Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/367

Rh enriched him with a fortune of £10,000. But only ten years thereafter, Wilson, now the father of two sons and three daughters, was reduced to a very limited income compared with his former resources. As profuse of his money as of his ideas, he had flung both about with reckless prodigality; but while the latter stock, like the purse of Fortunatus, underwent no diminution let him squander it as he pleased, it was otherwise with the former, which had dissolved he knew not how. Thus it was with him to the end of his days: he made little or no account of money while it lasted, and was one of those happy uncalculating spirits, to whom the difference between £10 and £100 is a mere nothing. Something more than the scanty relics of his fortune, with the additional profits of authorship, was necessary; and in 1820 a favourable prospect occurred, in consequence of the death of Dr. Thomas Brown, by which the chair of moral philosophy in the university of Edinburgh became vacant. Wilson presented his name among the candidates for the charge, and his Mends commenced an active canvass in his behalf. But the proposal took Edinburgh aback. Wilson a teacher of morals! The religious remembered the unlucky Chaldee Manuscript, and the grave and orderly bethought them of his revels. Even those who took a more tolerant view of the subject, could not comprehend how the president of Ambrose's nodes could be fitted for the chair of Brown and Dugald Stewart. But what, perhaps, weighed more heavily with the citizen-electors was the fact of his Toryism, to which, like the generality of shop-keepers and merchants, they were decidedly hostile. All these obstacles, Sir Walter Scott, who had long known and admired the genius of the applicant, fully calculated, and thus expressed in his usual tolerant manner: "You are aware that the only point of exception to Wilson may be, that, with the fire of genius, he has possessed some of its eccentricities; but did he ever approach to those of Henry Brougham, who is the god of Whiggish idolatry? If the high and rare qualities with which he is invested are to be thrown aside as useless, because they may be clouded by a few grains of dust which he can blow aside at pleasure, it is less a punishment on Mr. Wilson than on the country. I have little doubt he would consider success in this weighty matter as a pledge for binding down his acute and powerful mind to more regular labour than circumstances have hitherto required of him; for indeed, without doing so, the appointment could in no point of view answer his purpose. . . . . You must of course recommend to Wilson great temper in his canvass—for wrath will do no good. After all, he must leave off sack, purge and live cleanly as a gentleman ought to do; otherwise, people will compare his present ambition to that of Sir Terry O'Fagg, when he wished to become a judge. 'Our pleasant follies are made the whips to scourge us,' as Lear says; for otherwise, what could possibly stand in the way of his nomination? I trust it will take place, and give him the consistence and steadiness which are all he wants to make him the first man of the age." The nomination did take place according to Sir Walter's wish, notwithstanding an amount of opposition seldom offered in such elections; and Wilson, to the general surprise of all classes, became professor of moral philosophy, a grave and important charge which he occupied thirty-two years.

In this manner, at the early age of thirty-four, a man esteemed so reckless in temper and unfixed in purpose, so devoted to the whim of the passing hour and careless of the morrow, had yet by sheer force of talent fought his way to an eminence of the highest literary as well as moral responsibility. As a