d, he did not renounce his home among the lakes. He
was a lover of scenery, and an enthusiast and master in manly sports. He
is said to have fished in every trout-brook north of the Clyde, and
he wandered every season over the Highlands. In his sportsman's
accomplishments he took a truly English pride, and made fun of the
Edinburgh Whigs by representing a company of them as getting by chance
into the same room with himself and his associates, and then, pipes and
tobacco being brought, as being fairly smoked out, sickened, and
obliged to retreat by the superior smoking capacities of the Tories. He
ridiculed Leigh Hunt for fancying in one of his poems that he should
like a splendid life on a great estate, when (as Wilson says) he
couldn't even ride without being thrown. Yet, of all the men of this
time, there was probably no one who had wider sympathies or more
delightful prejudices than Professor Wilson, or who made more sagacious
reflections. The centre of a literary clique, he loved to associate
with all the other cliques, and was one of the first to recognize and
proclaim the great merits of Wordsworth.

The third group was larger than either of the preceding, retained its
_esprit de corps_ longer, and may be most conveniently defined as the
associates of Charles Lamb. Beside Lamb, there were Coleridge, Southey,
Lovel, Dyer, Lloyd, and Wordsworth, among the earlier members of
it,--and Hazlitt, Talfourd, Godwin, De Quincy, Bernard Barton, Procter,
Leigh Hunt, Gary, and Hood, among the later. This group, unlike the
others, did not make politics, but literature, its leading object. It
was composed of literary men,--a title of doubtful import, but which
certainly in civilized society will always designate a class. Political
life has more of outward importance, religious life is holier, but
literary life is the most humane of all the avocations. It is to the
professions what pastoral occupations are to the trades. Politics and
religion both have something to do with institutions. A mechanical
man can play a part in them not very well, but passably well. But
the literary man is sheer humanity, with nothing to help him but his
thoughtfulness and sensibility. He is the unfelled tree, not the timber
framed into the ship of state or carved into ecclesiastic grace. He
lives as Nature lives, putting on the splendor of green when the air
is sunny, and of crystal when the blasts sweep by; and while his roots
reach down into the ear