the agreeable income of a thousand a year or so for thirty
years. But whether (as Mrs. Gordon seems to hint) the notes were in too
dilapidated and chaotic a condition for use, or whether Professor
Ferrier, his son-in-law and editor (himself, with Dean Mansel, the last
of the exact philosophers of Britain), revolted at the idea of printing
anything so merely literary, or what it was, I know not--at any rate
they do not now figure in the list. This leaves us ten volumes of
collected works, to wit, four of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_, four of
_Essays Critical and Imaginative_, and two of _The Recreations of
Christopher North_, all with a very few exceptions reprinted from
_Blackwood_. Mrs. Gordon filially groans because the reprint was not
more extensive, and without endorsing her own very high opinion of her
father's work, it is possible to agree with her. It is especially
noteworthy that from the essays are excluded three out of the four chief
critical series which Wilson wrote--that on Spenser, praised by a writer
so little given to reckless praise as Hallam, the _Specimens of British
Critics_, and the _Dies Boreales_,--leaving only the series on Homer
with its quasi-Appendix on the Greek dramatists, and the _Noctes_
themselves.

It must be confessed that the _Noctes Ambrosianae_ are not easy things to
commend to the modern reader, if I may use the word commend in its
proper sense and with no air of patronage. Even Scotchmen (perhaps,
indeed, Scotchmen most of all) are wont nowadays to praise them rather
apologetically, as may be seen in the case of their editor and abridger
Mr. Skelton. Like most other very original things they drew after them a
flock of imbecile imitations; and up to the present day those who have
lived in the remoter parts of Scotland must know, or recently remember,
dreary compositions in corrupt following of the _Noctes_, with
exaggerated attempts at Christopher's worst mannerisms, and invariably
including a ghastly caricature of the Shepherd. Even in themselves they
abound in stumbling-blocks, which are perhaps multiplied, at least at
the threshold, by the arbitrary separation in Ferrier's edition of
Wilson's part, and not all his part, from the whole series; eighteen
numbers being excluded bodily to begin with, while many more and parts
of more are omitted subsequently. The critical mistake of this is
evident, for much of the machinery and all the characters of the
_Noctes_ were given to, not by, W