Place, Edinburgh, his home since 1826, he had a paralytic stroke, which terminated his life two days afterwards. He was buried in the Dean cemetery with an imposing public funeral on 7 April, and a statue of him by John Steell was erected in Princes Street in 1865. Wilson left two sons, John and Blair, one a clergyman of the church of England, the other for a time secretary to the university of Edinburgh. He had three daughters: Margaret Anne, married to Professor James Frederick Ferrier [q. v.]; Mary, his biographer, married to Mr. J. T. Gordon, sheriff of Midlothian; and Jane Emily, married to William Edmonstoune Aytoun [q. v.]
Wilson was a man of one piece. His personal and literary characters were the same. The chief characteristic of both is a marvellously rich endowment of fine qualities, marred by want of restraining judgment and symmetrical proportion. As a man he was the soul of generosity and magnanimity, but exaggerated in everything, and by recklessness and wilfulness was frequently unjust where he intended to be the reverse. As an author he must have attained high distinction if his keen perception of and intense delight in natural and moral beauty had been accompanied by any recognition of the value of literary form. In the ‘Noctes’ this is in some measure enforced upon him by the absolute necessity of maintaining consistency and propriety among his dramatis personæ. Elsewhere the perpetual frenzy of rapture, although perfectly genuine with him, becomes wearisome. His style is undoubtedly colloquial and sometimes meretricious. Nassau Senior thought so badly of both ‘his dulcia as well as his tristia vitia’ that ‘he would almost as soon try to read Carlyle or Coleridge.’ Such a verdict has no terrors now. Yet it is true that there are few writers of Wilson's calibre who discourse at such length, and from whom so little can be carried away. His descriptions both in prose and verse read like improvisations, leaving behind a general sense of beauty and splendour, but few definite impressions. He will live nevertheless by his often imitated but never rivalled ‘Noctes,’ and should ever be held in honour for the manliness and generosity of his character as an author. The same qualities characterised the mass of his criticism, although at times some insuperable prejudice or freak of perversity intervened, as when in his old age he recanted his former sentiments respecting Wordsworth in an essay which fortunately never saw the light. Such were aberrations of judgment: he was entirely free from malice or vindictiveness, and never cherished resentment. His review of his former adversary Macaulay's ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’ affected Macaulay ‘as generous conduct affects men not ungenerous.’ Long before his death he was entirely reconciled to Jeffrey, and he wrote in 1834 of his bygone enmity with Leigh Hunt, ‘The animosities die, but the humanities live for ever.’ His own function, whether as a painter of natural or an expositor of literary beauty, may be truly and tersely summed up in another dictum, that it was to teach men to admire.
Portraits of Wilson, painted by Raeburn and Watson Gordon, are in the National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, and in the National Portrait Gallery, London, respectively; an engraving of the latter is prefixed to ‘Professor Wilson: a Memorial and a Sketch’ [by George Cupples], Edinburgh, 1854. A fine engraving of a portrait taken at the age of sixty is prefixed to Mrs. Gordon's biography of her father. Thomas Duncan painted ‘Christopher in his Sporting Jacket’ (engraved by Armytage for the collected works), and a sketch from a statue by Macdonald, with a caricatured background, appeared in the Maclise Gallery in ‘Fraser's Magazine.’
Wilson's works were collected in twelve volumes by his son-in-law, Professor Ferrier, 1855–8. Four volumes are occupied by the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ;’ four by ‘Essays, Critical and Imaginative;’ two by ‘The Recreations of Christopher North,’ one by the poems, and one by the tales. The collection is not complete, the earlier numbers of the ‘Noctes’ being omitted, as well as the papers on Spenser, ‘Dies Boreales,’ and other matter which but for space might well have been reprinted. A complete and elaborate edition of the ‘Noctes’ was published at New York by Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie (in five volumes with an excellent index) and revised in 1866.
[Christopher North: a Memoir of John Wilson by his Daughter, Mrs. Gordon, 1862; Mrs. Oliphant's Annals of the Publishing House of Blackwood, William Blackwood and his Sons, 1897; Cupples's Professor Wilson, a Memorial and Estimate by one of his Students, 1854; Blackwood's Mag. May and December 1854; Athenæum, April 1854 and 8 July 1876 (a brilliant but severe estimate of the ‘Noctes,’ which are pronounced to be ‘dying of dropsy’); Quarterly Review, vol. cxiii.; Professor Ferrier's prefaces in Wilson's Works; Lang's Life of John Gibson Lockhart, 1897; De Quincey's Portrait Gallery and Autobiographic Sketches; Gillies's Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, 1851; Douglas's The ‘Blackwood’ Group, 1897; Selections from the Correspondence of Macvey Napier; Lock-
