grandiose and low,
relieved indeed by touches of observation and feeling, as all his work
is, but hardly redeemed by them. The depths of his possible fall may
also be seen from a short piece which Professor Ferrier, obligingly
describing it as "too lively to be omitted," has adjoined to
"Christopher at the Lakes." But, on the whole, all the articles
mentioned in the list at the beginning of this paragraph, with the
capital "Streams" as an addition, with the soliloquies on "The Seasons,"
and with part (_not_ the narrative part) of "Highland Storms," are
delightful reading. The progress of the sportsman has never been better
given than in "Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket." In "The Moors"
the actual sporting part is perhaps a little spoilt by the affectation
of infallibility, qualified it is true by an aside or two, which so
often mars the Christopherian utterances. But Wilson's description has
never been bettered. The thunderstorm on the hill, the rough
conviviality at the illicit distillery, the evening voyage on the loch,
match, if they do not beat, anything of the kind in much more recent
books far better known to the present generation. A special favourite of
mine is the rather unceremonious review of Sir Humphry Davy's strangely
over-praised "Salmonia." The passage of utter scorn and indignation at
the preposterous statement of the chief personage in the dialogues, that
after an exceptionally hard day's walking and fishing "half a pint of
claret per man is enough," is sublime. Nearly the earliest, and
certainly the best, protest against some modern fashions in shooting is
to be found in "The Moors." In the same series, the visit to the hill
cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the
fashion to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather
mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the
sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his
pictures of rural and humble life. The passages on Oxford, to go to a
slightly different but allied subject, in "Old North and Young North" (a
paper not yet mentioned), may have full appeal to Oxford men, but I can
hardly be mistaken in thinking that outsiders must see at least some of
the beauty of them. But the list of specially desirable things in these
articles is endless; hardly one of them can be taken up without
discovering many such, not one of them without discovering some.[15]

And, throughout the wh