Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/405

JOHN WILSON 389 with an express command that no one was to disturb him, and he never stirred from his writing-table until perhaps the greater part of a ' Noctes ' was written." After a frugal dinner at nine (boiled fowl, potatoes, and glass of water), he wrote on again till midnight ; and so for the next day or two when necessary. " I do not exaggerate his power of speed, when I say he wrote more in a few hours than most able writers do in a few days ; examples of it I have often seen in the very manuscript before him, which, disposed on the table, was soon transferred to the more roomy space on the floor at his feet, where it lay ' thick as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa,' only to be piled up again quickly as before." In 1837, after twenty-six years of most happy marriage, he lost his wife. Their five children were all grown up. The three daughters afterwards married : Margaret, the eldest, her cousin, Professor J. F. Ferrier; Mary, Mr. J. T. Gordon, sheriff of Midlothian ; Jane Emily, Professor Aytoun — of whose bashful wooing, and Wilson's presentation of the ladylove " with the author's compliments " (pinned to her back), her sister in the "Memoir" tells us not. In 1840 he was attacked by paralysis of the right hand, which disabled him for nearly a year. He took a zealous part in the Burns festival at Ayr, 6th August, 1844 ; having written the essay for the " Land of Burns," brought out by Messrs. Blackie, of Glasgow. When the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution was established, 1847, he was elected the first president; and was annually re-elected during his life. In the winter of 1850, in his sixty-sixth year, his health was evidently breaking, and he could scarcely manage to