial tears — having bidden farewell to all her glens, now a-glimmer in the blended light of imagination and memory, with their cairns and kirks, their low-chimneyed huts, and their high-turreted halls, their free-flowing rivers, and lochs dashing like seas-we were all at once buried not in the Cimmerian gloom, but the Cerulean glitter of Oxford's Ancient Academic groves. The genius of the place fell upon us. Yes! we hear now, in the renewed delight of the awe of our youthful spirit, the pealing organ in that Chapel called