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Liverpool merchant, and kept open house at Elleray for some years. Then his fortune disappeared in the keeping of a dishonest relation, and he had, in a way, his livelihood to make. I say "in a way," because the wind appears to have been considerably tempered to this shorn but robust lamb. He had not even to give up Elleray, though he could not live there in his old style. He had a mother who was able and willing to entertain him at Edinburgh, on the sole understanding that he did not "turn Whig," of which there was very little danger. He was enabled to keep not too exhausting or anxious terms as an advocate at the Scottish bar; and before long he was endowed, against the infinitely superior claims of Sir William Hamilton, and by sheer force of personal and political influence, with the very lucrative Professorship of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. But even before this he had been exempted from the necessity of cultivating literature on a little oatmeal" by his connexion with 'Blackwood's Magazine.' The story of that magazine has often been told; never perhaps quite fully, but sufficiently. Wilson was not at any time strictly speaking editor; and a statement under his own hand avers that he never received any editorial pay, and was sometimes subject to that criticism which the publisher, as all men know from a famous letter of Scott's, was sometimes in the habit of exercising rather indiscreetly. But for a very great number of years there is no doubt that he held a kind of quasieditorial position which included the censorship of other men's work and an almost, if not quite, unlimited right of printing his own. For some time the even more masterful spirit of Lockhart (against whom by the way Mrs. Gordon seems to have had a rather unreasonable prejudice) qualified his control over " Maga.' But Lockhart's promotion to the 'Quarterly' removed this influence, and from 1825 (speaking roughly) to 1835 Wilson

was supreme. The death of William Blackwood and of the Ettrick Shepherd in the last named year, and of his own wife in 1837 (the latter a blow from which he never recovered) strongly affected not his control over the publication but his desire to control it; and after 1839 his contributions (save in the years 1845 and 1848) were very few. Ill health and broken spirits disabled him, and in 1852 he had to resign his professorship, dying two years later after some months of almost total prostration. Of the rest of the deeds of Christopher, and of his pugilism, and of his learning, and of his pedestrian exploits, and of his fishing, and of his cock-fighting, and of his hearty enjoyment of life generally, the books of the chronicles of Mrs. Gordon, and still more the twelve volumes of his works and the un-reprinted contributions to Blackwood' shall tell.

It is with those works that our principal business is, and some of them we will take the liberty of at once dismissing. His poems are now matters of interest to very few mortals. It is not that they are bad, for they are not; but that they are almost wholly without distinction. He came just late enough to have got the seed of the great romantic revival; and his verse work is rarely more than the work of a clever man who has partly learnt and partly divined the manner of Burns, Scott, Campbell, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and the rest. Nor to my fancy are his prose tales of much more value. I read them many years ago and cared little for them. I re-read, or attempted to re-read, them the other day and cared less. There seems from the original prospectus of the edition of his works to have been an intention of editing the course of moral philosophy which, with more or fewer variations, obtained him the agreeable income of a thousand a year or so for thirty years. But whether (as Mrs. Gordon seems to hint) the notes were in too dilapidated and chaotic a condition for

use, or whether Professor Ferrier, his son-in-law and editor (himself, with Dean Mansel, the last of the exact philosophers of Britain) revolted at the idea of printing anything so merely literary, or what it was I know not at any rate they do not now figure in the list. This leaves us ten volumes of collected works, to wit, four of the Noctes Ambrosianae,' four of Essays Critical and Imaginative,' and two of 'The Recreations of Christopher North,' all with a very few exceptions reprinted from 'Blackwood.' Mrs. Gordon filially groans because the reprint was not more extensive, and without endorsing her own very high opinion of her father's work, it is possible to agree with her. It is especially noteworthy that from the essays are excluded three out of the four chief critical series which Wilson wrotethat on Spenser, praised by a writer so little given to reckless praise as Hallam, the Specimens of British Critics' and the 'Dies Boreales,'-leaving only the series on Homer with its quasi-Appendix on the Greek Dramatists, and the 'Noctes' themselves.

It must be confessed that the 'Noctes Ambrosianae' are not easy things to commend to the modern reader, if I may use the word commend in its proper sense and with no air of patronage. Even Scotchmen (perhaps, indeed, Scotchmen most of all) are wont nowadays to praise them rather apologetically, as may be seen in the case of their editor and abridger Mr. Skelton. Like most other very original things they drew after them a flock of imbecile imitations; and up to the present day those who have lived in the remoter parts of Scotland must know or recently remember dreary compositions in corrupt following of the Noctes' with exaggerated attempts at Christopher's worst mannerisms, and invariably including a ghastly caricature of the Shepherd. Even in themselves they abound in stumbling-blocks, which are perhaps multiplied, at least at the

threshold, by the arbitrary separation in Ferrier's edition of Wilson's part, and not all his part, from the whole series; eighteen numbers being excluded bodily to begin with, while many more and parts of more are omitted subsequently. The critical mistake of this is evident, for much of the machinery and all the personages of the 'Noctes' were given to, not by, Wilson, and in all probability he accepted them not too willingly. The origin of the fantastic personages, the creation of which was a perfect mania with the early contributors to 'Blackwood', and who are, it is to be feared, too often a nuisance to modern readers, is rather dubious. Maginn's friends have claimed the origination of the Noctes' proper, and of its wellknown motto paraphrased from Phocylides, for "The Doctor," or, if his chief Blackwood' designation be preferred, for the Ensign Ensign O'Doherty. Professor Ferrier, on the other hand, has shown a not unnatural but by no means critical or exact desire to hint that Wilson invented the whole. There is no doubt that the real original is to be found in the actual suppers at "Ambrose's." These Lockhart had described in 'Peter's Letters' before the appearance of the first Noctes' (the reader must not be shocked, the false concord is invariable in the book itself) and not long after the establishment of 'Maga.' was the case with the magazine generally the early numbers were extremely local and extremely personal. Wilson's glory is that he to a great extent, though not wholly, lifted them out of this rut, when he became the chief if not the sole writer after Lockhart's removal to London, and reduced the personages, with rare exceptions, to three strongly marked and very dramatic characters, Christopher North himself, the Ettrick Shepherd, and "Tickler." All these three were in a manner portraits, but no one is a mere photograph from a single person. On the whole, however, I suspect that Christopher North is a much closer

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likeness, if not of what Wilson himself was, yet at any rate of what he would have liked to be, than some of his apologists maintain. These charitable souls excuse the egotism, the personality, the violence, the inconsistency, the absurd assumption of omniscience and Admirable-Crichtonism, on the plea that "Christopher" is only the ideal Editor and not the actual Professor. It is quite true that Wilson, who, like all men of humour, must have known his own foibles, not unfrequently satirises them; but it is clear from his other work and from his private letters that they were his foibles. The figure of the Shepherd, who is the chief speaker and on the whole the most interesting, is a more debateable one. It is certain that many of Hogg's friends, and in his touchy moments he himself, considered that a great liberty was taken with him, if not that (as the 'Quarterly' put it in a phrase which evidently made Wilson very angry) he was represented as a mere "boozing buffoon." On the other hand it is equally certain that the Shepherd never did in prose and in his own name (he was a very pretty dialect poet) any thing that exhibited half the power over thought and language which is shown in the best passages of his Noctes' eidolon. Some of the adventures described as having happened to him are historically known as having happened to Wilson himself, and his sentiments are much more the writer's than the speaker's. At the same time the admirably imitated patois and the subtle rendering of Hogg's very well known foibles-his inordinate and stupendous vanity, his proneness to take liberties with his betters, his irritable temper, and the rest-give a false air of identity which is very noteworthy. The third portrait is said to have been the farthest from life, except in some physical peculiarities, of the three. "Tickler," whose original was Wilson's maternal uncle Robert Sym, an Edinburgh "writer", and something of a humorist in the

flesh, is very skilfully made to hold (without being anything of a "stick") the position of common sense intermediary between the two originals, North and the Shepherd. He has his own peculiarities, but he has also a habit of bringing his friends down from their altitudes in a Voltairian fashion which is of immense use to the dialogues. The few occasional interlocutors are of little moment, with one exception; and the only female characters, Mrs. and Miss Gentle, would have been very much better away. They are not in the least lifelike, and usually exhibit the namby-pambiness into which Wilson too often fell when he wished to be refined and pathetic. The "English" or half English characters, who come in sometimes as foils are also rather of the stick, sticky. On the other hand, the interruptions of Ambrose, the host, and his household, though a little farcical, are well judged. And of the one exception above mentioned, the live Thomas De Quincey, who is brought in without disguise or excuse in some of the very best of the series, it can only be said that the imitation of his written style is extraordinary, and that men who knew his conversation say that the rendering of that is more extraordinary still.

The same designed exaggeration which some uncritical persons have called Rabelaisian (not noticing that the very fault of the Noctes' is that, unlike Rabelais, their author mixes up probabilities and improbabilities so that there is a perpetual jarring) is maintained throughout the scenery and etceteras. The comfortable but modest accommodations of Ambrose's hotels in Gabriel's Road and Picardy Place are turned into abodes of not particularly tasteful luxury which put Lord Beaconsfield's famous upholstery to shame, and remind one of what they probably suggested, Edgar Poe's equally famous and much more terrible sketch of a model drawing-room. the plate is carefully described as "silver"; if it had been gold there might have been some humour in it.

All

The "wax" candles and "silken" curtains (if they had been 'Arabian Nights' lamps and oriental drapery the same might be said) are always insisted on. If there is any joke here it seems to lie in the contrast with Wilson's actual habits which were very simple. For instance, he gives us a gorgeous description of the apparatus of North's solitary confinement when writing for 'Blackwood'; his daughter's unvarnished account of the same process agrees exactly as to time, rate of production, and so forth, but substitutes water for the old hock and "Scots pint" (magnum) of claret, a dirty little terra-cotta inkstand for the silver utensil of the 'Noctes,' and a single large tallow candle for Christopher's "floods of light." He carried the whim so far as to construct for himself-his 'Noctes' selfan imaginary hall-by-the-sea on the Firth of Forth (which in the same way seems to have had an actual resemblance, half of likeness, half of contrast, to the actual Elleray) and to enlarge his own comfortable town house in Gloucester Place to a sort of fairy palace in Moray Place. But that which has most puzzled and shocked readers are the specially Gargantuan passages relating to eating and drinking. The comments made on this seem (he was anything but patient of criticism) to have annoyed Wilson very much; and in some of the later 'Noctes he drops hints that the whole is mere barmecide business. Unfortunately the same criticism applies to this as to the upholstery - - the exaggeration is "done too natural." The Shepherd's consumption of oysters not by dozens but by fifties, the allowance of "six common kettles full of water" for the night's toddy ration of the three, North's above mentioned bottle of old hock at dinner and magnum of claret after, the dinners and suppers and "whets" which appear so often ;-all these stop short of the actually incredible, and are nothing more than extremely convivial men of the time, who were also large eaters,

would have actually consumed. Lord Alvanley's three hearty suppers, the exploits of the old member of Parliament in Boz's sketch of Bellamy's (I forget his real name, but he was not a myth), and other things might be quoted to show that there is a fatal verisimilitude in the Ambrosian feasts which may, or may not, make them shocking (they don't shock me) but which certainly takes them out of the category of merely humorous exaggeration. The Shepherd's jugs numerous as they are (and by the way the Shepherd propounds two absolutely contradictory theories of toddy-making, one of which, according to the instructions of my preceptors in that art who lived within sight of the hills that look down on Glenlivet, is a damnable heresy) are not in the least like the

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seze muiz, deux bussars, et six tupins" of tripe that Gargamelle so rashly devoured. There are men now living, and honoured members of society in Scotland, who admit the soft impeachment of having drunk in their youth twelve or fourteen "double" tumblers at a sitting. Now a double tumbler, be it known to the Southron, is a jorum of toddy to which there go two wineglasses (of course of the oldfashioned size, not our modern goblets) of whisky. "Indeed," said a humorous and indulgent lady correspondent of Wilson's, " indeed, I really think you eat too many oysters at the 'Noctes; and any one who believes in distributive justice must admit that they did.

If, therefore, the reader is of the modern cutlet-and-cup-of-coffee school of feeding, he will no doubt find the 'Noctes' most grossly and palpably gluttonous. If he be a very superior person he will smile at the upholstery. If he objects to horseplay he will be horrified at finding the characters on one occasion engaging in a regular "mill," on more than one corking each other's faces during slumber, sometimes playing at pyramids like the bounding brothers of acrobatic fame, at others indulging in leap-frog

with the servants, permitting themselves practical jokes of all kinds, affecting to be drowned by an explosive haggis, and so forth. Every now and then he will come to a passage at which, without being superfine at all, he may find his gorge rise; though there is nothing quite so bad in the Noctes' as the picture of the ravens eating a dead Quaker in the Recreations,' a picture for which Wilson offers a very lame defence elsewhere. He must put all sorts of prejudice, literary, political and other, in his pocket. He must be prepared

not only for constant and very scurrilous flings at "Cockneys' (Wilson extends the term far beyond the Hunt and Hazlitt school, an extension which to this day seems to give a strange delight to Edinburgh journalists), but for the wildest heterodoxies and inconsistencies of political, literary and miscellaneous judgment, for much bastard verse-prose, for a good many quite uninteresting local and ephemeral allusions, and, of course, for any quantity of Scotch dialect. If all these allowances and provisos are too many for him to make, it is probably useless for him to attempt the Noctes' at all. He will pretty certainly set their characters down with the Quarterly' reviewer as boozing buffoons, and decline the honour of an invitation to "Ambrose's" or "The Lodge," to "Southside" or the tent in Ettrick forest.

But any one who can accommodate himself to these little matters, much more any one who can enter into the spirit of days merrier, more leisurely, and if not less straitlaced than our own, yet lacing their laces in a different fashion, will find the Noctes' very delightful indeed. The mere high jinks, when the secret of being in the vein with them has been mastered, are seldom unamusing, and sometimes (notably in the long swim out to sea of Tickler and the Shepherd) quite admirable fooling. No one who has an eye for the literary-dramatic can help, after a few 'Noctes' have been No. 321.-VOL. LIV.

read, admiring the skill with which the characters are at once typified and individualised, the substance which they acquire in the reader's mind, the personal interest in them which is excited. And to all this, peculiarly suited for an alterative in these solemn days, has to be added the abundance of scattered and incomplete but remarkable gems of expression and thought that come at every few pages, sometimes at every page, of the series.

Some of the burlesque narratives (such as the Shepherd's Mazeppa-like ride on the Bonassus) are inimitably good, though they are too often spoilt by Wilson's great faults of prolixity and uncertainty of touch. The criticisms, of which there are many, are also extremely unequal, but not a few very fine passages may be found among them. The politics, it must be owned, are not good for much, even from the Tory point of view. But the greatest attraction of the whole, next to its sunshiny heartiness and humour, is to be found in innumerable and indescribable bits, phrases, sentences, short paragraphs, which have, more than anything out of the dialogues of the very best novels, the character and charm of actual conversation. To read a Noctes' has for those who have the happy gift of realising literature not much less than the effect of actually taking part in one with no danger of headache or indigestion after, and without the risk of being playfully corked, or required to leap the table for a wager, or forced to extemporise sixteen stanzas standing on the mantelpiece. There must be some peculiar virtue in this, for, as is very well known, the usual dialogue leaves the reader more outside of it than almost any other kind of literature.

This peculiar charm is of necessity wanting to the rest of Wilson's works, and in so far they are inferior to the

Noctes'; but they have compensatory merits of their own, while, considered merely as literature, there are better things in them than any

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