Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/390

 374 CRITICAL STUDIES as the greyhound, and his eyes like the lightning of fiery flame (Wilson, author of the * Isle of Palms ') . . . There came also from a far country the scorpion, which delighteth to sting the faces of men (Lockhart). . . . Also the great wild boar from the forest of Lebanon, and he roused up his spirit, and I saw him whetting his dreadful tusks for the battle (Hogg, from Ettrick Forest). Also the black eagle of the desert, whose cry is as the sound of an unknown tongue, which flieth over the ruins of the ancient cities, and hath his dwelling among the tombs of the wise men (Sir William Hamilton)." The formidable catalogue included also the lynx, the griflfin, the stork, the hyaena, "and the beagle and the slowhound after their kind, and all the beasts of the field, more than could be numbered, they were so many." Charged with such powerful explosives as political passion and reckless personalities, a paper or series of papers will indeed go up like a rocket, but is apt to come down like the stick. If, then, when the gun- powder has been long burnt out, and the firework blaze long since swallowed up in oblivious darkness, the " Noctes " still float in the upper air, and still shine with a certain pale or ruddy light, it must be because of some inherent buoyancy and brilliance. It is true that of the original series of seventy-one, Professor J. F. Ferrier, in his twelve-volumed edition of the works of his father-in-law, left about thirty to haunt as wan ghosts the sepulchral limbo of old sets of Blackwood ; some because they were mainly occupied with matters of merely local and temporary interest, others because Wilson had but small part in them; but the remainder (forty-one by Preface,