s energy, and for some years before his death in 1854 he
wrote little. Two years before that time his increasing ailments caused
him even to resign his professorship.

Wilson--whose stories are merely mediocre, and whose poems, _The Isle of
Palms_ (1812) and _The City of the Plague_ (1816), merely show that he
was an intelligent contemporary of Scott and Byron, and a neighbour of
the Lake poets--developed in his miscellaneous journalism one of the
most puissant and luxuriant literary faculties of the time; and in
particular was among the first in one, and perhaps the very first in
another, kind of writing. The first and less valuable of the two was the
subjection of most, if not all, of the topics of the newspaper to a
boisterous but fresh and vigorous style of critical handling, which
bears some remote resemblance to the styles of L'Estrange towards the
end of the seventeenth century, and Bentley a little later, but is in
all important points new. The second and higher was the attempt to
substitute for the correct, balanced, exactly-proportioned, but even in
the hands of Gibbon, even in those of Burke, somewhat colourless and
jejune prose of the past age, a new style of writing, exuberant in
diction, semi-poetical in rhythm, confounding, or at least alternating
very sharply between, the styles of high-strung enthusiasm and
extravagant burlesque, and setting at naught all precepts of the
immediate elders. It would be too much, no doubt, to attribute the
invention of this style to Wilson. It was "in the air"; it was the
inevitable complement of romantic diction in poetry; it had been
anticipated to some extent by others, and it displayed itself in various
forms almost simultaneously in the hands of Landor, who kept to a more
classical form, and of De Quincey, who was modern. But Wilson, unless in
conversation with De Quincey, cannot be said to have learnt it from any
one else: he preceded most in the time, and greatly exceeded all in the
bulk and influence of his exercises, owing to his position on the staff
of a popular and widely-read periodical.

The defect of both these qualities of Wilson's style (a defect which
extends largely to the matter of his writings in criticism and in other
departments) was a defect of sureness of taste; while his criticism was
more vigorous than safe. Except his Toryism (which, however, was shot
with odd flashes of democratic sentiment and a cross-vein of crotchety
dislike not to England