fence elsewhere. He must put all sorts
of prejudice, literary, political, and other, in his pocket. He must be
prepared not only for constant and very scurrilous flings at "Cockneys"
(Wilson extends the term far beyond the Hunt and Hazlitt school, an
extension which to this day seems to give a strange delight to Edinburgh
journalists), but for the wildest heterodoxies and inconsistencies of
political, literary, and miscellaneous judgment, for much bastard
verse-prose, for a good many quite uninteresting local and ephemeral
allusions, and, of course, for any quantity of Scotch dialect. If all
these allowances and provisos are too many for him to make, it is
probably useless for him to attempt the _Noctes_ at all. He will pretty
certainly, with the _Quarterly_ reviewer, set their characters down as
boozing buffoons, and decline the honour of an invitation to Ambrose's
or The Lodge, to Southside or the tent in Ettrick Forest.

But any one who can accommodate himself to these little matters, much
more any one who can enter into the spirit of days merrier, more
leisurely, and if not less straitlaced than our own, yet lacing their
laces in a different fashion, will find the _Noctes_ very delightful
indeed. The mere high jinks, when the secret of being in the vein with
them has been mastered, are seldom unamusing, and sometimes (notably in
the long swim out to sea of Tickler and the Shepherd) are quite
admirable fooling. No one who has an eye for the literary-dramatic can
help, after a few _Noctes_ have been read, admiring the skill with which
the characters are at once typified and individualised, the substance
which they acquire in the reader's mind, the personal interest in them
which is excited. And to all this, peculiarly suited for an alterative
in these solemn days, has to be added the abundance of scattered and
incomplete but remarkable gems of expression and thought that come at
every few pages, sometimes at every page, of the series.

Some of the burlesque narratives (such as the Shepherd's Mazeppa-like
ride on the Bonassus) are inimitably good, though they are too often
spoilt by Wilson's great faults of prolixity and uncertainty of touch.
The criticisms, of which there are many, are also extremely unequal,
but not a few very fine passages may be found among them. The politics,
it must be owned, are not good for much, even from the Tory point of
view. But the greatest attraction of the whole, next to its sunshiny
h