of his youth, in his sedate manhood, in his hoary age, more beautiful than youth, for then he is crowned with the wisdom of his simple experience of the trials and vanity of life, and of the feeling that he draws near to eternity. It is thus that he bids you mark the fair young maiden; the young mother tossing her laughing infant in the open air; the aged woman basking by her door in the tranquillity of decline. It is thus that he fills you with the noblest sympathies, the purest human feelings; and then suddenly astonishes you with some feat of leaping, running, or wrestling; and as suddenly is gone with rod in hand, following the course of a mountain stream, eagerly intent on trout or salmon. In 1820, three years after the establishment of Blackwood's Magazine, the chair of Moral Philosophy became vacant by the death of Dr. Thomas Brown. Wilson became a candidate for the post. Of course the circumstance took the public by surprise. Brilliant as were the evidences of genius already thrown out by him, they were evidences such as are not looked for in a grave teacher of morals. His style was strange, wild, discursive; his topics were often equally startling and eccentric; and those qualities were but the reflex of his life, as the story of it had run far and wide. But those who knew him well were confident that there lay in him "a capability of the profoundest seriousness, and of the most delicate sympathies with every youthful impulse; which, if once permanently tied down to regular exercise, would find its most appropriate sphere of action supplied, without sacrifice of literary retirement; and the result justified their impressions." Notwithstanding violent opposition from the Town Council patronage, he was elected. It is pleasant to know that in this contest he was warmly supported by Sir Walter Scott. Ten years before, Wilson had married a young English lady of great beauty, accomplishment, and refined taste, who was said to have brought him nearly 10,0007. If we add this to his ample patrimony, we are at a loss to imagine him at this crisis in considerable need of the emoluments of his new office; yet such is said to have been the fact. True, he was not a man to live parsimoniously. He had two houses; one in Edinburgh, one in Westmoreland. He had now five children, two sons and three daughters; and his tastes, his boatings, fishings, shootings, ramblings, and social festivities, carried on with the recklessness of a poet, and the habits of a gentleman, no doubt demanded a tolerably capacious purse. We behold him now established in that character and those offices which he continued to exercise and make famous through his life. In the pages of Blackwood he continued to amuse, instruct, and astonish the world at large; in the professional chair, through the long period of thirty-two years, that is, from 1820 to 1852, in the words of one of his own students, he was "moulding throughout that long occupancy, the after character of as many successive bands of young men for every department of life,--at once the most admired, the most beloved, the most revered of teachers. He was listened to as one speaking with authority, the same mysterious sage who to the world was known as Christopher North; dignifying and adorning this place, side by side with, perhaps, the two greatest professors, in their own respective spheres, save him, who ever distinguished any University, Chalmers and Sir William Hamilton." For the greatest portion of Wilson's life from this period, we see him then varying his existence by his spring retreat to Elleray, his summer wandering by the Tweedside, his autumn resort to Highland moors. But the eloquent and enthusiastic student, whom I have so often quoted, gives us deeper insight into his nature and habits. "It was strange," he says, "that constant love for the plaintive and melancholy, for images of death, with its peace and silence,-in a man so full of intense joy in his existence and exuberant health, or in the gleeful spirit of humour that became at times riotous! For no one went to more funerals than Wilson; whether it were the grave of some distinguished public man, or that of some obscure student from his class." And he adds, "It is yet recorded only in the memories of thousands of students, passing each year to all sorts of occupations and places, but chiefly to the parish manses, kirks and rustic baptisms, marriages, household visitations, death-beds of Scotland, how his example as well his teachings prepared them for these duties. Nor," says he very justly, "could wisdom itself have sought a nobler, a more elevating and solemnizing office, than to rouse in the breasts of those youths, fresh from classic mythology and strict logic, their first serious considerations as to the nature of duty, the workings of the passions, the laws of sentiment, and that yet undefined, unnoticed faculty, imagination: above all, to propound that great problem of the soul's destiny, with which coming theology had soon to deal. To these, for the first time, there rose up, as it were, the very statue of eloquence animated, and mused, and moved, and uttered itself daily, yearly, before them; a prevailing form they could never forget, an influence they could never lose, for it blended itself with all the associations of the land and people they were to make their care." We should not present an adequate image of this great and noblehearted man, did we not take a view of him as he, in his best years, presented himself, both at the public meeting and in his own college chair. We may take, as an example of the first, Lockhart's mention of his walking fifty miles to the Burns' dinner, to propose the health of the Shepherd, and the impression he produced there. "The effect of his features was more eloquent, both in its gravity and its levity, than almost any other countenance that I am acquainted with. In a convivial meeting... the beauty to which men are most alive in any piece of eloquence, is that which depends on its being impregnated and instinct with feeling. Of this beauty no eloquence can be more full than that of John Wilson. His declamation is often loose and irregular to an extent that is not quite worthy of a man of his fine education and masculine powers; but all is redeemed, and more than redeemed, by his rich abundance of quick, generous, and ex pansive feeling. The flashing brightness, and now and then, the still more expressive dimness of his eye,-and the tremulous music of a voice that is equally at home in the highest and the lowest notes,and the attitude, bent forward with an earnestness to which the graces could make no valuable addition,-altogether compose an index which they that run may read,- -a rod of communication to whose electricity no heart is barred." What a pity that Lockhart, who could see and acknowledge this generous character, was utterly destitute of it himself! Whilst Wilson, in his criticisms in Blackwood, was continually overleaping all the boundaries of party, creed, and custom, and doing glorious justice to those of opposite views; Lockhart, with the vast opportunities opened to him by the Quarterly Review, went on, cold, selfish, and cynical, and has left no memory in the hearts of those who were then struggling for a well-deserved fame, of a generous hand extended, a word for the poor and the obscure man of genius nobly spoken, a great justice done to the politically opposed, which would have done more honour to the giver than the receiver. Wilson was like a superb fruit-tree, always full of flowers or of fruit, and ready to shower them down on all deservers; Lockhart, like a upas, full of vigour, but a vigour deadly, poisonous, or at best barren. But let us take one more view of the warm-hearted Professor, as he stood before his admiring class. It is from the pen of one of his most distinguished gold-medal students, assuming the name of Juniper Agate in the Edinburgh Guardian :— "His students could never think of him as growing old, for he always manifested in the discharge of his College duties the ardour and enthusiasm of youth, and retained to the last that fine freshness of feeling which gives bloom and beauty to mental health. The lion-like energy of his nature, moreover, broke through all official restraint; and if you went to hear the Professor, you found, instead of the mere Professor, the poet, the philosopher, or the genial and large-hearted literary man. In fact, to one so thoroughly vital, mere routine-work was impossible; and though in his public teaching he of course pursued a plan, and always had some pages of manuscript before him, yet there were few lectures into which something new was not introduced, while many were lighted by flashes of extempore eloquence, finer in thought and feeling than anything contained in the written manuscripts-finer, indeed, probably than anything that could be written. The working of the same vital nature was manifested in his intercourse with his students. In general, of course, the members of the class saw but little of the Professor in private; but when they had occasion to consult him, his face was always beaming with kindness, and his words, spoken in the simplest manner, were felt to be the words of a friend-often apt words of counsel and encouragement. In reading the class exercises, indeed, he unconsciously saw in the essay the writer; and being wise in the maladies to which students are liable, the logical, rhetorical, and metaphysical maladies, which are the measles and hooping-cough of a College course, he understood the mental phase through which he was passing, and the kind of criticism which he most needed. I remember that this was strikingly illustrated on a day that is now especially remembered, as it proved to be the last on which he ever addressed his class. On this day, for nearly two hours, he kept a crowded class-room intensely interested by an address on their essays and writings, partly critical, partly humorous, but full of life and spirit, and thoroughly delightful throughout. It abounded with touches of deep and subtle criticism, obviously the result rather of direct insight than of reflection; was brightened by the play of a lively fancy, full of humour: here and there, too, sparkling with wit, and surprising us more than once by a sketch, half descriptive, half dramatic, of some eccentric or unhappy essayist; displaying throughout, however, such hearty sympathy with the students and their work, that none could feel offended or hurt, even those who were most severely criticised cheerfully joining in the irresistible laugh against themselves. Altogether, I never heard so much pure wit, humour, and criticism blended together in an extempore address, for such it was. Thus, up to the last day of his appearance amongst them, Professor Wilson was still vigorous and young. I hear it remarked in a tone of regret, how comparatively little he accomplished: but when his critical essays are collected-those on the Greek poets, on Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, Dryden, Shakspeare, and others-it will, I am confident, appear that few have done so much or so well; none, perhaps, have exercised a more wide and healthful influence on criticism in general." In confirmation of this opinion, I cannot resist giving a striking proof of its truth from my own experience. Before I ever saw Professor Wilson, or beheld him genially presiding at a dinner given to Campbell, or in his own happy domestic circle, at a time when a section of the London press was from month to month loading me with the most gratuitous and groundless abuse; when one review was sending me to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage with Richard Carlyle; and Mr. Jerdan, then great in the Literary Gazette, was giving columns of the most absurd statements, that I was a bad husband, a bad father, bad in every relation of life, a haunter of low pothouses,places I never entered, being chiefly a drinker of water,-in fact, inost libellous attacks, unsupported by an atom of truth, I was much astonished by coming upon a grand resentment of these villanies in the Tory Blackwood. "We have not this vile slanderer here," said Wilson, "or we would inflict summary chastisement. Does he say Mr. Howitt is no Christian? We say that Mr. Howitt is a Christian in his way, and we are a Christian in ours. If we had the base calumniator, we would lay him across a bench, and skelp him till he roared; but as we have him not, we take his loathsome pages, and fling them into the fire." What a magnificent contrast to the usual pettiness of party criticism! What an example to critics of all classes and times! and which, we cannot help thinking, has had a wonderful effect in producing the nobler and more broadly liberal tone of the criticism of the present day. The prose fictions of Wilson-his Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, the Forresters, and Trials of Margaret Lindsay-were of the true Scottish stamp. They depicted the life of the people of Scotland with the hand of one who had seen it, and sympathised with it. They had all the tenderness and the exuberant fancy of Wilson, overflowing with a devout, pure, and loving spirit, and became and remain a portion of the literature of the nation, which it would not readily consent to lose. In the poetry of Wilson we are not to look for a great and wellsustained whole. He was altogether too impulsive, too excursive in his poetry, as in his prose. He was, moreover, too fond of revelling in scenes which delighted his imagination in its more joyous or lugubrious moods, but where he could not bear with him sufficiently the sympathies of his readers. His Isle of Palms, published in 1812, is of the former character; his City of the Plague, a dramatic poem, published in 1816, was of the latter. But in both of these, and in the minor poems accompanying them, there are abundance of passages instinct with such deep and tender feeling, such exquisite fancy, such genuine pathos, as are excelled by no other poet, living or dead. In The Angler's Tent, published with the Isle of Palms, we have Christopher North, not in his "shooting jacket," but in his poetic garb, luxuriating in all the glories, beauties, fragrances of his beloved mountain scenes and streams. In the City of the Plague, the character of Magdalene, who goes about giving all the aid and solace that she can to the sufferers, is one of the finest and most lovely conceptions of the human imagination. She is a stranger in the city from the Lake country, unknown and unhappy, yet is justly regarded with wonder as an angel walking beneficently the haunts of death. "Woman. It is the lovely lady no one knows, Who walks through lonesome places day and night, To the dying comfort; to the dead a grave! I am a hardened sinner,-yet my heart Man. She is indeed most beautiful! O misery Of that eternal ocean! Can it be? Can a smile, a word,-destroy an atheist's creed ?" The tone of melancholy yet faith-sustained sentiment in this sublime heroine has something inconceivably affecting in it : "Magdalene. Whate'er my doom, It cannot be unhappy. God hath given me Though doubtless human fears would cross my soul, Calmly even now ;-yet if it be ordained That I return unto my native valley, And live with Frankfort there, why should I fear To say I might be happy,-happier far Than I deserve to be? Sweet Rydal Lake! Am I again to visit thee? to hear Thy glad waves murmuring all around my soul?' |