Cockaigne. However this may be, I exult | manifested so much emotion at the resemwith all my heart and mind and soul and blance of the scenery to his own native strength in the effusions of Christopher North. hills, and broke into a torrent of tears when Sure I am that every German who at my insti- Andersen, to intensify the association, began gation studies the writings of Wilson will feel to sing a well-known Scottish air. Sentimengrateful for the hint. One will admire him tal myself, I could not for the life of me scold as the gentle and pathetic tale-teller, as in one so susceptible to Heimweh; so instead of "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life," abusing I began to pump him, catechising "The Foresters," and "The Trials of Mar- him about the literature and national characgaret Lyndsay." Another, as the refined, teristics of his "land of the mountain and reflective, tender, and true poet, who has the flood." Of all living authors he panegysung in sweetest verse, "The Isle of Palms," rized chiefly Professor Wilson, whom hitherto Unimore," and "The City of the Plague." I had known by repute only as the editor of A third, as the accomplished metaphysician Blackwood. He dwelt enthusiastically on and professor of moral philosophy, who can the critic, the poet, the novelist, and last, make his abstruse themes as rich with grace- not least, the man; telling me many a tradiful drapery and jewelled front as with our tion, apocryphal or otherwise, of his blithe ontologists they are withered and dry as dust. boyhood, his Oxford career, and his doings A fourth, as the imaginative commentator at Elleray; how he threw himself into the on the world's classics-Homer, Spenser, roistering companionship of gipsies and tinShakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth-around kers, potters and strolling players; how he whose immortal lines he throws a new halo, served as waiter, and won all hearts-Bonso that their old glory seems as nothing by iface's included-at a Welsh inn ;* how at reason of the glory that excelleth. A fifth, Oxford he repeatedly fought a pugnacious as the ardent politician, dashing like an eagle shoemaker; and how, in all such encounters, on a dovecot, among Whigs, Radicals-et he magnanimously recorded himself beaten hoc genus omne. A sixth, as the shrewd, when beaten he was. I returned to my satirical, caustic reviewer, dealing out retri- rooms that day with a pile of Wilson's writbution wholesale on a herd of poetasters. ings under my arm. And as there are eclectics who will thus admire him in some one or other of his aspects; so there are syncretists (myself among the number) who admire him in all.

Six summers have now come and gone since I learned to know and love Christopher North. In 1845 I was lecturing to a drowsy class on certain obscure developments of transcendental philosophy, when I had to call to order a red-haired foreign student, who, in violation of lecture-room decorum, was intent on the perusal of some work of fiction, and whose eyes, as I saw when he raised them at my protest, were suffused with tears. After lecture I summoned him to my rooms. He was a Caledonian to the backbone-from the wilds of Ross-shire-as primitive a specimen in dialect, though not in intellect, as that memorable stripling who told Dr. Chalmers before his class at St. Andrews that Julius Caesar was the father of the correct theory of population. The book he had been crying over-and his eyes were still red-was Andersen's. "Dichters Bazaar;" and the passage that affected the poor fellow was that descriptive of Andersen's rencontre at Innsbruck with a young Scotchman, on a sentimental journey, who

*Life, by Hanna, vol. iii.

The critics en masse will support me, I apprehend, in preferring Wilson's prose to his poetry. The latter is apt to pall upon the taste; it is too dainty, too elevated, too ornamental a thing for the uses of this "working-day world." It is delicious when seen in an extract; but read in extenso, it is almost suggestive of a yawn. Moods of mind there are when it pleases almost beyond compare; but they are exceptional, transient. If you exult in it at soft twilight, and find that it then laps your senses in elysium, the probability is that at midday you will wonder what has come to it or to yourself that the spell is broken, the rapture diluted into satiety, the surge and swell of inspiration smoothened to a dead calm. According to Dr. Moir, its grand characteristics are delicacy of sentiment, and ethereal elegance of description-refining and elevating whatever it touches. It avoids the stern and the rug* Recorded also in Howitt's Homes and Haunts, vol. ii.

This is mentioned, too, in De Quincey's Autobiography.

See "Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half Century," by D. M. Moir: Blackwood & Sons. 1851. These sketches were lectures delivered to the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh in the winter of 1850-1 The volume is a faithful and generous estimate of the great poets of the age just

ged at the expense of the sublime; preferring | another greater or lesser star. One cannot whatever is gentle, placid, and tender. The help wondering, however, that even with result of this, however, is-as Lord Jeffrey this theme Wilson should write so little that pointed out along with a tranquillizing and is powerful amid so much that is pathetic; most touching sweetness, a certain monotony that he should raise so few spirits of terror and languor, which ordinary readers of poetry from the vasty deep of his imagination; and will be apt to call dulness. As Wilson's that, at his warm touch, the freezing horrors friend Macnish-the modern Pythagorean- of such a topic should melt, thaw, and discharacterizes it: solve themselves almost into a gentle dew. in this work; and of his minor poems," gems Descriptions "beautiful exceedingly" abound of purest ray serene" are "Edith and Nora," the "Address to a Wild Deer," and the "Lines Written in a Highland Glen."

To his novels and tales, with all their peculiar charm, the same objection of " languor and monotony" is also applicable. He is too apt to cancel from his pictures whatever would offend a too fastidious ideal; to eliminate every negative quantity; to give us the rose without the thorn, poetry without prose, man without original sin. His shepherds and shepherdesses, his swains and cottars, are nearly as unreal, though far more interesting, than the pastoral creatures dear to Shenstone and Dresden china. They flit before us like figures in bas-relief, which want more background and less statuesque uniformity. Jeffrey, in his review of " Margaret Lyndsay," "Lights and Shadows," &c., objected to them as lamentably deficient in that bold and free vein of invention, that thorough knowledge of the world, and rectifying spirit of good sense, which redeem all Scott's flights from the imputation either of extravagance or. affectation.

"His strain like holy hymn upon the ear doth float, Or voice of cherubim, in mountain vale remote." It is not of the earth, earthy. But so much the more it fails in human interest, and seems to soar above human sympathies-as though, like the Ettrick Sheperd's "Kilmeny," or our own Fouqué's "Undine," the link were broken which "bound it in the bundle of life" with common clay. "I should like," said Allan Cunningham, "to live in a world of John Wilson's making: how lovely would be the hills, how romantic the mountains; how clear the skies, how beauteous the light of the half-risen sun; how full of paradise the vales, and of music the streams! The song of the birds would be for ever heard, the bound of the deer for ever seen; thistles would refuse to grow, and hail-showers to descend; while amid the whole woman would walk a pure, unspotted creature, clothed with loveliness as with a garment, the flowers seeking the pressure of her white feet, the wind feeling enriched by her breath, while the eagle would hesitate to pounce upon the lambs, charmed into a dove by the presence of beauty and innocence.' This applies rather to the "Isle of Palms" and to Unimore" than to the "City of the Plague," the very title of which is sufficiently discordant with the above description, and the subject of which was declared monstrous by Come we now to his connection with periSouthey.* "It is," says he, "out-German-odical literature. Putting on the anonymous, izing the Germans; it is like bringing rack, he forthwith became broader in girth, higher wheels, and pincers, upon the stage to excite in stature, greater in strength. Like the pathos." Perhaps the tu quoque might be cap of Fortunatus, it seemed to endow him. here retorted upon the author of "Thalaba" with new faculties. Addison says there are with considerable unction; and at any rate few works of genius that come out at first he must include in his censure the genius of with the author's name; and adds: "For my Dante, of Boccaccio, of Defoe, of Manzoni, own part, I must declare, the papers I preof Shelley, of Brockden Brown, and many sent the public are like fairy favors, which shall last no longer than while the author is past or still current. We do not, indeed, know any concealed." No sooner had Christopher book which may be more confidently recommended to the young of the present day who may be anxious North shouldered his crutch than he showed how fields are won-handling it like a sceptre that made him monarch of all he surveyed. He did not indeed use his liberty as a cloak for licentiousness, but he was laughingly and laughably reckless in his doings and darings. Coleridge in one of his

66

to know what is best worth their attention in one important branch of recent literature. Most sad it is to reflect that the amiable and accomplished author-the DELTA of "Blackwood's Magazine"was suddenly cut off in the vigor of his days in July last.-Ed. C. E. J.

In a letter to C. W. W. Wynn, 1816.

But all must acknowledge the exquisite pathos and the generous enthusiasm, consecrated everywhere by a pervading purity of sentiment, which make them justly dear to youth and innocence.

himself." The unique style of Wilson's criticisms is hardly conceivable by those amongst us who are ignorant of his mother-tongue : we have nothing I can point to by way of parallel, harldly even of resemblance. He has the wit and searching intellect of Lessing; the facile analysis of Brockhaus; the philosophic tendency of the younger Schlegel ; the discriminative faculty of the elder; Herder's catholic sympathies; Tieck's lively en

monologues, as De Staël called them, blamed his lawless expenditure of talent and genius in his protracted management of "Blackwood," but at the same time exclaimed:* "How can I wish that Wilson should cease to write what so often soothes and suspends my bodily miseries, and my mental conflicts!" How indeed? With such cordiality in his chuckle, such glee in his eccentricities, such genius in his vagaries, such method in his madness, who coull frown on the extrava-thusiasm; much of Heine's withering sarganzas of North any more than utter grave strictures on the " All Fool's Day" of Charles Lamb? It was all so genial that you for gave everything and forgot nothing. And then his eloquence was truly as "the rush of mighty waters"

"How the exulting thoughts,
Like chidren on a holiday, rush forth
And shout, and call to eyery humming bee,
And bless the birds for angels !"

One of his "Cockney" victims, upon whose shoulders he had laid the crutch with more bone-crushing (beinbrechend) emphasis than any other man's, eulogizes his prose as a rich territory of exuberance congenial with Keats's poetry a forest tempest-tossed indeed, compared with those still valleys and enchanted gardens, but set in the same region of the remote, the luxuriant, the mythologicalgoverned by a more wilful and scornful spirit, but such as hates only from an inverted spirit of loving, impatient of want of sympathy. Well might poor Hartley Coleridge call Christopher North the happiest speaking mask since Father Shandy and Uncle Toby were silent; " for Elia," he adds, "is Charles

*Table-Talk, vol. ii.

How characteristic these writings were of the man may be illustrated by a letter of Mrs. Grant of Laggan, who, after calling Wilson "the most provoking creature imaginable," proceeds to say: "He is young, handsome, wealthy, witty; has great learning, exuberant spirits, a wife and children that he dotes on, and no vice that I know, but on the contrary, virtuous principles and feelings. Yet his wonderful eccentricity would put anybody but his wife wild. She, I am convinced, was actually made on purpose for her husband, and has that kind of indescribable controlling influence over him that Catherine is said to have had over that wonderful savage the Czar Peter."- Memoirs and Correspond ence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan.

Sydney Yendys: "The Roman." Scene vi. § Leigh Hunt: Seer."

In his introduction to Massinger. Elsewhere Hartley Coleridge writes:-"Wilson is the best critic that Scotland has produced; nay, that is say ing too little. When at his best, he is almost the best that Britain has produced."—Essays, ii.

casm; and the dashing vigor of Menzel : to-
gether with a nescio quid which harmonizes
their discords; a something that separates
him from their conventionalisms, and makes
him like "a star that dwells apart:" a comet
if you will--but glorious in its vagrancy—
brilliant with a light that never was on sea
or shore of the orbis veteribus notus.
nature endowed with what Tennyson ascribes
to the dead friend he memorializes so fondly:

"Heart-affluence in discursive talk

Him

From household fountains never dry;
The critic clearness of an eye
That saw through all the Muses' walk."*

With all his partisanship and consummate irony, he is justly praised for tolerance, and for the fine spirit of frankness and generous good-will which animates many of his reviews of political and literary foes; for, as Justice Talfourd observes, notwithstanding his own decided opinions, he has a compass of mind large enough to embrace all others which have noble alliances within its range. Seldom, if ever in fact, was so sound and warm a heart allied to so clear a head. If our Gutzkow is not more trenchant in his satire and scorn, neither is our Jean Paul more gentle, more meltingly tender, more winning and womanly in his gushing pathos. "The Recreations of Christopher North" collect some of his choicest miscellanea; but why does he not make a selection also from that glorious repository of eccentric, self-willed, ebullient genius, the Nights at Ambrose's?" Nowhere else does he appear to such advantage. He there riots in prodigality of intellectual

"In Memoriam."

+"Life and letters of Charles Lamb." Lamb and Wilson met once only. Talfourd tells us they walked out from Ensfield (Lamb's residence) together, and strolled happily a long summer day; not omitting, however, a call for a refreshing draught. Lamb called for a pot of ale or porter-half of which would have been his own usual allowance; and was deligthed to hear the Professor, on the appearance of the foaming tankard, say reproachfully to the waiter, "And one for me !"

From Fraser's Magazine.

EDMUND BURKE.

PART II.-Continued from the Eclectic Magazine for January.