metimes subject to that criticism which the publisher, as all men know
from a famous letter of Scott's, was sometimes in the habit of
exercising rather indiscreetly. But for a very great number of years,
there is no doubt that he held a kind of quasi-editorial position, which
included the censorship of other men's work and an almost, if not quite,
unlimited right of printing his own. For some time the even more
masterful spirit of Lockhart (against whom by the way Mrs. Gordon seems
to have had a rather unreasonable prejudice) qualified his control over
"Maga." But Lockhart's promotion to the _Quarterly_ removed this
influence, and from 1825 (speaking roughly) to 1835 Wilson was supreme.
The death of William Blackwood and of the Ettrick Shepherd in the
last-named year, and of his own wife in 1837 (the latter a blow from
which he never recovered), strongly affected not his control over the
publication but his desire to control it; and after 1839 his
contributions (save in the years 1845 and 1848) were very few. Ill
health and broken spirits disabled him, and in 1852 he had to resign
his professorship, dying two years later after some months of almost
total prostration. Of the rest of the deeds of Christopher, and of his
pugilism, and of his learning, and of his pedestrian exploits, and of
his fishing, and of his cock-fighting, and of his hearty enjoyment of
life generally, the books of the chronicles of Mrs. Gordon, and still
more the twelve volumes of his works and the unreprinted contributions
to _Blackwood_, shall tell.

It is with those works that our principal business is, and some of them
I shall take the liberty of at once dismissing. His poems are now
matters of interest to very few mortals. It is not that they are bad,
for they are not; but that they are almost wholly without distinction.
He came just late enough to have got the seed of the great romantic
revival; and his verse work is rarely more than the work of a clever man
who has partly learnt and partly divined the manner of Burns, Scott,
Campbell, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and the rest. Nor, to my fancy,
are his prose tales of much more value. I read them many years ago and
cared little for them. I re-read, or attempted to re-read, them the
other day and cared less. There seems, from the original prospectus of
the edition of his works, to have been an intention of editing the
course of moral philosophy which, with more or fewer variations,
obtained him