Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/192

178 kidney, such as Ben, and Shakspeare, and Dick Corbet (pride of the lawn) would have chimed in with. Tories, of the Ambrosial sect, understood, that in order to be a gentleman- it is necessary to be a man." The dramatic individuality of the compotators is certainly, in the main, most distinctly pronounced, and surprisingly well kept up. Wilson plumed himself upon it: "In those divine dialogues, the Noctes Ambrosianæ," he says (reviewing Davy's Salmonia, where the interlocutors have no individuality at all), "you could not change the name of one speaker for another, even for one retort courteous, or quip modest, without the misnomer being instantly detected by the dullest ear." The scope of the Dies Boreales may preclude the same felicitous effect; at any rate it is no longer patent in the graver debates in which to Hogg, and Tickler, and Mallion, have succeeded Seward, and Buller, and Talboys. Alas! though, that the Dies should so soon have finished their course. How gratefully welcome they were; and how cordially we looked forward to each new session of Christopher under Canvass, and to a prolonged continuance of the series. They were worthy of the ripe, yet green old age which had haunted Ambrose's in its prime:—sobered, solemnised, saddened—"but that not much"—mellow with rich but unusual tints, with the soft western glow of a large soul's sunset. Who would have thought the two last of all were penned by a hand trembling with paralysis, and almost illegible to the compositor, though so readily perused by his friends and students. In reading them we were reminded of the elder Humboldt's saying, "I have always contemplated old age as a more pleasing, more charming period of life than youth; and now that I have reached this term of life, I find my expectations almost surpassed by the reality. … Meditation becomes purer, stronger, and more continuous." The meditative character of the Dies is full of winning tenderness and manly strength combined; the buoyant, often boisterous spirits of midnight revelries have been toned down, and chastened, and a little dulled—as became one who felt that, in his own case, Highly therefore we prize these the last records of his literary career—to which we may apply lines of his, and call them

Professor Wilson had well-nigh fulfilled his threescore years and ten when he died. By man's prevision, he might, with his constitution, have been expected to reach fourscore, without his strength even then being labour and sorrow. But it was not so to be. A quarter of a century ago, he playfully canvassed the term of human life, and declared the limit of threescore and ten to be "quite long enough." "If a man," said he, "will but be busy, and not idle away his time, he may do wonders within that period. … Let us die at a moderate age, and be thankful. Why this vain longing for longevity? Why seek to rob human life of its melancholy moral—namely, its shortness?" And again, elsewhere, but in the same year: "Oh! who can complain of the shortness of human life that can re-travel all the windings, and wanderings, and mazes