Page:The Maclise Portrait-Gallery.djvu/105

 This was an article on ihe fourth canto of Childe Harold. He possessed many of the qualities which go to form a great critic; and was, indeed, pre-eminently great, when the catholicity of his sympathies was not impaired by political or national prejudice. Here, too, he was truly original in style; at once subtle in analysis, precise in discrimination, genial in tone, and rich in imaginative illustration. In the union of these characteristics, I do not know that he had a precursor, or that he has since been surpassed.

In 1820, -by the death of Thomas Brown, who, himself, had succeeded Dugald Stewart, the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh became vacant, and Wilson,—to whom a fixed income had become necessary,—was urged by his friends, and especially by Sir Walter Scott, to become a candidate. His opponent was Sir William Hamilton,—unfortunately his early friend,— a gentleman, a scholar, a logician and metaphysician of the highest rank. The contest was of the keenest, but its bitterness was confined to the partisans of the candidates. Wilson was as yet an untried, and comparatively unknown man; but his Conservatism,—time had worked its wonders for him, and he had long shed his radical skin,—gained him the day, and he was elected to the vacant chair mainly by political influence. This was not as it should have been; and there can be no question that Sir William Hamilton was the fitter man. The experiment, however, turned out better than could have been anticipated. Wilson had, perhaps, as was said to cram for his lectures; but they were prepared with great care, and delighted his auditory by their fire, originality and eloquence, and the happy combination of literature, philosophy and poetry which they exhibited.

Not to speak here of the immortal "Noctes Ambrosianæ" would indeed be an unpardonable omission. How capital is the motto, in the humorously amplified rendering into English of the old Greek lines, which stands at the head of each number in Blackwood:—

Who is there who would not have given his very ears to be present at the ever memorable noctes cænæque of our northern Athens, and listen to the converse of these deipnosophists of modern times; when North and Hogg, and the rest of the Northern Lights were in their glory; and when, as has been well said, the brilliant wit, the merry song, and, from time to time, the grave and interesting discussion, gave to the sanded parlour of a common alehouse, the air of the Palæstra at Tusculum, or the Amaltheum of Cumæ. Here we have Wilson at his best, giving us the reflex of his many-sided intellect, alternating poetry with politics, wit with wisdom, pathos with bathos, fun with philosophy,' literary gossip with metaphysical discussion, gastronomy with asthetics,—and this by means of the most skilful and artistic ordonnance of heterogeneous and apparently unmanageable qualities and characters. Perhaps the domain of literature hardly contains so remarkable an instance of the union