from the great Marquis of Montrose,—a great part was lost by the faikire of a mercantile concern in which it had been embarked. Soon after quitting the university, he purchased the beautiful estate of Elleray, on the noble lake of Windermere, which led to his intimacy with Wordsworth, Southey, Ouillinan, Coleridge and De Quincey. Here he contributed some fine letters to Coleridge's Friend, under the signature of "Mathetes"; and hence, quite as much as from the character of his poems, his general association with the "Lake School." In 1812, appeared The Isle of Palms; and in 1816, The City of the Plague. These poems, together with those by which they were accompanied, or which subsequently appeared in the magazines of the day, gave the author a high place among modern bards. The characteristics of his poetry are exuberance of fancy; tenderness and pathos; sympathy with the beauties of nature, and the charms of rural and contemplative life; and touching pictures of religious confidence and innocent love. These qualities constitute the charm of Wilson's lesser poems, which will continue to please; but in the more sustained flights of his muse become, in spite of the classical purity of their diction, almost monotonous in their even, sustained and uncontrasted progression. Their early critic was Jeffrey, who welcomed the new aspirant, and strove to withdraw him from the "pond-poets" over the border. Of Wilson's novels,—The Foresters, Margaret Lindsay,[1] The Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life,—it can only be said that they possess excellencies and defects very similar to those of his poetry. In 1814, he came to reside in Edinburgh, and was called to the bar, but never practised. In 1817, was started Blackwood's Magazine, with its indiscriminate Toryism,—its unjust and unreasoning abuse of what it was pleased to term the "Cockney School," with Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt at its head,—and its glorification of everything north of the Tweed, and whatever chanced to be written in what was grandiloquently termed the British " Doric." Wilson, Lockhart and Maginn were on the staff, and Blackwood s had already become known, — as was said,—as the Blackguard's; when the two latter gravitating to London,—Lockhart in 1826, to edit the Quarterly, and Maginn, in 1830, to establish Fraser's,—Wilson was left to alter the character of the magazine, and give it the high literary and critical standing which it so long maintained.
Still, it must be admitted that John Wilson, in criticism as in other walks of literature, too often made a reckless use of his vast powers, and allowed judgment to be swayed by politics or nationality. Time has reversed many of his verdicts; and there is much truth, as well as beauty, in the dictum of a modern writer[2]:—"Christopher North, Cock of the walk, whose crowings have now long given place to much sweet singing that they often tried to drown; and who, for all his Jove-like head, cloud-capped in Scotch sentiment and humour, was but a bantam Thunderer after all. … There they lie, broken weeds in the furrows traced by time's ploughshare for the harvest which they would fain have choked." One review, and one only, did Wilson write for the "blue and yellow."
- ↑ This beautiful story has been translated into French by Mme. La Comtesse M——, 4 vols. 12mo; and is preceded by a "Notice" by M. de Barante, characterized by a subtle and genial appreciation worthy of the author of the Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne.
- ↑ D. G. Rossetti.
