was admired in its day it has failed to endure ] him, reason or no reason; but he began in a the test of time. In 1816 he produced "The voice of thunder right into the matter of his City of the Plague," a dramatic poem which lecture, kept up unflinchingly and unhesitateven the envious Lord Byron placed among ingly, without a pause, a flow of rhetoric such the great works of the age. But it too has as Dugald Stewart or Thomas Brown, his prefailed to secure that enduring popularity decessors, never delivered in the same place. accorded to the poems of his great contempo- Not a word, not a murmur escaped his captiraries. Wilson's next publications were prose vated, I ought to say his conquered audience, tales and sketches, entitled Lights and Sha- and at the end they gave him a right-down dows of Scottish Life, The Foresters, and The unanimous burst of applause. Those who Trials of Margaret Lindsay. On the estab- came to scoff remained to praise." Wilson lishment of Blackwood's Magazine in 1817 a occupied this important chair for thirty years. new sphere of literary life, and one for which In 1851 he received a pension from the governhis future career proved he was as well fitted ment of £300 per annum, and in the same as any author then living, was opened to him. year he resigned his professorship without The magazine was started as the champion of making the usual claim of a retiring allowance. Tory principles, in opposition to the Edinburgh | Till within a short period preceding his death Review, and so marked was the influence he he resided during the summer months at exercised on its fortunes for upwards of a Elleray, where he dispensed a princely hospiquarter of a century that he was universally tality, and his splendid regattas on Lake Winregarded as its editor, although Mr. Blackwood dermere won for him the title of "Admiral of the publisher performed the duties of that the Lake." He died at his residence in Glouoffice himself. "Christopher North" was, cester Place, Edinburgh, April 3, 1854. His however, the living soul and support of the remains were interred in the Dean Cemetery, magazine, so that in spite of all denials he and the funeral, which was a public one, was continued to be proclaimed on both sides of attended by thousands, who thus testified their the Atlantic the editor of Maga. respect for one of the noblest Scotchmen of the nineteenth century. In February, 1865, a noble statue of Wilson, executed in bronze by John Steel of Edinburgh, was erected in that city on the same day that a marble statue of Allan Ramsay, by the same distinguished artist, was inaugurated.

In 1820 he offered himself as a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, made vacant by the death of Dr. Thomas Brown, and notwithstanding an amount of opposition unprecedented in such an election, Wilson, to the general surprise of all classes, was elected. His competitor was no less a person than Sir William Hamilton, who, it appears, was the students' choice. The professor's first lecture is thus described by an eye-witness:-" There was a furious bitterness of feeling against him (Wilson) among the classes of which probably most of his pupils would consist, and although I had no prospect of being among them I went to his first lecture, prepared to join in a cabal which I understood was formed to put him down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such a collection of hard-browed scowling Scotchmen, muttering over their knob-sticks, I never saw. The professor entered with a bold step amid profound silence. Everyone expected some deprecatory or propitiatory introduction of himself and his subject, upon which the mass was to decide against

In 1825 Wilson's entire poetical works were published in two volumes, followed in 1842 by three volumes of prose contributions to Blackwood's Magazine, under the title of Recreations of Christopher North. After his death a complete edition of his works, under the editorial supervision of his son-in-law Professor Ferrier, was published; and in 1862 appeared an interesting memoir of his life by his daughter, the late Mrs. Gordon.

The poetical productions of John Wilson, by which he commenced his career as an aspirant for the honours of authorship, notwithstanding their many beauties, will not preserve his name; his fame rests more securely upon those matchless papers which appeared through a long series of years in the pages of Blackwood's Magazine. "By nature," says an eminent writer, "Wilson was Scotland's brightest sun

save Burns; and he, Scott, and Burns must | relish for nature breaks out in all of them:

From eagle and from raven to guard her little Round her white brows so innocent, and her flock, blue quiet eyes And read her Bible as she sits on greensward That look out bright, in smiling light, beneath or on rock.

So down upon her rushy couch her moisten'd" The hawk hath long been sleeping upon the cheek she laid,

And away into the morning hush is flown her And what hath kept my Mhairi in the moorHighland maid; lands all alone?

In heaven the stars are all bedim'd, but in its And where got she those lovely flowers mine dewy mirth

"And while that I was reading of Him who | By day she feels the dismal truth that death for us died, has ta'en her child, And blood and water shed for us from out his At night she hears her singing still and danc

"I looked up from my Bible, and lo! before And faster than mine own two doves e'er me stood,

In her green graceful garments, the Lady of Our flight was through the ether-then we the Wood;

Then started Mhairi's mother at that wild Till we came to a waterfall, and 'mid the rain