WILSON, JOHN, famous as prof. Wilson, and the Christopher North of Blackwood's Magazine, was b. on May 18, 1785, at Paisley, where his father was a wealthy manufac turer. His earlier education lie received in the house of Dr. M'Letchie, minister of the parish of Mearns, a wild moorland district in Renfrewshire, his boyish residence, which he long afterward commemorated in some of his most charming essays. After having been transferred for a time to the care of the rev. Joseph Macintyre of Glcnorchy, in the Highlands, the love of which became for him a lifelong passion, lie was sent to the university of Glasgow, where he remained for 4 years, distinguished as on the whole a diligent and successful, though somewhat fitful and irregular, student. In 1803 he went to Magdalen college, Oxford, 'where lie became notable at once for the splendor of his intellectual gifts, and for his supremacy in the various athletic sports—boxing, row ing, running, etc.—which have always formed a not inconsiderable part of the educatioi bestowed at the English universities. In 1806 he signalized himself by his Newdigate prize poem, On the Study of Greek and Roman Architecture ; and the year after he took his degree of B.A., that of M.A. following in 1810. Meantime, he had left Oxford and settled himself in Cumberland, attracted partly by the beauty of the lake country and partly by a desire to cultivate the intimacy of Wordsworth, of whose genius he was already a devout admirer. He purchased the lovely little property of Elleray, where, for some years, he resided almost constantly.- Besides Wordsworth, there were available in the district for intellectual converse De Quincey, Southey, and Coleridge (to whose Friend lie contributed some essays). With all of them he became intimate; and when he wearied a little of " celestial colloquy divine" with them, he sought a variety to life in measuring his strength against that of the far-famed Cumberland wrestlers, the very sturdiest of whom has left it on express record that he found him " a vera bad un to lick." In 1810 he married a Miss Jane Penny, a Liverpool lady, of great personal attrac tions and much amiability of character, iu his union with whom be found the main hap piness of his life. He now seriously devoted himself to poetry, and in 1312 published i his Isle of Palms, which attracted considerable attention, and was followed, in 1816, by The City of the Plague. This work showed a marked increase of power; hut it is ques tionable, despite the grace, music, and tender feeling of much of his verse, whether, as a poet, Wilson would ever have succeeded iu developing the real force of his genuis. His true field, however, was found on the starting, in 1817, of Blackwood's Mayazzne. Some years previously a pecuniary disaster had befallen him; the fortune of £30,000 left him by his father being so seriously curtailed by the misconduct of a relative as to necessitate the breaking up of his establishment at Elleray. On this lie transferred himself to Edin burg, where, in 1815, he was called to the Scottish bar; hut it does not appear that he had any opportunity of practice. As one of the briefless, with plenty of spare time on his hands, along with his friend Lockhart, then in similar case, he lost no time in prof fering his aid to Mr. Blackwood. The astute publisher was at no loss to estimate the value of their alliance; and it is not too much to say that during its earlier years, Lock hart and Wilson were the soul of the success of the magazine. Presently, Lockhart was withdrawn to succeed Gifford as editor of the Quarterly Ileriew in London; and Wilson, though never in any strict sense its editor—Blackwood himself throughout exer cising a severe control—became, in the eye of the public, more and more identified with the magazine; in a certain modified, yet very real sense, to all intents for many i ny years he was editor of the magazine, and under his famous pseudonym of Kit Nortii, swayed before the world. In 1820 lie was appointed to succeed Dr. Brown, deceased, ns profes sor of moral philosophy in the university of Edinburgh, his friend, sir W. Hamilton, being one of the defeated candidates. His real claims to such a post, though ant to be compared with those of Hamilton—who, at that time, however, had given little or no proof before the public of his consummate accomplishment and ability—have been some what unduly depreciated. They were not so by Hamilton himself, whose opinion it was,
as reported by Mr. De Quincey, that " Wilson's philosophic subtlety of intellect was not the least wonderful of his many wonderful gifts.' Thus much is certain, that as a pro fessor, though somewhat desultory in his methods, lie had an almost unexampled power of stimulating the enthusiasm of his students. Out of his class-room, however, it must be admitted lie but indifferently succeeded in attaining the staid ideal proper to the learned and respectable class of men with whom he was thus somewhat oddly associated. He was the most "muscular" of "Christians," and on more than one occasion the singular spectacle was exhibited of a Scotch professor of moral science taking off his coat in a public market-place to inflict personal chastisement on some ruffian, whose obnoxious proceedings had clone outrage to his nicer sense of the fitness of things. Though sedulous and strict in his discharge of his ditties as a professor, Wilson was loyal in his adhesion to Blackwood, and his contributions to the magazine, in their mere amount enormous, continued to form the main part of his activity. In 1810 he suffered an irreparable loss in the death of his wife. His grief for a while nearly prostrated him, and seems to have flung something of a shadow over what of life remained to him. He continued, however, to contribute to Blackwood, though now somewhat more intermit tently; and in 1842 lie published, as The Recreations of Christopher North, a selection, in two volumes, from the mass of his essays furnished to it. During the session 1852-53, he was smitten by an attack of paralysis, which permanently incapacitated him for the discharge of professorial duty; and in Edinburgh, on April 3, 1854, he died. During his last years he enjoyed a pension of £200 a year from government, in acknowledgment of his literary services. Besides his poetry and periodical writings, he published, in 1822, a volume of sketches, entitled Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, which was followed the year after by his tale of Margaret Lyndsay. In these, as in his poems, the robuster side of his mind is scarcely, if at all, represented; but the tender idyllic grace and charm by which they are pervaded, secured for them an extensive popularity, some portion of which they have since continued to retain. In his miscellaneous prose essays, critical and descriptive, and most especially in the celebrated series of dialogues entitled Noctes Ambrosiame, the true power of his genius is revealed. Of the genius, there can be little question; though as to whether it has succeeded in embodying itself in forms which are likely to be permanent, there may reasonably be difference of opinion. The materials for judgment are before the world in the collected (or rather selected) edition of his mis cellanies, published since his death by his son-in-law, prof. Ferrier. As a magnificent potentiality, it is scarcely exaggeration to speak of Wilson along with Burns and Scott as a member of the trinity (so to speak) of Scottish literary genius. Certain it is, that nearly as effectually as they did, he stormed the heart of the Scottish people, and became, in his later years—the great novelist being gone—their idol and accepted literary repre sentative. If he has left behind him no work sacred as his literary monument, thus much was almost involved in the conditions tinder which lie wrote. Writing, as he did, from month to month, for the instant purpose of the hour, wise and steady concentra tion of his energies became more and more difficult for him. Not the less, when all reasonable deduction is made, he holds his place as one of the most notable literary fig ures in the earlier half of this century. His range of power is extraordinary ; from the nicest subtleties of feminine tenderness, he passes at will to the wildest animal riot and the most daring grotesqueries of humor; and in what he terms "numerous prose," the prose poem or rhapsody—a questionable and perilous, though, within wise limits, a legitimate form of art—he may be held, in his finer passages, to be at this day unrivaled. Bee the affectionate and felicitous Memoir by his daughter, Mrs. Gordon (1863). A selec tion from the Nodes Ambrosiance--Comedy of the Nodes Ambrosiante—by J. Skelton, appeared in 1876.