HOW TO GET STRONG
and so (once again) the church militant became the church triumphant.
At Scotland's gifted son, descendant of the great Marquis of Montrose—John Wilson, "Christopher North," carrying off many prizes at Glasgow University; editor of Blackwood's; elected over Sir William Hamilton to the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy; "of a wonderful power of stimulating the enthusiasm of his students"—perhaps if all our professors had vigorous bodies they also would stimulate more—whose Noctes Ambrosianæ delighted all Scotland; at Oxford, in 1803, "noted alike for the splendor of his intellectual gifts and for his supremacy in athletic sports—boxing, rowing, running, riding, swimming—a six-foot Apollo, he leaped the Cherwell (twenty-three feet wide); walked forty miles in eight hours; walked from London to Oxford—fifty-six miles—in a night"; now winning the Newdigate prize by his poem, "The Study of Greek and Roman Architecture"; now, jostled by a famous prize-fighter on London Bridge, thrashing the latter then and there; and, finding his identity known by the alternative remark from the bruiser, "You are either Jack Wilson or the devil," soothing the latter with a mug of porter; close friend of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, De Quincey; and loving to match himself against the Cumberland wrestlers, one of whom has left it on record that he was "a vera bad un to lick."
At Sir Robert Peel, who in boyhood trained his memory till it was as extraordinarily capacious and tenacious as Macaulay's; of whom it was said that "What most impressed those who knew him was his unvarying sense of public duty, which was carried by an iron will into every detail of action." Of whom Wellington said, "I never knew a man in whose truth and justice I had a
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