his young auditors; while the diffuseness and extravagance of diction which so greatly mar his critical writings would have passed unnoticed in an oral address.
For some years Wilson's more elaborate efforts in ‘Blackwood’ belonged to the department of prose fiction. Most of the ‘Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life’ appeared in the magazine prior to their collective publication in 1822. ‘The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay’ was published in 1823, and ‘The Foresters’ in 1825. These were all works of merit, but are little read now, and would scarcely be read at all but for the celebrity of their author in other fields. It was not until 1822 that Wilson found where his real strength lay, and began to delight the public with his ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ.’ The idea of a symposium of congenial spirits is as old as Plato, and Wilson's application of it had been in some measure anticipated by Peacock. But Plato's banqueters keep to one subject, while Wilson's range over interminable fields of discussion, usually suggested by the topics of the day. As Plato created a Socrates for his own purposes, so Wilson embodied his wit and wisdom, and, more important than either, his poetry, in the ‘Ettrick Shepherd,’ a character for which James Hogg undoubtedly sat in the first instance, but which improved immensely upon the original in humour, pathos, and dramatic force; while the dialect is by common consent one of the finest examples extant of the classical Doric of Scotland. Wilson himself, as ‘Christopher North,’ acts in a measure as prompter to the Shepherd; yet many splendid pieces of eloquence are put into his mouth, and he frequently enacts the chorus, conveying the broad common-sense of a subject. The literary form, or rather absence of form, exactly suited Wilson. Here at last was a great conversationalist writing as he talked, and probably few books so well convey the impression of actual contact with a grand, primitive, and most opulent nature. The dramatic skill shown in the creation of the ‘Shepherd,’ though it has been much exaggerated, is by no means inconsiderable: the other characters, Tickler (Mr. Robert Sym, Wilson's maternal uncle), ‘the opium eater,’ De Quincey, and Ensign O'Doherty, are comparatively insignificant. The original idea of the ‘Noctes’ seems to have been Maginn's, and between 1822 and 1825 they were the work of so many hands that Professor Ferrier has declined to include these early numbers in Wilson's ‘Works.’ After this date until their termination in 1835 they are almost entirely from his pen. Their conclusion was probably thought to be necessitated by the death of Hogg, who could no longer appear before the world as a convivial philosopher. But a blow was impending upon Wilson himself which must have destroyed his power of continuing a work the first requisite of which was exuberant animal spirits. In 1837 he lost his wife, and was never the same man again. For nearly twenty years he had been enriching ‘Blackwood,’ wholly apart from the ‘Noctes,’ with a torrent of contributions—critical, descriptive, political—so representative of the general spirit of the periodical as fully to warrant the erroneous inference that he was its conductor. The death of William Blackwood in September 1834 was a severe blow to him, but he ‘stood by the boys,’ and his relations with them continued to be much the same as they had been with the father, troubled by occasional suspicions and misunderstandings, but on the whole as consistently amicable as was possible in the case of one so wayward and desultory. ‘He was,’ Mrs. Oliphant justly says, ‘a man for an emergency, capable of doing a piece of superhuman work when his heart was touched,’ but not to be relied upon for steady support. In some years the abundance of his contributions was amazing, and in 1833 he wrote no fewer than fifty-four articles for the ‘Magazine.’ Among the most remarkable of his contributions before the death of Blackwood were a series of papers on Homer and his translators, abounding in eloquent and just criticism; similar series of essays on Spenser and British critics, and the memorable review of Tennyson's early poems, bitterly resented by the poet, but which, in fact, allowing for ‘Maga's’ characteristic horseplay, was both sound and kind. Of a later date were some excellent papers entitled the ‘Dies Boreales,’ his last literary labour of importance, and an edition of Burns.
Wilson's spirits had greatly waned after the death of his wife, and his contributions to ‘Blackwood’ became irregular, but he was unremitting in his attention to the duties of his professorship, and continued to fill the conspicuous place he held in Edinburgh society until 1850, when his constitution gave manifest signs of breaking up. In 1851 he resigned his professorship, and a pension of 300l. was conferred upon him in the handsomest spirit by Lord John Russell, the object of so many bitter attacks from him. Wilson exhibited the same spirit by recording his vote at the Edinburgh election of 1852 for his old political opponent Macaulay. This was his last public appearance. On 1 April 1854 at his house in Gloucester
