Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/258

222 222 WILLIAM BLA CKWOOD. life; like the old Danish hero 'to dare nobly, to will, strongly, and never to falter in the path of duty.' Such was Wilson's creed; and, till 1850, when he was found stricken down in his private room, ten minutes after the class hour, he astonished and de- lighted all that was intellectual in Edinburgh by these, aptly termed, 'volcanic lectures on ethics.' " Much work, however, had to be gone through be- fore that date ; his private fortune had been lost some years back by the failure of a house of business, and he was one of those men whom, the more work is thrown on them the more they are able to go through with. In 1822 appeared the first specimen of his power as a novelist in the "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life," which went rapidly through edition after edition ; and in the March of this year appeared also the first number of the Noctes Ambrosiance a curt dialogue between the editor and Ensign O'Doherty ; it was not for seventeen numbers that Wilson, almost sorry, commenced that wonderful series that became one of the literary wonders of the day ; and for thirteen years as Christopher North he continued to delight the world, and it is as Christopher North, in his shooting-jacket, with gun or fishing-rod, by the lochs or by the moors, amid the scenery which he has so marvellously limned, and the emotions to which he has given utterance, that he will be remembered to all time. In 1824 we see that Carlyle gets his first pleasant encouragement in Maga, and Moir's most famous production, the " Autobiography of Mansie Wauch," appears. Moir a young surgeon of only nineteen when he first appeared in the pages of the original