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ART. VII. THE NOCTES AMBROSIANÆ.

Noctes Ambrosianæ. By Professor Wilson. In 4 vols. William Blackwood and Sons: Edinburgh and London, 1856. (Part of a collected re-issue of the Works of Professor Wilson, edited by his Son-in-law, Professor Ferrier.)

It was in the year 1817 that the late Mr. William Blackwood, publisher, of Edinburgh, started in that city a monthly periodical for the advocacy of Tory principles, in opposition to the Edinburgh Review, then at the height of its power under Jeffrey, and without an adequate Tory antagonist in Scotland. The new periodical was conducted for six months under the title of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, its editors being a Mr. Pringle and a Mr. Cleghorn, both of them men of some local reputation for talent, and both of them lame. The experiment, however, did not answer expectations; and Mr. Blackwood determined to discontinue it after the sixth number, and to bring out another magazine under more vigorous management. The young Tories of Edinburgh gathered round him; and, in October 1817, there appeared the first number of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Among the contents of this number was the famous "Chaldee Manuscript;" a squib, in which, under the guise of a parody of the biblical language, Mr. Blackwood's difficulties in establishing the new magazine were described in ludicrous apocalypse, and war to the death was proclaimed between him and Mr. Constable, the publisher of the Edinburgh. "The Chaldee Ms.," says Mr. Ferrier, "fell on Edinburgh like a thunderbolt. It took the city by surprise. It was the first trumpet-note which dissolved the trance of Edinburgh and broke the spell of Whig domination." On reading the document itself, which Mr. Ferrier has kindly reprinted for us at the end of one of the present volumes, one can see that the prodigious local effect here attributed to it depended far less on any literary merit which it possessed than on the shock which it gave, on the one hand, to Presbyterian decorum by its daring mimicry of the scriptural style, and the wicked pleasure, on the other hand, which Presbyterians as well as other sinful folks feel in seeing well-known local persons mercilessly burlesqued. It was delightful, for example, for those who were familiar with the appearance of Mr. William Blackwood, to recognise him under the apocalyptic description of "a man clothed in plain apparel, whose name was, as it had been, the colour of ebony," it was delightful to identify Mr. Constable as "the man

who was crafty in counsel and cunning in all manner of working," and to interpret the "notable horn in his forehead wherewith he ruled the nations" as signifying the Edinburgh Review; and who that knew lame Mr. Pringle and lame Mr. Cleghorn could refrain from laughing on reading of them as "the two beasts who had faces like the faces of men," "the joints of whose legs were like the polished cedars of Lebanon," and the noise of whose departure from Mr. Blackwood's shop when they had concluded their agreement with him and pocketed his money, was as it had been the noise of many chariots and of horsemen horsing upon their horses?" One can conceive that such a paper of personalities would make a sensation about Arthur's Seat, and that, as a manifesto of the new magazine, and a defiance to Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Whigs, it served its purpose admirably.

The "Chaldee Manuscript" was the joint work of several hands, who continued to be the chief contributors to the new magazine for a good many years. Among these was Professor Wilson, then simply Mr. John Wilson, but already well known in Edinburgh and elsewhere under that name. Born in 1788 at Paisley, the son of a rich manufacturer, he had received his education first at Glasgow, and then at Oxford; at which latter University he was distinguished no less for his literary genius and attainments,-as shown in his carrying off, among other honours, the Newdegate prize for an English poem,-than for the exuberance of his animal spirits, his great physical strength and beauty, and his fondness for all athletic sports and exercises. A fair-haired young Hercules-Apollo, and with plenty of money to enable him to gratify his tastes whatever they might be, he had scarcely left Oxford when he signalised his double character by purchasing the small but beautiful estate of Elleray, on Lake Windermere, where, as Hercules, he might yacht about at his pleasure, beat the best boatman at the oar, and wrestle or box with the strongest dalesman; and, as Apollo, he might revel in the quiet beauties of the finest of English scenery, indulge undisturbed in poetic dreams of his own, and cultivate with due reverence the society of Wordsworth. Here he married; here he spent days of happiness which he lived afterwards to remember; and here he took his place as one of the Lake Poets, by the publication, in his twenty-fifth year (1812), of the Isle of Palms. Reverses, not of a very serious nature, obliged him, after a little time thus spent, to choose a more active mode of life; and, breaking up his establishment at the Lakes, he removed to Edinburgh, and qualified himself for the Scottish bar. His prepossessions, both political and literary, led him to attach himself to the little band of young Tories, with Scott as a cau

tious veteran to advise them, who were disposed to break out in rebellion against Jeffrey's Whig supremacy in the northern world of letters; and accordingly, when Blackwood started his magazine to afford an outlet for native Scottish Toryism similar to that which had already been provided in the Quarterly for British Toryism in general, Wilson was one of the first to join him. He had then just added to his laurels as one of the Lakists by the publication (1816) of a second poem of some length, entitled The City of the Plague; his magnificent physique was the admiration of Edinburgh, so that as he walked hurriedly along Princes Street, in somewhat wild costume, and with his fair hair streaming from under his broad white hat, heads were turned to look at him; and his reputation in social circles was that of a young Goth of genius, with powers yet undeveloped which would one day astonish Britain. Woe to the camp of the Whigs when this young Alaric bounded in amongst them! So thought Mr. Blackwood and the Edinburgh Tories; and fortunately, once his hand was in, he remained with them. Even in the "Chaldee Manuscript," the idea of which and the first forty verses of the writing were Hogg's, while the rest was supplied by Wilson and Lockhart, Wilson is already described by anticipation (by Lockhart, we suppose) as the chief reliance of the new magazine. Among the "living things" which came to the man in plain apparel when he called them in his straits, "the first which came," says the Ms., was after the likeness of the beautiful leopard from the valley of the palm-trees, whose going forth was comely as the greyhound, and his eyes like the lightning of fierý flame." More prosaically, so close did Wilson's connection with the magazine become, that, though Blackwood himself always retained the ultimate right in the management, Wilson was by universal repute regarded as the editor.

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If the connection thus formed was important for Blackwood, it was not less important for Wilson. To it, or, at least, to it taken in conjunction with another event which shortly followed it-namely, his appointment in 1820 to the chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, vacant by the death of Dr. Thomas Brown-is to be attributed, happily for himself, the permanent determination of his genius to prose rather than to verse. He did not, indeed, cease from verse, but continued to write new poetical pieces in the Lakist style, sufficient, when added to his former pieces, to swell his poetical works in 1825 to two octavo volumes in all-a quantity farther increased by occasional coquettings with the Muses during the rest of his life. But the demands of the magazine, not to speak of his professorship, were naturally for other kinds of matter than Lake poetry; and Wilson in supplying these demands gave exercise to faculties

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and broke into depths of his genius which he might have gone on versifying for ever, so far as appears from any competence he possessed in that line, without so much as disturbing or even finding out. He wrote tales for the magazine, in which, while his imagination had as free scope as it had in verse, his constitutional Scotticism, his shrewd observation of Scottish humours, his sensibility to the woes of real life, and his powers of eloquent description and delineation of character, had a still freer and more minute range. Some of these tales, with others written independently, formed collectively his first professed prose work, published in 1822, under the title of Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, and followed in 1823 by a continuous one-volume novel called The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay. He wrote also political articles on the questions of the day, in which he blazed out as a Tory with a vengeance, and lashed the Whigs far and near, and tumbled them over by dozens, in a manner heartily satisfying to his instincts, and yet not possible had he kept to metre. He wrote literary criticisms, in which he advanced and expounded canons of taste, especially in poetry, deeper than those of Jeffrey, and vindicated against that critic and his disciples the poetic claims of Wordsworth and the writers associated with him. He wrote, either as lectures or as articles, subtle philosophical disquisitions, not very connected or systematic perhaps, but gleaming with brilliant ideas, and tinged throughout with that rich and highly-coloured mode of metaphysics which Coleridge was diffusing through England, but which had hardly till then ventured into the bleakness across the Tweed. been on the faith, indeed, of what he had done in this way in the earlier numbers of the magazine, as well as on the faith of his general reputation as a man of original mind, that he had been appointed to succeed Dr. Thomas Brown. Lastly, careless of the formality and sedateness conventionally identified with the gown of a Scotch Professor, and that gown the gown of Moral Philosophy, he wrote papers for the magazine, in which he was seen throwing the gown off and making a football of it, relapsing ideally into his character as an untrammelled human being, a bruiser at country-fairs, a sportsman on Scottish hills and rivers, a boon-companion among bacchanalians, commenting on men and manners, on life and literature, from the point of view of an inspired king of the gypsies, or from amid the uproarious conditions of a city orgie. Among these nondescript papers of riotous phantasy, the most famous were the series called the Noctes Ambrosianæ.

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The origin of the Noctes Ambrosiana lies in the mythical age of the magazine which they made illustrious; and Mr. Ferrier still leaves the matter somewhat dark. Suffice it to say that

there was in Edinburgh, in a little back street going off from East Princes Street, a tavern kept by one Mr. Ambrose, an Englishman; that the Professor and his friends, in their occasional topographical researches in quest of suppers, had become acquainted with this tavern and its capabilities; and that, some time in the year 1822, it entered into their wicked heads to make this tavern the scene of imaginary convivial meetings, to be described in the magazine, in which all matters in heaven and earth, and especially the matters of the current month, should be humorously discussed in the interests of truth and Toryism. Accordingly, in 1822 the first of the Noctes appeared; and, the public liking the entertainment, the series was continued till the year 1835. During these thirteen years, seventy-one distinct papers appeared under the well-known title. Of these, however, only forty-one are republished in the volumes before us as the veritable Noctes Ambrosiane of Professor Wilson; the other thirty being omitted as either not his or his only in part. Wilson, indeed, had been concerned with the Noctes from the first, and his hand may be "traced to a considerable extent" in some of the earliest of them. But for a while they were jointstock productions by several hands, and were devoted chiefly to matters of local interest; and it was not till the nineteenth number, which was published in 1825, that Wilson made them his own, and gave them a development coextensive with his own. powers and tastes. From that time, with but an occasional contribution from others when his own leisure failed, he conducted them single-handed, till the death of Hogg, the prototype of the principal colloquist in the imaginary brotherhood of Ambrosians, necessarily, or at all events naturally, brought them to a close.

Wilson was forty-seven years of age when the Noctes were concluded. He lived nearly twenty years longer; but though, during these twenty years, he still figured as Christopher North in Blackwood, and still, as "the Professor," was the lion of Edinburgh society, and the idol of successive classes of students, to whom he lectured, or rather panted, his queer Moral Philosophy from the backs of old letters, and who cheered him till the roof rang, as he shook his yellow mane and cried "Ugh" at the end of every eloquent period, he never hit upon a vein of literary manifestation in which he quite equalled his fame as the author of the Noctes. Accordingly, though the proper time for an estimate of his genius and literary career, as a whole, will be when Professor Ferrier has completed his labours as editor of the present re-issue of his entire works, and when his other son-in-law, Professor Aytoun, has given to the world the expected accompanying biography, readers of the volumes before us may be sure

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