sit silent at the helm of his boat on the Isis, his rapt
eye peopling the vacant air with unutterable visions. He swam like
a dolphin, rode like a Centaur, and De Quincey called him the best
unprofessional male dancer he had ever seen. Three times he was
vanquished by a huge shoemaker,--so the story goes,--champion of the
"Town": at the fourth meeting, the Gentleman Commoner proved himself
the better man, knocked his antagonist out of time, and gave him twenty
pounds. Another professor of the manly art of self-defence, who had
ventured to confront the young Titan, and was unexpectedly laid low,
said in astonishment,--"You can be only one of the two: you are either
Jack Wilson or the Devil." He proved himself to be the former, by not
proclaiming, "_Voe victis_!" and by taking his prize of war to the
nearest alehouse, and then and there filling him with porter. Sotheby
said it was worth a journey from London to hear him translate a Greek
chorus; and, at a later day, the brawny Cumberland men called him "a
varra bad un to lick."

Never were such "constitutionals" known, even at old Oxford. He would
wander away alone, sometimes for many days, tramping over the country
leagues and leagues away, making the earth tremble with his heavy tread,
and distancing everything with his long, untiring stride. Then, on his
return, he would be the prince of good-fellows once more, and fascinate
the merry revellers with the witchery of his tongue. Even when a boy, he
had won a bet by walking six miles in two minutes less than an hour. He
once dined in Grosvenor Square, and made his appearance at Oxford at an
early hour the next morning, having walked the fifty-eight miles at a
tremendous pace. In his vacations, he walked over all the Lake region
of England, the North of Scotland, and the greater part of Wales. On
finishing his course at Oxford, he went on foot to Edinburgh,--more than
three hundred miles. He was equally remarkable as a leaper, surpassing
all competitors. He once jumped across the Cherwell--twenty-three feet
clear--with a run of only a few yards. This is, we believe, the greatest
feat of the kind on record. General Washington, it is known, had great
powers in this way; but the greatest distance ever leaped by him, if we
remember right, was but twenty-one feet.

The many vagaries into which he was led, and the innumerable odd pranks
he played, would be sufficient, in the case of any one else, to prove
that he was not a read