ole collection, there is the additional
satisfaction that the author is writing only of what he thoroughly knows
and understands. At the Lakes Wilson lived for years, and was familiar
with every cranny of the hills, from the Pillar to Hawes Water, and from
Newby Bridge to Saddleback. He began marching and fishing through the
Highlands when he was a boy, enticed even his wife into perilous
pedestrian enterprises with him, and, though the extent of his knowledge
was perhaps not quite so large as he pretends, he certainly knew great
tracts as well as he knew Edinburgh. Nor were his qualifications as a
sportsman less authentic, despite the somewhat Munchausenish appearance
which some of the feats narrated in the _Noctes_ and the _Recreations_
wear, and are indeed intended to wear. His enormous baskets of trout
seem to have been, if not quite so regular as he sometimes makes them
out, at any rate fully historical as occasional feats. As has been
hinted, he really did win the trotting-match on the pony, Colonsay,
against a thoroughbred, though it was only on the technical point of the
thoroughbred breaking his pace. His walk from London to Oxford in a
night seems to have been a fact, and indeed there is nothing at all
impossible in it, for the distance through Wycombe is not more than
fifty-three miles; while the less certainly authenticated feat of
walking from Liverpool to Elleray (eighty miles at least), without more
than a short rest, also appears to be genuine. Like the heroes of a song
that he loved, though he seems to have sung it in a corrupt text, he
could wrestle and fight and jump out anywhere; and, until he was
thoroughly broken by illness, he appears to have made the very most of
the not inconsiderable spare time of a Scotch professor who has once got
his long series of lectures committed to paper, and has nothing to do
for the rest of his life but collect bundles of pound notes at the
beginning of each session. All this, joined to his literary gifts, gives
a reality to his out-of-door papers which is hardly to be found
elsewhere except in some passages of Kingsley, between whom and Wilson
there are many and most curious resemblances, chequered by national and
personal differences only less curious.

I do not think he was a good reviewer, even after making allowance for
the prejudices and partisanships of the time, and for the monkey tricks
of mannerism, which, at any rate in his earlier days, were incumbent on
a