CHRISTOPHER NORTH.* Tins book is not without defects. Dates and

facts are some- times too few, reflections too many ; letters from Wilson at the most stirring period of his life, when he took part in establishing Blackwood's Magazine, are conspicuously absent; letters, from others than Wilson are somewhat too copiously present. But it is interesting and substantially able, contains a true and vivid presentation of a memorable man, and is not only a beautiful and touching tribute by a daughter to the memory of her father, but a contribution of value to the biographical literature of Great-Britain. We are glad to see it lives.

John Wilson was born in Paisley in 1785, the fourth child and eldest son of a gauze-manufacturer, who had realised enough in trade to leave his heir an unencumbered fortune of 250,000. Paisley was then a pleasant enough place, its houses look- ing abroad upon an undulating landscape of wood and corn- field, enlivened by an unpolluted river. Mrs. Gordon speaks

-with enthusiasm of Wilson's childhood, and we have no doubt that he was as bright and happy a yellow-haired la,ddie as ever ran about the adjacent braes of Gleniffer, or roamed in Stanley Shaw. From his earliest childhood he was a rambler in green fields and by brook-sides, and at three years old performed his first feat in angling, by catching, with the primitive enginery of a willow-wand, thread-line, and crooked pin, a small trout, in a "wee burnie," a mile from home. The incident he never forgot, and in the noonday of his reputation found room in a char- acteristic essay to record the event :— "A tug,—a tug With face ten times flushed and pale by turns ere you could count ten, he at last has strength, in the agitation of his fear and joy, to pull away at the monster ; and there he lies in his 'beauty among the gowans and the greensward, for he has whapped 'bim right over his head and far away, a fish a quarter of an ounce in weight, and at the very least, two inches long ! Off he flies, on wings of wind, to his father, mother, sisters, and brothers, and cousins, and all the neighbourhood, holding the fish aloft in both hands."

After some elementary schooling in Paisley, Wilson was sent to pass his boyhood in the manse of the Rev. G. M`Latchie, minister of the picturesque parish of Mearns, who took a few pupils, and was the most genial and fatherly of pedagogues. Here the boy found a second home, and throughout life he thought and spoke with glowing enthusiasm of the "wild, moorland, sylvan, and pastoral parish," with its rained castle, touched on the grey turrets by pale gold of wall-flower, its wealth of streams and rills, its wooded dells and broomy

nooks, its "bold, bleak exposure, sloping upwards in ever lustrous undulations to the portals of the East." He loved

Christopher North : a Memoir of John Wilson. late Professor of Moral Philosophy ta the University of Edinburgh. By his Daughter, Mrs. Gordon. New Edition. Edinburgh : T. C. Jack. London Hamilton, Adams; and Co. 1878.

Mr. M‘Latchie like a son, and formed friendships with his class-fellows in the manse that lasted all his life. It was characteristic of Wilson—and no nobler or more enviable characteristic could be named—to love every one, and to be loved by every one, with whom he came into close contact. Like Browning's Luitolfo, he was a

"Friend-seeking, everywhere friend-finding soul, Fit for the sunshine,--so it followed him."

Father and mother, brothers and sisters, Mr. Peddie, who put him through his horn-book in Paisley, Mr. M•Latchie, who drilled him in his Latin rudiments, his boyish playmates, and all the retainers, male and female, of the manse of Mearns, were loved by him, and delighted in the affectionate, brilliant boy. The "dearest Robert" whom he learned to love as they rambled on the moors of Mearns, continued the "dearest Robert" to whom he wrote with the shaking pen of age.

Out of the class of Mr. M‘Latchie, Wilson passed to the Uni- versity of Glasgow, where he distinguished himself as a clever and not inattentive student. From a boyhood which had been intensely, yet serenely happy, he entered on a period of youth which, to use his own language, had "its insupportable sun- shine and its agitating storms." He fell in love with a girl whom we hear of only as Margaret, and of whose social posi- tion we can judge from the circumstance that she lived at Dychmont farmhouse, "unadorned and homely," over- looking the valley of the Clyde. The passion with which he regarded her, which retained its power over him for seven years, was the strongest feeling he ever experi- enced. He wrote a great deal of boyish verse, dedicating to Margaret the octavo volume of manuscript into which he copied it, and declaring that the pieces owed whatever beauty they possessed "to the delicacy of her feelings and the emotions she has inspired." A long prose preface "is very remarkable," Mrs. Gordon tells us, considering the age of the writer, " for the ease and grace of the style," and some of the verses rise into "real poetry." Why, then, Mrs. Gordon, not give us three sentences of the preface, or ten lines of the verse, and let us judge for ourselves ? Will biographers never learn that

the literary productions of boys and girls, who become men and women important enough to have lives written of them

for world-wide circulation, deserve printing in samples, not be- cause of intrinsic merit, but because they are the best possible revelations of the writers at the time, and show us their minds and their hearts in the growing ? Happily, however, we are enabled to judge for ourselves of the sincerity and ardour of Wilson's affection for Margaret, by scanning somq of his con- fidential correspondence on the subject. When he left Scotland for Oxford, at seventeen, he loved her with all his heart, but had begun to be tortured by the knowledge that there were insuperable obstacles to their union. We know nothing in Wilson's writings so terse and strong, so Lessing-like in unadorned, unaffected vehemence, as his letters to Robert Findlay on his love for Margaret. On her, he says, depends all his power of benefiting his kind. Rejoicing in her love, he could open his heart wide enough to embrace the whole human family. If he cannot have her, he has nothing to live for,—the chain is broken which bound him to the world :—

"When Margaret is married, on 'that night that gives her to another, if I am in any part of this island, you must pass that night with me. Blair will do the same. I don't expect, indeed, I won't suffer either of you to soothe the agony of my soul, for that surely were a vain attempt. But you will it with me. I know that I could never pass that night alone. I would crush to death this cursed heart, which has so long tormented me, and bless with my latest breath my own Margaret ; for she is mine in the secret dwellings of the soul, and not a power in the universe shall tear her from that hospitable home."

The love in Wilson's poems and tales is mere foam-rainbow to this.

He was no idler at Oxford, nor was he, on the other hand, a severe and methodical student. His agitation about Margaret shook his mind to such a degree that his friends feared to men- tion her, on account of the "bursts of anguish" they had seen. Under these circumstances, he'went to his examination for his Bachelor Degree "in full conviction that he was to be plucked?, The result was very different. "His examination," writes one who seems to have been present, "was, as might naturally be expected, the most illustrious within the memory of man. Sotheby was there, and declared it was worth coming from

London to hear him translate a Greek chorus." One of the eau-inners publicly attested that the examination "afforded the strongest proofs of very great application, and genius, and

-scholarship." It was only, indeed, to his friends that the idea could occur of his enduring the pangs of hopeless love. He was known in the University as one of the most athletic men of his day, a formidable wrestler, a bold and skilful pugilist, a rapid and indefatigable walker, a swift runner, and with one exception, the best far-leaper in England. He could clear twenty-three feet in a flying jump, with a run and a slightly inclined plane, about an inch in the yard. One evening in London, on quitting a house in which he had dined, he was in- sulted by a man, and knocked the fellow down. Not choosing to be entangled in a street row, he started for Oxford, and arrived at the gate of his College—Magdalen—as it was being opened in the morning. This was a walk of fifty-eight miles. He was much addicted to cock-fighting, kept cocks of his own, and delighted in observing the habits of the birds. We cannot help being struck by this trait, in one who was beyond question both -chivalrous and tender-hearted, whose gentleness at a later time won the entire confidence of a pet sparrow, and who had not one particle of cruelty in his composition. The annals of knight- hood, however, prepare us to find emotional warmth and gentle- -less combined with pugnacity and with passionate delight in the exhibition of courage and endurance.

On leaving the University, Wilson went to live at Elleray on Windermere, and amid the excitements with which a young man commanding £50,000, and encircled with admiring friends, could surround himself among the Lakes, he gradually weaned his mind from the entrancing yet tor- menting thought of Margaret. There was one sacrifice he would not make even for her, namely, the affection of his mother, and he knew that if he married the Dychmont beauty, they" could never again be on the footing of mother and son.'; It seems -clear, besides, that some interviews which he had with the girl about the time of his leaving Oxford had produced a some- what disenchanting effect. They parted, never to meet again. Soon after, he met with Miss Jane Penny, a vivacious and lovely English girl, who exactly suited him, became his wife, and lived with him in perfect harmony for six-and-twenty years. In the year of his marriage (1811), he made preparations for publishing a book of poems. Immense expecta- tions were formed of the volume by so practised a critic and author as Scott, and so experienced a dealer in books as John Ballantyne. The latter wrote to Wilson, "most anxiously requesting a share in the work," and asking "to have 500 copies to sell." Wilson had become known to literary circles, and the critics did not overlook his claims ; but the public fought shy of the volume, and the author, who under his dashing exterior carried always with him the judgment of a sagacious Scot, knew that he had failed, but could not quite pene- trate the cause. In this, as in all his books, as distinguished from his collections of essays, there was too great a proportion of leaf to branch, of flower to fruit. Literary attractiveness rests ultimately on things, not on words; and Wilson had not suffi- -dent knowledge of life or character, sufficient sensibility or inven- tive imagination, to supply the framework of extensive poems. No bird could fly that was all wing and plume, though the wings were covered with silver, and the plumes with yellow gold ; there must be the pulley-system and strong leverage of the sinews and bones, and the central weight of breast and body.

In the fourth year after his marriage, he lost his whole fortune. Adapting himself, without whine or whimper, to the change in his position, he left his cottage home on Windermere ; settled in Edinburgh, taking up his quarters in his mother's house ; and addressed himself to the labours of a literary life, with a buoyancy that gave his descriptive essays the freedom and flashing beauty of sea-waves, and a sustained intensity of application that would have done credit to the veriest hack. It is impossible to read the tale of the establishment, by him and -Lockhart, aided by the judicious management and instinctive shrewdness of William Blackwood, of Blackwood's Magazine, without being astonished at his prodigious vitality, his pro- ductive opulence, his wild, unequal, frequently oppressive, but, on the whole, genuine and racy humour. It is, no doubt, true that a great deal of the famous " Noctes Ambrosiante " strikes English readers as the mere horse-play of overgrown school- -boys, dependent for its enjoyableness on exuberance of animal spirits. But there is an irrational element in all wild humour, and we must not allow ourselves to be drilled and formalised by our modern critics of the French -high-art school into incapacity to laugh at such fun as moved the Homeric gods to inextinguishable laughter at the limping

of Hephaistos, and the Homeric heroes to similar delight when Ajax, on the point of winning the race, came flop into the bloody mire-heap left by the sacrificed bullocks :—

isvOou fio6u lair° crreipa. re, 'Sivas 7E."

Without the genius of a great poet, a great novelist, or a great philosopher, Wilson possessed faculties eminently suited to.criti- cism. Mr. Gladstone has pronounced his Homeric critiques supremely good, and some of his papers on Shakspere, reprinted by the New Shakspere Society, are brilliant and suggestive. It is, perhaps, however, in his descriptive essays, as in that upon "Streams," that he is at his best. These bring us into the very sound of the hill-breeze, the very scent and sight of the blooming heather. In felicity and precision of graphic touch, in eye for picturesque detail, in genial vivacity, it would not be easy to surpass the following sketch :— "Once it was feared that poor wee Kit was lost ; for having set off all by himself, at sunrise, to draw a night-line from the distant Black Loch, and look at a trap set for a glede, a mist overtook him on the moor on his homeward way, with an eel as long as himself hanging over his shoulder, and held him prisoner for many hours within its shifting walls, frail indeed, and opposing no resistance to the hand, yet impenetrable to the feet of fear as the stone dungeon's thraldom. If the mist had remained, that would have been nothing, only a still, cold, wet seat on a stone ; but as a trot becomes a gallop soon, in spite of curb and rein, so a Scotch mist becomes a shower, and a shower a flood, and a flood a storm, and a storm a tem- pest, and a tempest thunder and lightning, and thunder and lightning heaven-quake and earth-quake, till the heart of poor wee Kit quaked, and almost died within him in the desert. In this age of Confessions, need we be ashamed to own, in the face of the whole world, that we sat down and cried ? The small brown moorland bird, as dry as a toast, hopped out of his heather-hole, and cheerfully chirped comfort. With crest just a thought lowered by the rain, the green-backed, white-breasted peaseweep walked close by us in the mist ; and, sight of wonder, that made even in that quandary by the quagmire our heart beat with joy,—lo! never seen before, and seldom since, three wee peaseweeps, not three days old, little bigger than shrew-mice, all covered with blackish down, interspersed with long white hair, running after their mother ! But the large hazel eye of the she peaseweep, restless even in the most utter solitude, soon spied us, glowering at her and her young ones through our tears ; and not for a moment doubting (Heaven forgive her for the shrewd but cruel suspicion !) that we were Lord Eglinton's gamekeeper, with a sudden, shrill cry that thrilled to the marrow in our cold back-bone, flapped and fluttered herself away into the mist, while the little black bits of down disappeared, like devils, into the moss. The croaking of the frogs grew terrible. And worse and worse, close at hand, seeking his lost cows through the mist, the bellow of the notorious red bull ! We began saying our prayers ; and just then the sun forced himself out into the open day, and like the sudden opening of the shutters of a room, the whole world was filled with light. The frogs seemed to sink among the pow-heads ; as for the red bull who had tossed the tinker, he was cantering away, with his tail towards us, to a lot of cows on the hill."

If this and a hundred such passages may strike some stern judges as trivial, we must profess a different opinion. In the dingy dens of great cities such writing fills the ear with woodland music,' with the tinkling of brooks and the singing of birds. Such impassioned love for nature, such brilliant accuracy in depicting scenes which have an inexhaustible charm for all whose minds retain any trace of healthy boyishness, may be justly held to approach the dignity of poetic achievement. Ebenezer Elliott, who looked with the anguish of a born poet upon smoke- blackened skies and poison-blasted hedges, thanked Wilson for "those inimitable rural pictures which," says the stout furnace- man, "before God, I believe have lengthened my days on earth."