of Mr. Wilson; and so passed the scene of his
_first introduction_.

* * * * *

In reading the anecdote of the bull hunt, you must bear in mind the
period of Mr. Wilson's life to which it belongs, else I should here be
unintentionally adding one more to the thousand misrepresentations of
his character, which are already extant in different repositories of
scandal: most of which I presume, unless in the rarer cases where they
have been the pure creations of malice, owe their origin to a little
exaggeration, and a great deal of confusion in dates. Levities and
extravagances, which find a ready excuse at twenty, ten or fifteen
years later are fatal to a man's character for good sense. In such a
case, therefore, to be careless or inaccurate in dates, is a moral
dishonesty. Understand then that the bull-hunting scenes belong to the
time which immediately succeeded my first knowledge of Mr. Wilson.
This particular frolic happened to fall within the earliest period of
my own personal acquaintance with him. Else, and with this one
exception, the era of his wildest (and according to the common
estimate, of his insane) extravagances was already past. All those
stories, therefore, which you question me about with so much
curiosity, of his having joined a company of strolling players, and
himself taken the leading parts both in Tragedy and Comedy--of his
having assumed the garb of a Gipsy, and settled for some time in a
Gipsy encampment, out of admiration for a young Egyptian beauty; with
fifty others of the same class, belong undoubtedly (as many of them as
are not wholly fabulous), to the four years immediately preceding the
time at which my personal knowledge of Mr. Wilson commenced.

From the latter end of 1803 to the spring of 1808, Mr. Wilson had
studied at the University of Oxford; and it was within that period
that most of his _escapades_ were crowded. He had previously studied
as a mere boy, according to the Scotch fashion, at the University of
Glasgow, chiefly under the tuition of the late Mr. Jardine (the
Professor, I believe, of Logic), and Dr. or Mr. Young (the Professor
of Greek). At both Universities he had greatly distinguished himself;
but at Oxford, where the distribution of prizes and honours of every
kind is to the last degree parsimonious and select, naturally it
follows that such academical distinctions are really _significant_
distinctions, and proclaim an unequivocal merit