was intermittent, and, with some exceptions, not up to the level of his earlier years. Late in 1850 his health showed definite signs of breaking up; and in the next year he resigned his professorship, and a Civil List pension of £300 a year was conferred on him. He died at Edinburgh on the 3rd of April 1854.
Only a very small part of Wilson's extensive work was published in a collected and generally accessible form during his lifetime, the chief and almost sole exceptions being the two volumes of poems referred to, the Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, and the Recreations of Christopher North (1842), a selection from his magazine articles. These volumes, with a selected edition of the Noctes Ambrosianae in four volumes, and of further essays, critical and imaginative, also in four volumes, were collected and reissued uniformly after his death by his son-in-law, Professor J. F. Ferrier. The collection is very far from exhaustive; and, though it undoubtedly contains most of his best work and comparatively little that is not good, it has been complained, with some justice, that the characteristic, if rather immature, productions of his first eight years on Blackwood are almost entirely omitted, that the Noctes are given but in part, if in their best part, and that at least three long, important and interesting series of papers, less desultory than is his wont, on “Spenser,” on “British Critics” and the set called “Dies Boreales,” have been left out altogether. Wilson's characteristics are, however, uniform enough, and the standard edition exhibits them sufficiently, if not exhaustively. His poems may be dismissed at once as little more than interesting. They would probably not have been written at all if he had not been a young man in the time of the full flood of the Lake school influence. His prose tales have in some estimates stood higher, but will hardly survive the tests of universal criticism. It is as an essayist and critic of the most abounding geniality, if not genius, of great acuteness, of extraordinary eloquence and of a fervid and manifold sympathy, in which he has hardly an equal, that Christopher North will live. His defects lay in the directions of measure and of taste properly so called, that is to say, of the modification of capricious likes and dislikes by reason and principle. He is constantly exaggerated, boisterous, wanting in refinement. But these are the almost necessary defects of his qualities of enthusiasm, eloquence and generous feeling. The well-known adaptation of phrase in which he did not recant but made up for numerous earlier attacks on Leigh Hunt, “the Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live for ever,” shows him as a writer at his very best, but not without a little characteristic touch of grandiosity and emphasis. As a literary critic, as a sportsman, as a lover of nature and as a convivial humorist, he is not to be shown at equal advantage in miniature; but almost any volume of his miscellaneous works will exhibit him at full length in one of these capacities, if not in all.
See Christopher North, by Mrs Mary Gordon, his daughter (1862); and Mrs Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House; William Blackwood and his Sons (1897).
WILSON, JAMES HARRISON (1837-), American cavalry soldier, was born at Shawneetown, Illinois, in 1837 and entered West Point military academy in 1855, graduating in 1860. He was appointed to the engineer branch of the United States army, served in the Port Royal and Fort Pulaski operations, being breveted major for his gallant conduct at Pulaski, was on M'Clellan's staff at Antietam as a lieutenant-colonel in 1862, and as a topographical engineer on the headquarters staff of the Army of the Tennessee during the Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns. His services in the intricate operations before Vicksburg were rewarded by promotion to brigadier-general U.S.V. In 1864 he was appointed to command a division in Sheridan's cavalry corps, and played a distinguished part in the cavalry operations of the 4th to 6th of May during the battle of the Wilderness (for which he was breveted colonel U.S.A.), the so-called Richmond Raid, the operations on the Totopotomoy, &c. Later in 1864 he commanded the cavalry of Thomas's army in Tennessee. During the closing operations of the war he led a cavalry expedition on a grand scale through the South-Western states, occupying Selma, Montgomery and Macon, and capturing at different times nearly 7000 prisoners, including President Davis. He was promoted major-general of volunteers and breveted major-general U.S.A. shortly before the end of the war. Returning to duty in the regular army as a lieutenant-colonel of infantry for some years, he resigned in 1870 and engaged in engineering and railway construction. In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, he was appointed a major-general in the new volunteer army, and took part in the operations in Porto Rico. He served in the China expedition of 1900 as a brigadier-general and in 1901 was placed on the retired list as a brigadier-general U.S.A.
WILSON, RICHARD (1714-1782), English landscape painter, was born at Penegoes, Montgomeryshire, where his father was a clergyman, on the 1st of August 1714. His early taste for art was observed by a relative of his mother, Sir George Wynne, who in 1729 sent him to London to study under Thomas Wright, a little-known portrait painter of the time, by whom he was instructed for six years. He then started on his own account, and was soon in a good practice. Among his commissions was a full-length of the prince of Wales and the duke of York, painted for their tutor, the bishop of Norwich. Examples of his portraits may be studied in Greenwich Hospital, in the Garrick Club, and in various private collections. In 1749 Wilson visited Italy, where he spent six years. He had previously executed some landscapes, but it was now that the advice of Zuccarelli and Joseph Vernet decided him to adopt this department of art exclusively. He studied Claude and Poussin, but retained his own individuality, and produced some admirable views of Rome and the Campagna. In 1755 he returned to England, and became one of the first of English landscape painters. “Niobe,” one of his most powerful works, was exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1760. On the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768 he was appointed one of the original members, and he was a regular contributor to its exhibitions till 1780. He frequently executed replicas of his more important subjects, repeating some of them several times; in the figures which he introduced in his landscapes he was occasionally assisted by Mortimer and Hayman. During his lifetime his landscapes were never widely popular; his temper was consequently embittered by neglect, and so impoverished was he that he was obliged to seclude himself in an obscure, half-furnished room in Tottenham Court Road, London. In 1776, however, he obtained the post of librarian to the Academy; and by the death of a brother he acquired a small property near Llanferras, Denbighshire, to which he retired to spend his last days, and where he died suddenly in May 1782. After his death his fame increased, and in 1814 about seventy of his works were exhibited in the British Institution. The National Gallery, London, contains nine of his landscapes.
The works of Wilson are skilled and learned compositions rather than direct transcripts from nature. His landscapes are treated with great breadth, and with a power of generalization which occasionally led to a disregard of detail. They are full of classical feeling and poetic sentiment; they possess noble qualities of colour, and of delicate silvern tone; and their handling is vigorous and easy, the work of a painter who was thoroughly master of his materials.
See Studies and Designs by Richard Wilson, done at Rome in the year 1752 (Oxford, 1811); T. Wright, Some Account of the Life of Richard Wilson (London, 1824); Thomas Hastings, Etchings from the Works of Richard Wilson, with some Memoirs of his Life (London, 1825). Many of Wilson's best works were reproduced by Woollett and other engravers of the time.
WILSON, ROBERT (d. 1600), English actor and playwright, was a comedian in the earl of Leicester's company, beginning with its establishment in 1574, and from 1583 to 1588 in the Queen's and afterwards in Lord Strange's company. He wrote several morality plays. In his Three Ladies of London (1584) he has the episode of the attempt of the Jew to recover his debt, afterwards adapted by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Another Robert Wilson (1579-1610), probably his son, was one of Henslowe's dramatic hack-writers.
WILSON, SIR ROBERT THOMAS (1777-1849), British general, was a son of the painter Benjamin Wilson (1721-1788), and obtained a commission in the 15th light dragoons in 1794, taking part in the famous charge at Villers-en-Cauchies. He was one of eight officers who received the emperor's commemoration medal (of which only nine were struck), the order of Maria Theresa and the dignity of Freiherr of the Empire. In the campaigns of Tourcoing and Tournay and in the retreat through Holland, Wilson repeatedly distinguished himself. In 1796 he became captain by purchase, in 1798 he served as a
