but to London), he had not many pervading
prejudices. But at the same time he had not many clear principles: he
was the slave of whim and caprice in his individual opinions; and he
never seems to have been able to distinguish between a really fine thing
and a piece of fustian, between an urbane jest and a piece of gross
buffoonery, between eloquence and rant, between a reasoned condemnation
and a spiteful personal fling. Accordingly the ten reprinted volumes of
his contributions to _Blackwood_ and the mass of his still uncollected
articles contain the strangest jumble of good and bad in matter and form
that exists anywhere. By turns trivial and magnificent, exquisite and
disgusting, a hierophant of literature and a mere railer at men of
letters, a prince of describers, jesters, enthusiasts, and the author of
tedious and commonplace newspaper "copy," Wilson is one of the most
unequal, one of the most puzzling, but also one of the most stimulating
and delightful, figures in English literature. Perhaps slightly
over-valued for a time, he has for many years been distinctly neglected,
if not depreciated and despised; and the voluminousness of his work,
coupled with the fact that it is difficult to select from it owing to
the pervading inequality of its merits, may be thought likely to keep
him in the general judgment at a lower plane than he deserves. But the
influence which he exerted during many years both upon writers and
readers by his work in _Blackwood_ cannot be over-estimated. And it may
be said without fear that no one with tolerably wide sympathies, who is
able to appreciate good literature, will ever seriously undertake the
reading of his various works without equal satisfaction and profit.

Wilson's principal coadjutor in the early days of _Blackwood_, and his
friend of all days (though the mania for crying down not so much England
as London made "Christopher North" indulge in some girds at his old
comrade's editorship of the _Quarterly_), was a curious contrast to
Wilson himself. This contrast may may have been due partly, but by no
means wholly, to the fact that there was ten years between them. John
Gibson Lockhart was born at Cambusnethan, where his father was minister,
on 14th July 1794. Like Wilson, he was educated at Glasgow and at
Oxford, where he took a first-class at a very early age, and whence he
went to Germany, a completion of "study-years" which the revolutionary
wars had for a long time rendered di