It was in an old bookshop that I came across the three volumes of the Recreations of Christopher North. Where else indeed, unless it were in libraries slightly antiquated, would one be likely to find at the present day this miscellany of culled contributions to Blackwood's by old Christopher, that Nimrod of the North, redoubtable Scotch Worthy, and Edinburgh's Old Man Eloquent, who, if Laurence Sterne has been described as the least exemplary of English clergymen, may in the same spirit be called the least conventional of Scotch Professors of Moral Philosophy? For John Wilson, or Christopher North as he was best known in his own day, seems quite forgotten, utterly of the past, and these Recreations, filled as they are with the beauty and delight that charmed an earlier generation, must litter old bookstalls or grow musty and worm-eaten on library shelves. Even the Noctes Ambrosianæ, most memorable of his works, with all their boisterous fun, pungent wit, and still racy comic characterization of contemporary men of letters, are well-nigh forgotten; nor is it accounted a lack of cultivation not to be familiar with poetry that men of his own time assured him was as good as any then being written

and that in the age of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge! The canon of his criticism is a dead letter, and his critical work is occasionally revived only to illustrate, as in the case of his attack on Keats, the fallibility of contemporary judgments. In fine, that fate has overtaken Wilson which bowls over so many of those who achieve a splendid reputation in their own day, a sort of premature immortality in advance of posterity's final decision. Destiny works strange reversals, though possibly under a law, and Wilson is the victim of one of them.

Perhaps his very popularity has been against him. Perhaps he belonged too exclusively to his own age, represented its tastes too completely in their most intimate aspects, to make an effective appeal to the generation succeeding that to which he was a sort of literary grandfather. For no man can live beyond his own day who does not keep in reserve some little mystery of mind for future generations to penetrate, who has not suffered somewhat of contumely for an element of incomprehensibility with respect to those among whom he lived. Wilson had many notable qualities, but he had none of this incomprehensibility, this reserve of genius. He wrote absolutely from the point of view of the present, in the manner of journalism as we now call it, and with the present he slipped back inevitably into the past.

And yet, however much there may be lacking in Wilson's work as literature, there is in the man himself something vital and persistently defiant of oblivion. This grows largely out of his personality and the strenuous part he played as a man of action in the world of letters. In a measure he was the most representative man of his day, combining in his eccentric, paradoxical, yet always lovable personality, its most dissimilar aspects. A thorough-going sportsman, he loved nothing better than a day's or a month's fishing in the streams of the Scotch Highlands, or a good fight between men or cocks, the prize-ring and the cocking-main not then having fallen into that disrepute in which they are allowed to languish in these days. On the other hand, nothing could have been more brilliant than his academic career at Glasgow and Oxford. Add to this that he was an accepted poet and critic in his own day, the virtual editor of a great magazine at a time when the paucity of periodicals com

Such men History does not readily let slip from her records, however much erities may differ as to the permanent value of their literary accomplishment. Consequently Wilson belongs to the domain of history rather than of literature, and his fame is the reverse of that by which most men of letters gain their share of immortality. For with these, as with Shakespeare, the personal element tends to become obliterated by the impersonal, universal element in their work. In the case of Wilson it is the personality that survives, while the work perishes, save only in so far as it can contribute to the revitalizing of this personal element in our remembrance of the man himself.

John Wilson was born at Paisley in 1785. His parents were well to do, his father having amassed a fortune in those manufacturing enterprises which have made the especial fame of that city, so that from the start he had every opportunity and prospect of success in life that wealth and a gentle breeding could give him. In this he was different from so many of his fellow Scots, Burns and Carlyle, for example, who have had to win their way from a bleak boyhood. He was most like Scott in this assurance of a life of comparative ease; though like Scott curiously enough, before half his life was done, he was forced by circumstances to take his place in the world

upon

Wilson's boyhood is of peculiar importance as determining our conception of the character of the man, for the reason that he never entirely grew away from it, but retained always a bit of the boy tucked away in his heart to give zest to life and joy to the sheer act of living. He always kept an imaginative hold the scenes of his childhood that enabled him to render expression to those poetic moods of mind which, awakened within him at the birth of consciousness, remained unobscured and untarnished by the various vicissitudes of a long and not unharassed life. For him his boyhood was, as Stevenson wrote in Virginibus Puerisque, "not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of his faculties," and to him preeminently belonged the power of "retiring upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his childhood."

For Wilson this "green enchanted forest" was the parish of Mearns, to which he was sent for his schooling at the Manse, and which he describes over and over again so glowingly in the Recreations. There is a great temptation to linger over these schooldays in the Scotch parish "half highland, half lowland," and over the captivating personality of the lad whom his daughter, Mrs. Gordon, so exquisitely characterized when she wrote that "in his earlier years, John Wilson was as beautiful and animated a creature as ever played in the sunshine." He was indeed a brilliant and beautiful boy, in whom the healthiest of natural instincts were touched with a glory of Wordsworthian boyhood, which raised common sports and pastimes, followed on "flood, field, and fell" into ennobling pursuits worthy of the divinity of a young demigod. Wilson has left us an account of this period of his life in Christopher in His Sporting Jacket in the Recreations. Some allowance must of course be made for that frank idealization of himself to

which Wilson confesses, in the figure of young Kit North, in this sketch of his own boyhood. They who would recall their vanished youth "must perhaps,' writes Wilson in Christmas Dreams in the same collection, "transfuse also something of their maturer minds into those dreams of their former being." Thus Kit becomes more than the mere picture of Wilson's own youthful self; he is rather an imaginative type of the ideal boy as he develops under the formative influences of sport pursued in the face of nature, while yet retaining in the main the physiognomy of selfportraiture. This last point must not be lost sight of; for the fact remains that however much of the more reflective passages in the Sporting Jacket we may attribute to the mature mind of the man working upon the material of boyish experiences, all the freshness and fullness of instinctive joy, and all the sensitiveness to natural beauty revealed in these passionate reminiscences of past glory, belong to the inextinguishable boy within him, and serve to characterize him correctly for us as he was in the days of his youth. Had he not been of that rare race to whom in boyhood nothing in nature is without inspiration, and nothing in emotional experience without significance, he could have had no basis in later life upon which to build such an ideal representation, at once so exalted and so true, as he has given us in the young Kit of the Sporting Jacket.

This representation we have called Wordsworthian, and indeed was it not Wordsworth who first ennobled our conception of boyhood by a recognition of those intimations of immortality that come to it in all the wonder of awakening sense? But Wilson's delineation of boyhood's moods and fresh states of consciousness seems even truer and more natural without being any the less ideal than Wordsworth's own. For him there is no sharp distinction between those coarser pleasures which the Wordsworthian boy is represented in Tintern

Abbey as having passed, and those more purely meditative employments to which the maturing lad gives himself wonder ingly over. Wordsworth's boy is never quite convincingly human. He is always a little of that "smug, smooth, prim, and proper prig," whose existence Wilson deprecates. Not so young Christopher. For him, moods of excitement and enthusiasm for the chase are suddenly shot through with new and strange perceptions of romance: Not only in listening to the thunder of the waterfall, or the sharp ring of steel on the frozen river, arise those rare moods of spiritual excitement that we encounter in Wordsworth. They arise equally in sports partaking not a little of elemental savagery, like coursing and gunning and stalking the deer, from which Wordsworth, with his intellectual and spiritual refinement, was repelled. But such delicacy of sentiment forms no necessary part of the poetic constitution, and in the boy, at least, the poet and the savage are often curiously commingled. The same cause which at one instant may arouse the fierce instinct to kill may result at the next in the flooding of the youthful spirit with a tremulous and tremendous sense of awe and beauty. If one would perceive the quick transition from mood to mood which is characteristic of this exquisite instability of boyish emotion, let him read that unequaled passage in the Sporting Jacket in which Wilson describes the night hunt after the great white swan:

"To have shot such a creature SO large so white- so high-soaring and on the winds of midnight wafted from so far a creature that seemed not merely a stranger in that loch, but belonging to some mysterious land in another hemisphere, whose coast ships with frozen rigging have been known to visit, driving under bare poles through a month's snowstorms- to have shot such a creature was an era in our ima gination, from which, had nature been more prodigal, we might have sprung