Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/400

384 CRITICAL STUDIES end of 1 81 9, Wilson, having then five young children, removed with his family from his mother's house to 20 Ann Street, then quite out of town in the suburb of Stockbridge. In April 1820, the chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh became vacant by the death of Dr. Thomas Brown. The two chief competitors for the post were Wilson and Sir William Hamilton, afterwards Professor of Logic and Metaphysics. The contest was exceedingly furious, being fought out by their partisans on purely political grounds ; Government influence and Tories for Wilson, Whigs (the Whigs, now effete, were very much alive then) for Hamilton; but the intimate personal friendship of the two rivals was not broken or interrupted. " The patronage lay with the Town Council, whose members had to be canvassed per- sonally, like the voters in a rotten borough." Wilson was elected by twenty-one votes out of thirty, and immediately was hard at work reading-up and pre- paring his first course of lectures, and asking counsel from competent friends. In his first lecture he triumphed over all ill-will ; and thenceforward to his death rejoiced in the title of "The Professor," actually filling the chair for thirty years, and only resigning when quite worn out and broken down. And as he grew more and more prominently the Professor, one of the best-known men in Edinburgh, he grew also more and more prominently Christopher North, one of the best known writers in Britain. At the University he was the idol of his class, wielding an enormous influence over many successive student- generations, all in their plastic youth. John Hill Burton, the historian of Scotland and delightful Book