of human woe and loves and remorse than belong to most modern stories; not lighted, indeed, with humor; not entertaining with anecdote; not embroidered with archæologic knowledge; not rattling with coruscating social fireworks, butsubtle, psychologic, touching the very marrow of our common manhood with a pen both sharp and fine. We remember him, however, most gratefully as the charming biographer of Scott, and as the accomplished translator of certain Spanish ballads into which he has put under flowing English verse-all the clashing of Cordovan castanets, and all the jingle of the war stirrups of the Moors.

We return now to Professor Wilson and propose to tell you how he came by that title. It was after only a few years of work in connection with Blackwood that the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinboro' University—which had been held by Dugald Stewart, and later by Dr. Thomas Brown- fell vacant; and at once the name of Wilson was pressed by his friends for the position. It was not a little odd that a man best known by two delicate poems, and by a bold swashbuckler sort of magazine writing should be put forward

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-in such a staid city as Edinboro', and against such a candidate as Sir William Hamilton - for a Chair which had been held by Dugald Stewart ! But he was so put forward, and successfully; Walter Scott and the Government coming to his aid. Upon this, he went resolutely to study in the new line marked out for him; his rods and guns were, for the time, hung upon the wall; his wrestling frolics and bouts at quarter-staff, and suppers at the Ambrose tavern, were laid under limitations. He put a conscience and a pertinacity into his labor that he had never put to any intellectual work before.* But there were very

* Mrs. Gordon says, quoting from her mother's record : Mr. Wilson is as busy studying as possible; indeed, he has little time before him for his great task; he says it will take one month at least to make out a catalogue of the books he has to read and consult. I am perfectly appalled when I go into the dining-room and see all the folios, quartos, and duodecimos, with which it is literally filled; and the poor culprit himself sitting in the midst, with a beard as long and red as an ancient carrot; for he has not shaved for a fortnight. P. 215, Memoir of John Wilson. We are sorry to see that Mr. Lang, in his recent Life of Lockhart (1897), pp. 135-6-7-8, has put some disturbing cross-coloring (perhaps justly) upon the pleasant portrait which Mrs. Gordon has drawn of Christopher North.

many people in Edinboro' who had been aggrieved by the appointment - largely, too, among those from whom his pupils would come. There was,

naturally, great anxiety among his friends respecting the opening of the first session. An eye-witness says:

"I went prepared to join in a cabal which was formed to put him down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such a collection of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, muttering over their knob-sticks, I never saw. The Professor entered with a bold step, amid profound silence. Every one expected some deprecatory, or propitiatory introduction of himself and his subject, upon which the mass was to decide against him, reason or no reason; but he began with a voice of thunder right into the matter of his lecture, kept up-unflinchingly and unhesitatingly, without a pause— a flow of rhetoric such as Dugald Stewart or Dr. Brown, his predecessors, never delivered in the same place. Not a word - not a murmur escaped his captivated audience; and at the end they gave him a right-down unanimous burst of applause." *

From that time forth, for thirty years or more, John Wilson held the place, and won a popularity

*Mrs. Gordon's Memoir of John Wilson, p. 222. The statement is credited to the author of The Two Cosmos. Middleton, New York, 1863.

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with his annual relays of pupils that was unexampled and unshaken. Better lectures in his province may very possibly have been written by others elsewhere-more close, more compact, more thoroughly thought out, more methodic. His were not patterned after Reid and Stewart; indeed, not patterned at all; not wrought into a burnished system, with the pivots and cranks of the old school-men all in their places. But they made up a series continuous, and lapping each into each, by easy confluence of topic - of discourses on moral duties and on moral relations, with full and brilliant illustrative talk-sometimes in his heated moments taking on the gush and exuberance of a poem; other times bristling with reminiscences; yet full of suggestiveness, and telling as much, I think, on the minds of his eager and receptive students as if the rhetorical brilliancies had all been plucked away, and some master of a duller craft had reduced his words to a stiff, logical paradigm.

From this time forward Professor Wilson lived a quiet, domestic, yet fully occupied life. He wrote enormously for the magazine with which LIBRARY

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his name had become identified; there is scarce a break in his thirty years' teachings in the university; there are sometimes brief interludes of travel; journeys to London; flights to the Highlands; there are breaks in his domestic circle, breaks in the larger circle of his friends; there are twinges of the gout and there come wrinkles of age; but he is braver to resist than most; and for years on years everybody knew that great gaunt figure, with blue eyes and hair flying wild, striding along Edinboro streets.

His poems have indeed almost gone down under the literary horizon of to-day; but one who has known Blackwood of old, can hardly wander anywhere amongst the Highlands of Scotland without pleasant recollections of Christopher North and of the musical bravuras of his speech.

Thomas Campbell.

Another Scotsman, who is worthy of our attention for a little time, is one of a different order; he is stiff, he is prim, he is almost priggish; he is so in his young days and he keeps so to the very last.