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.

PROFESSOR WILSON.

51

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

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.

A verse or two from one of the little poems he

wrote will bring him to your memory:

"On Linden when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow,
Of Iser, rolling rapidly."

And again :

Then shook the hills with thunder riven,
Then rushed the steed to battle driven,
And louder than the bolts of heaven,
Far flashed the red artillery."

If Thomas Campbell * had never written anything more than that page-long story of the "Battle of Hohenlinden," his name would have gone into all the anthologies, and his verse into all those school-books where boys for seventy years now have pounded at his martial metre in furies of declamation. And yet this bit of martial verse, so full of the breath of battle, was, at the date of its writing, rejected by the editor of a small provin

*Thomas Campbell, b. 1777; d. 1844. The Pleasures of Hope, 1799; Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809; Life of Petrarch, 1841; Dr. Beattie's Life, 1850.

cial journal in Scotland as not coming up to the

true poetic standard !*

I have spoken of Campbell as a Scotsman ; though after only a short stay in Scotland-following his university career at Glasgow - and a starveling tour upon the Continent (out of which flashed "Hohenlinden")- he went to London; and there or thereabout spent the greater part of the residue of a long life. He had affiliations of a certain sort with America, out of which may possibly have grown his Gertrude of Wyoming; his father was for much time a merchant in Falmouth, Virginia, about 1770; being however a strong loyalist, he returned in 1776. A brother and an uncle of the poet became established in this country, and an American Campbell of this stock was connected by marriage with the family of Patrick Henry.

The first coup by which Campbell won his literary spurs, was a bright, polished poem-with its couplets all in martinet-like order-called the Pleasures of Hope. We all know it, if for noth

* Maclise Portrait Gallery, London, 1883 (which cites in confirmation, Notes and Queries, December 13, 1862).