f leaf and flower but knit together at the
bottom--that was my old figure of speech--only by an ocean of
whisky punch. On these terms nothing can be done. Wilson seems
to me always by far the most _gifted_ of our literary men either
then or still. And yet intrinsically he has written nothing that
can endure. The central gift was wanting.

Something in the unfavourable part of this must no doubt be set down to
the critic's usual forgetfulness of his own admirable dictum, "he is not
thou, but himself; other than thou." John was quite other than Thomas,
and Thomas judged him somewhat summarily as if he were a failure of a
Thomas. Yet the criticism, if partly harsh and as a whole somewhat
incomplete, is true enough. Wilson has written "intrinsically nothing
that can endure," if it be judged by any severe test. An English
Diderot, he must bear a harder version of the judgment on Diderot, that
he had written good pages but no good book. Only very rarely has he even
written good pages, in the sense of pages good throughout. The almost
inconceivable haste with which he wrote (he is credited with having on
one occasion actually written fifty-six pages of print for _Blackwood_
in two days, and in the years of its double numbers he often
contributed from a hundred to a hundred and fifty pages in a single
month)--this prodigious haste would not of itself account for the
puerilities, the touches of bad taste, the false pathos, the tedious
burlesque, the more tedious jactation which disfigure his work. A man
writing against time may be driven to dulness, or commonplace, or
inelegance of style; but he need never commit any of the faults just
noticed. They were due beyond doubt, in Wilson's case, to a natural
idiosyncrasy, the great characteristic of which Carlyle has happily hit
off in the phrase, "want of a tie-beam," whether he has or has not been
charitable in suggesting that the missing link was supplied by whisky
punch. The least attractive point about Wilson's work is undoubtedly
what his censor elsewhere describes as his habit of "giving a kick" to
many men and things. There is no more unpleasant feature of the _Noctes_
than the apparent inability of the writer to refrain from sly "kicks"
even at the objects of his greatest veneration. A kind of mania of
detraction seizes him at times, a mania which some of his admirers have
more kindly than wisely endeavoured to shuffle off as a humorous
dramatic touch inte