Edinburgh. His competitor was Sir William Hamilton, then, however, but little known. Wilson succeeded in sustaining both his editorship and his professorship with great distinction. Although neither original nor profound as a thinker, he was eminently successful in stimulating and interesting his pupils.

Aside from his contributions to the Magazine, he published Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, The Trial of Margaret Lyndsay, and The Foresters. The principal collections of his magazine pieces are to be found in The Critical and Miscellaneous Articles of Christopher North, The Recreations of Christopher North, and the Noctes Ambrosianæ.

It can scarcely be doubted that Wilson possessed poetic talents, but whether he was really a poet remains undecided. In the press of his duties as professor and constant contributor, his aim was too much distracted to permit him to ripen into a decided poet. His genius shone brightest when writing those genial, hap-hazard, yet eminently suggestive sketches, criticisms, and fragments that filled page after page of Blackwood, and kept the reader laughing or frowning, but always awake. There was a spontaneity, a freshness, about North's utterances, a freedom from conventionality, that surprised and delighted.

After all, however, there is ground for believing that North was greater than his works. The historian or the critic encounters, from time to time, a hero or an author who occupies an exalted position, and yet who has left no record or monument which, considered in itself alone, would justify such exaltation. The explanation is to be looked for in the impression which the presence and character of the man himself made upon his friends, and which they have communicated to the nation at large. Horner is an instance, and Wilson is another. They are men of capabilities, of potentialities rather than of realities. There is a something about their name and bearing which suggests that they may do, or might have done, far beyond what they ever have done. Thus it is that we must explain the phenomena of North's record in Scotch literature. The popular heart has always associated him with Burns and Scott, as one of a great literary trio. To the Scotch mind, the massive form, shaggy brows, rollicking manner, shrewd bonhomic, independent speech of the great Kit North, are typical of national character. He is a man whom his countrymen thoroughly understand, and with whom they can sympathize.

JAMES WILSON, 1795-1856, brother of "Christopher North" (Prof. John Wilson), was born at Paisley, Scotland. He began the study of the law, but soon relinquished it, and taking to himself a wife, and a pretty little cottage near Edinburgh, gave himself up to the life of a naturalist.

Wilson's contributions on natural history have all the grace and beauty of those of the American ornithologists, Wilson and Audubon, and of other great naturalists who have studied Nature with the imagination of a poet and the fondness of a lover. He published Illustrations of Zoology, being representations of new, rare, or otherwise remarkable subjects of the animal kingdom, drawn and colored after nature, with descriptive letter-press; with James Duncan, Entomologia Edinensis, a description and history of the insects found in the neighborhood of Edinburgh; A Treatise on Insects; The Natural History of Quadrupeds and Whales; The Natural History of Fishes; The Natural History of Birds; The Rod and the Gun, two treatises on Angling and Shooting; A Voyage round the Coasts of Scotland and the Isles. Mr. Wilson contributed also most of the articles on natural history in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

HENRIETTA WILSON,

1862, a niece of Prof. John Wilson, wrote Little Things, and the Chronicles of a Garden, its Pets and its Pleasures.

De Quincey.

Thomas De Quincey, 1785-1859, is familiarly known as the English Opium Eater. Although in the main he made shipwreck of his wonderful powers, he yet achieved much that was great and noble. He is by common consent one of the greatest masters of English prose.

Career. De Quincey was born near Manchester, the son of a rich merchant. He spent his earliest years in rustic solitude, and afterwards, according to his own expression, "his infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, instead of horrid pugilistic brothers." At twelve he was sent to a public grammar-school. His proficiency there in classical studies approached the marvellous. At the age of seventeen, he ran away from school, took a tour on foot through Wales, and went thence to London, resolving to escape if possible the knowledge and control of his guardians. He led for several months a life of wild adventure in London, being often in abject poverty. The following year he entered Oxford, where he remained five years, and where, unfortunately, he contracted the habit of eating opium, which exerted such a baleful influence on his subsequent career.

After leaving the University, when about the age of twenty-four, he became intimate with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, and took up his abode among them at Grasmere, in the beautiful Lake region made famous by the residence of these great writers. He remained in that place about twenty years, devoting his time to literary pursuits, and publishing his writings through the magazines,- Blackwood, Tait, and others.

After indulging in the excessive use of opium for many years, he at last, by a desperate and long-continued effort, succeeded in overcoming the habit, though he never recovered entirely from the terrible effects. This was in 1820, when he was thirty-five years of age. In the following year he made a great sensation by the publication of The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, giving an account of his previous life and of his experience under the influence of the dreadful drug.

After leaving Grasmere, he went to Glasgow and thence to Edinburgh, in which latter city he spent the last years of his life. He lived to the age of seventy-four.

De Quincey was a man of extraordinary powers, and had they been under proper regulation, he might have achieved works which would have plac him among the great men of all time. As it is, his works are all of the nature of fragments, great and splendid, beyond the reach of any man of his time to equal, yet, after all, fragHe projected a great work, De Emendatione IIumani Intellectus (On the Im

ments.

provement of the Human Intellect), which might have been a companion to the Novum Organum of Bacon, if he had had the method and the persistence of will to carry the work to completion. "He never finished anything except his sentences, which are models of elaborate workmanship."- London Quarterly.

Of the excellence of his style, as a writer of prose, it is difficult to speak too highly. Not a few critics of great authority place him, in that respect, at the head of all English prose writers, while others divide the honor between him and Ruskin. His pre-eminent abilities seem to have met their full recognition first in the United States; and to Ticknor & Fields, of Boston, belongs the honor of bringing out the first complete edition of his works. That edition is in 20 vols., 12mo.

He wrote on a great variety of subjects, historical, literary, speculative, imaginative; and on every subject that he undertook he left the evidences of great and original genius. "The authors about whom he has written most are Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Of the first, third, and fourth, he was a devoted admirer and champion. But the second [Pope] seemed to him the very incarnation of the worst epoch of our literature."- London Quarterly.

De Quincey, like Coleridge, had a wonderful power in conversation. A visitor thus describes his talk: "For a half hour at least he talked as we have never heard another talk. We have listened to Sir William Hamilton at his own fireside, to Carlyle, walking in the parks of London, to Lamartine in the midst of a favored few at his own house, to Cousin at the Sorbonne, and to many others, but never have we heard such sweet music of eloquent speech as then flowed from De Quincey's tongue. To attempt reporting what he said would be like attempting to entrap the rays of the sun. Strange light beamed from that grief-worn face, and for a little while that weak body, so long fed upon by pain, seemed to be clothed upon with supernatural youth."

Lockhart.

John Gibson Lockhart, 1794-1854, occupies a large and honorable place in the literary history of his times.

Career. Lockhart was a native of Scotland. He was educated at Glasgow and Oxford, and married the eldest daughter of Sir Walter Scott. He was one of the early contributors to Blackwood's Magazine, and from 1826 to 1853 was editor of the London Quarterly Review, succeeding Gifford, the well-known "slasher" of young poets.

In his position as editor, Lockhart placed the Quarterly in the very first rank of periodicals, and restored to it the wide range of sympathy and culture which it had lost under Gifford's administration. Besides his editorial labors and his numerous and still uncollected contributions to the Quarterly, to Blackwood, and to other magazines, Lockhart is the author of a number of independent works.

Prominent among his works are the following: Reginald Dalton, a Novel, being a Story of English University Life; Matthew Wald, also a Novel; the Life of Burns, written with great understanding of the poet's character and talents; a Life of Napoleon; and a volume of Translations of Ancient Spanish Ballads. This work is well known to every or of ballad literature and warmly praised by critica of every country. Lockhart is at once a faithful and a spirited translator; in some instances, indeed, he has even improved slightly upon the imperfect original.

Lockhart's great work is his Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott, which, as a biography,

ranks next to Boswell's Life of Johnson. The chief merit of this biography, aside from the light which it throws upon the life of the celebrated novelist, is the warm spirit of devotion by which it is pervaded. Lockhart, like Boswell, is completely given up to his theme, and his own enthusiasm kindles the heart of the reader. As Prescott has happily expressed it: "Fortunate as Sir Walter Scott was in his life, it was not the least of his good fortune that he left the task of recording it to one so competent."

Landor.

WALTER SAVAGE Landor, 1775-1864, is one of the connecting links between the age of Walter Scott, Byron, and Southey, and that of Tennyson and Dickens. He began writing while still a boy, and he did not cease entirely until extreme old age, though he lived to be almost ninety.

Landor was educated at Rugby and Oxford, and was remarkable for the accuracy of his scholarship in Latin and Greek, and for his knowledge of history, and especially of the history of Greece and Rome. The men and the affairs of former ages seemed to be as familiar to his mind, in all the minutiae of their every-day and private life, as are those of our own personal acquaintance. This thoroughness of historical knowledge, joined to a vigorous imagination, enabled him to execute in so wonderful a manner those Imaginary Conversations, which form the enduring basis of his fame. In these Conversations, after the manner of Plato and Cicero, he introduces wellknown historical characters, as discussing various questions of public and private interest. The range of subjects discussed in these dialogues is almost encyclopædic in character, in accordance with the character of the author's mind, and the proprieties of time and person are so nicely observed that the reader almost unconsciously becomes acquainted with the men as well as with the subjects.

In this class of his works are to be included Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans, 2 vols.; Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen, 2 vols.; Pericles and Aspasia, 2 vols.; and perhaps Citation and Examination of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing.

Landor published several poems, some of which enjoyed much popularity, though all gave evidence of power. Gebir, one of his earliest, he translated into Latin, and Jeffrey declared it to be equally unintelligible in both languages, while Southey claimed to be the only person who had read it, until he discovered that the same feat had been accomplished by De Quincey. Some of Landor's other poems are Count Julian, a Tragedy; Andria of Hungary, and Giovanni of Naples, Dramas; Hellenics, etc. Mr. Landor was a man of wealth, extremely fastidions in his tastes, prond even to arrogance, careless, almost contemptuous, of public opinion, and not condescending to conceal the good opinion he had of himself. He was of course unpopular, and was subjected to savage criticism. Yet, as years rolled on, his eminent merits gradually obtained recognition; and, unlike many of his contemporaries, his star now stands confessedly higher in the firmament than it did fifty years ago. His writings are very unequal, and some of them doubtless deserve the condemnation which they received. But others are truly classical, and may claim to stand beside the famous works of antiquity which they most resemble in form and structure.

Mr. Landor in 1806 sold his large estates and left England in disgust. He served in the Spanish army, against Napoleon, from 1808 to 1814. In 1816 he became a resident of Florence, and died there in 1864, having visited England however at intervals meanwhile.

Leigh Hunt.

JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT, 1784-1859, was one of the leading literary men of this period.

Hunt was born at Southgate, near London, and educated at Christ Hospital, where Lamb and Coleridge also received their schooling. He began at a very early age the life of a man of letters. In 1808, in company with his brother John, he edited The Examiner. In 1812, both brothers were fined and imprisoned because of a satire upon the Prince Regent. From 1818 to 1822 he edited The Indicator, and in 1822, in conjunction with Byron and Shelley, The Liberal. He also edited The Companion and The London Journal, besides contributing profusely to many other periodicals, and publishing a number of independent works and translations.

Huut is not without some merit as a poet. His Rimini and his translations of Redi's Bacchus in Tuscany and Tasso's Amyntas have been highly praised. It is as a writer of easy, entertaining prose, however, that Leigh Hunt is and will be best known. Not the least interesting of his prose works is his Autobiography,

"His style, in spite of its mannerism, nay, partly by reason of its mannerism, is well suited for light garrulous, desultory ana, half-critical, half-biographical. We do not always agree with his literary judgments; but we find in him what is very rare in our time, -the power of justly appreciating and heartily enjoying good things of very different kinds."- Macaulay.

John Foster.

JOHN FOSTER, 1770-1843, was the son of a weaver, and was himself apprenticed to a trade; but discovering aptitudes for higher occupations, he was allowed to study for the ministry, and entered the Bap. tist College at Bristol.

Foster was ordained, and exercised his ministry among the Baptists in different places, but was obliged by a glandulous affection of the neck to stop preaching. He gave himself up. after this, to literary work, writing chiefly for the Eclectic Review. His contributions to this Review rank with those of Macaulay, Jeffrey, and Mackintosh in the Edinburgh, for vigor, originality, depth, and finish. He wrote also a series of Essays, which are known wherever the English language is spoken.

His publications are: Lectures at Broadmead Chapel; Contributions, Biographical, Literary, and Philosophical, to the Eclectic Review: Essays. The Essays are on the following subjects: 1. On a Man's Writing Memoirs of Himself; 2. On Decision of Character; 3. On the Application of the Epithet Romantic; 4. On Some of the Causes by which Evangelical Religion has been rendered Less Acceptable to Persons of Cultivated Taste; 5. On the Evils of Popular Ignorance; and 6. On the Communication of the Gospel to the People of India; Introductory Essay to Doddridge's Rise and Progress.

"In simplicity of language, in majesty of conception, in the eloquence of that conciseness which conveys, in a short sentence, more meaning than the mind dares at once admit, his writings are unmatched." - North British Review.

"The author places the idea which he wishes to present in such a flood of light, that it is not only visible itself, but it seems to illumine all around it. He paints metaphysics, and has the happy art of arraying what in other hands would appear