Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/628

592 WILSON income, no father or guardian to control him, no property requiring management, and apparently was not under the influence of the etiquette which in similar circumstances generally makes it necessary for a young man to adopt some profession, if only in name. His profession was an estate on Windermere called Elleray, and ever since imperishably connected with his name. Here he built, boated^ wrestled, shot, fished, walked (he was always an astonishing pedes trian), and otherwise diverted himself for four years, besides composing or collecting from previous compositions a con siderable volume of poems. But Wilson was too genuine a man to be happy without a wife, and in 1810 the place of " Margaret" was taken by Jane Penny, a Liverpool girl of some family and fortune, whom he married on llth May 1811. The Isle of Palms, his first published volume, consisting of poems, was issued not long after this. Four years of married life at Elleray succeeded, which, except as being happier and therefore less historied, do not seem to have differed much from the earlier four. Then came the event which definitely made a working man of letters of Wilson, and without which he would probably have produced a few volumes of verse and nothing more. His whole fortune, or at least the major part of it, was lost by the dishonest speculation of an uncle in whose hands, with no doubt rather culpable carelessness, Wilson had left it. At the same time this hard fate was by no means unquali fied in its hardness. His mother had a house in Edin burgh, in which she was able and willing to receive her son and his family ; nor had he even to give up Elleray, though henceforward he was not able constantly to reside in it. He read law and was called to the Scotch bar, taking- plentiful sporting and pedestrian excursions, on some of which his wife accompanied him, publishing in 1816 a second volume of poems (The City of the Plague), and generally leading a very pleasant life, if not such an entirely independent one as formerly. The year 1817 was the turning point in Wilson s life. The famous Cevallos article, which resulted in the secession of Scott and other Tories from the Edinburgh Review and the establishment of the Quarterly, was years earlier ; but there had still been no formal declaration that the " Blue and Yellow " was for Whigs only. Wilson was a Tory and the son of Tories (" If you turn Whig, John," said his mother to him, " this house will not hold you and me "), but he was glad to accept Jeffrey s invitation to contribute. Almost at the same time, however, a far more suitable chance appeared. Wilson was not patient of being edited, and his reckless humour as well as his political bias would in the long run have pretty certainly disqualified him for the Edinburgh. The growth of Blachvood s Magazine, and its sudden trans formation from a colourless or Whiggish monthly rival to Constable s Review into an organ at once of the most red-hot Toryism in politics and of the wildest irreverence towards received notions in literature and other matters, took place in the same year. The petard of the " Chaldee Manuscript," nominally clue to Hogg, but with most of the gunpowder put in by Wilson and Lockhart, determined the character of the new periodical, and Wilson s career was fixed. He was never exactly editor, for the powers of " Christopher North " in that respect were a fantastic imagination ; and we have definite and authoritative assertions, not only that he never received any stipend for editing, but that the pub lishers always retained a certain supervision even over Wilson s own contributions. The famous series of the Nodes Ambrosianse, is said to have been of Maginn s inven tion, and for nearly ten years was so very partially representa tive of Wilson s own work and thought that none of its numbers during that time have been included by his son-in- law in the authorized, but by no means complete, edition. Lockhart, a somewhat less genial but far more concentrated and deliberate writer, was, until his departure for London to take charge of the Quarterly, at least as potent in the management as Wilson ; and, although the facts are not known with absolute certainty, there is no doubt that it was a daring " alarum and excursion " of Lockhart s, under the alias (one of many) of Baron von Lauerwinkel, which caused Jeffrey, nominally because of an attack on Prof. Playfair, but obviously for other reasons, to inform AVilson, almost in so many words, that his further contributions were not desired for the Edinburgh. Wilson had also some share though, if internal evidence may be trusted, not much in Lockhart s Peter s Letters, which, harmless as they seem nowadays, infuriated the Whig society of the Scottish .capital. The first result of this new business on Wilson s general mode of life was that he left his mother s house and estab lished himself (1819) in Ann Street, Edinburgh, on his own account with his wife and family of five children. The second was much more unlocked for : it was his candidature for and election to the chair of moral philo sophy in the university of Edinburgh (1820). To speak honestly, his qualifications for the post were almost nil, even if the fact that the best qualified man in Great Britain, Sir William Hamilton, was also a candidate, be left out of the question. But, luckily for Wilson and for letters, the matter was made a political one ; the Tories still had a majority in the town council ; he was power fully backed up by friends, Scott at their head ; and his adversaries played into his hands by attacking, not his competence (which, as has been said, was very vulnerable), but his moral character, which was not open to any fair reproach. Yet he made a very excellent professor, never perhaps attaining to any great scientific knowledge in his subject or power of expounding it, but acting on generation after generation of students with a stimulating force that is far more valuable than the most exhaustive knowledge of a particular topic. His duties left him plenty of time for magazine work, and for many years his contributions to Blackivood were extraordinarily voluminous. Most of the best and best-knoAvn of them appeared between 1825 and 1835, that is, between the departure of Lockhart for London in the former year and the death of Blackwood the publisher and of Mrs Wilson in the latter. The domestic events of Wilson s life in the last thirty years of it may be very briefly told. He oscillated between Edinburgh and Elleray, with plentiful excursions and summer residences elsewhere, a sea trip on board the Experimental Squadron in the Channel during the summer of 1832, and a few other unimportant diversions. The death of his wife was an exceedingly severe blow to him, especially as it coincided very nearly with that of his friend Blackwood. For many years after it (though he never lip to the date of his death gave up writing) his literary work was intermittent, and, with some exceptions, not up to the level of the earlier. Late in 1850 his health showed definite signs of breaking up ; and in the next year a civil list pension of 300 a year was conferred on him. He died at Edinburgh on 3d April 1854. But 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 above referred to, the Lights and Shadoivs of Scottish Life (proso tales and sketches), and the Recreations of Christopher North, a selection, mostly limited to sporting and descriptive pieces, of his magazine articles. These volumes, with a selected edition of the Nodes Ambrosianse in four volumes, and of further essays, critical and imaginative, also in four volumes, were collected a-nd re-issued uniformly after his death by his son-in-law, Prof. 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 Nodes are