Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/189

Rh inclining to blue, pulley-hawleying away at the unresisting figure of the follower of Fox," and getting irritated at the amount of drab duffle, and drab broadcloth, and drabbish linen, to be got rid of before the company could sit down comfortably to supper! To the same composite order belong the "Hints for the Holidays" (1826), "Christmas Dreams" and "Christmas Presents" (1828), "Christopher in his Sporting Jacket" (1828), "Winter Rhapsody" (1830), "The Moots" (1830), "Christopher at the Lakes" (1832), "Christopher on Colonsay" (1834), "Christopher among the Mountains" (1838), &c. Some of the best of these were re-produced in the selected "Recreations of Christopher North," a few years since,—a little pruned and weeded, as was meet and right. For it must surely be allowed by the sturdiest of the Clan North, that their Chieftain was often sadly addicted to whole pages of twaddle—and that indeed he was apt now and then to take advantage of the good-nature of his public, by inflicting on them merciless floods of vapid, mawkish composition—sometimes bubbling with frothy rodomontade, sometimes stagnating in dull and dreary platitudes. What could be expected when a single man would charge himself with the production of a whole monthly number, and make his penmanship the staple of a double number to boot?

In referring to his critical essays, we may venture to demur, in part, to an assumption in the éloge in his own magazine, that to Wilson belongs the merit of purifying criticism from vicious partisanship, and of introducing a broad, catholic, tolerant spirit into our literary reviews, freed for the first time from the prejudices of clique or political sect. In some measure this is true, and a noble truth. But it is hard to read certain criticisms of his on the "Cockney" school, and Whig or Radical Authorship, without marking the distinct influence of political and social prejudice on his literary taste. That he gradually and signally disenthralled himself from such trammels, may be frankly and admiringly conceded; but from the beginning it was not so. Compare his tone towards Leigh Hunt in 1842 with that in 1827. The Christopher of the Dies Boreales would have written very differently from him of the early Noctes on such poets as Keats and Shelley,—or Keates and Shelly, as he used to spell their names—(accuracy in nomenclature not being among his accomplishments, great as he might be in "calling names"—for constantly we meet with hits of heterography such as De Quincy, Macauley, Keeble, Miss Jewesbury, George Cruickshanks, Thomas Carlisle, &c.;—and Wordsworth, it is said, often expressed his annoyance at the systematic perversion of Grasmere into Grassmere). In unsparing satire and reckless invective, Wilson has probably never been matched: fairly roused, he would stick at nothing in the heat of assault; whatever his hand found to fling, he flung it with all his might—whether paving-stone from the causeway, or mud from the kennel Woe to the wight whom he devoted to the Furies—to cockneys and bagmen poetasters all and sundry, who well might