ccentric book
unless he reads it as a whole; its humours arbitrarily separated and
cut-and-dried are nearly unintelligible. Indeed Professor Ferrier's
original attempt to give Wilson's work only, and not all of that work
when it happened to be mixed with others, seems to me to have been a
mistake. But of that further, when we come to speak of the _Noctes_
themselves.

Wilson's life, for more than two-thirds of it a very happy one and not
devoid of a certain eventfulness, can be summarised pretty briefly,
especially as a full account of it is available in the very delightful
work of his daughter Mrs. Gordon. Born in 1785, the son of a rich
manufacturer of Paisley and a mother who boasted gentle blood, he was
brought up first in the house of a country minister (whose parish he has
made famous in several sketches), then at the University of Glasgow, and
then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was early left possessor of a
considerable fortune, and his first love, a certain "Margaret," having
proved unkind, he established himself at Elleray on Windermere and
entered into all the Lake society. Before very long (he was twenty-six
at the time) he married Miss Jane Penny, daughter of a Liverpool
merchant, and kept open house at Elleray for some years. Then his
fortune disappeared in the keeping of a dishonest relation, and he had,
in a way, his livelihood to make. I say "in a way," because the wind
appears to have been considerably tempered to this shorn but robust
lamb. He had not even to give up Elleray, though he could not live there
in his old style. He had a mother who was able and willing to entertain
him at Edinburgh, on the sole understanding that he did not "turn Whig,"
of which there was very little danger. He was enabled to keep not too
exhausting or anxious terms as an advocate at the Scottish bar; and
before long he was endowed, against the infinitely superior claims of
Sir William Hamilton, and by sheer force of personal and political
influence, with the lucrative Professorship of Moral Philosophy in the
University of Edinburgh. But even before this he had been exempted from
the necessity of cultivating literature on a little oatmeal by his
connexion with _Blackwood's Magazine_. The story of that magazine has
often been told; never perhaps quite fully, but sufficiently. Wilson was
not at any time, strictly speaking, editor; and a statement under his
own hand avers that he never received any editorial pay, and was
so