Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/363

Rh Glasgow family, the early youth of the future Christopher North was not subject to those privations that crush the weak, and nurse the strong into greater hardihood. Of the first stages of his education at a Paisley school he has left no account; but we learn from his "Recreations," that at a more advanced period he was placed under the tuition of a country minister, who, in those days of scanty teinds, eked out his stipend by receiving pupils into the manse as boarders. In this rural situation, the boy conned his lessons within doors; but the chief training for his future sphere consisted of many a long ramble among the beautiful scenery with which he was surrounded, and the frolics or conversation of the peasantry, among whom he soon became a general favourite. On reaching the age of fourteen he was sent to the university of Glasgow, where he studied Greek and Logic during three sessions under professors Young and Jardine. Few literary minds could pass under the training of such teachers, and especially the last, without finding it constitute a most important epoch in their intellectual history; and it was to Jardine that Wilson's great rival in critical literature—Jeffrey—acknowledged those first mental impulses which he afterwards prosecuted so successfully. In 1804, John Wilson went to Oxford, and was entered into Magdalen College as a gentleman-commoner; and there his diligence was attested by the knowledge of the best classical writers of antiquity which he afterwards displayed, and his native genius by the production of an English poem of fifty lines for the Newdigate prize of £50, in which he was the successful competitor. In another kind of college exercises he was also particularly distinguished, such as leaping, running, and boxing, and the sports of boat-rowing, cricket-playing, and coursing, with other amusements of a more boisterous and perhaps more questionable nature. But in the days of "Town-and-Gown," and with such iron strength of limb and fierce effervescence of animal spirits as Wilson possessed, the case could scarcely have been otherwise. It was hard therefore that these curious escapades, while an Oxford student, should have been numbered up against him, when he sought at a future period to become the guide and preceptor of students. On one occasion, it was said, he joined, during the college recess, a band of strolling players, with whom he roamed from town to town, enjoying their merry vagabond life, and playing every character, from the lover "sighing like furnace," to the "lean and slippered pantaloon." This we can easily believe; the event .is no unfrequent recoil from the strictness of a college life; and more than one grave personage is yet alive, in whose venerated position, as well as awe-inspiring wrinkles, no one could read the fact, that once on a time they had drank small beer with king Cambyses, or handed a cracked tea-cup of gin to Cleopatra. On another occasion, he became waiter at an inn, that he might be within the sphere of one of its fair female residents, and in this capacity so endeared himself by his inexhaustible glee to the whole establishment, that they were disconsolate when he cast off his slough and disappeared. But the oddest of all the adventures attributed to him was his having fallen in love with a daughter of the sovereign of the gipsies, of whom he would fain have been the king Cophetua, and for whose sake he transformed himself into an Egyptian, and took a share in the wanderings of the tribe, until the successful pursuit of his friends restored him to civilized life. This incessant restlessness and love of desperate enterprise was accompanied with many a purpose of foreign travel, and while at one time he calculated upon a tour over the Peninsula in the rear of the British army, or a run through Turkey; at another, he meditated an African exploration that was to extend to Timbuctoo.