Frederick Sessions

'Tories! Yes! we are Tories. Our faith is in the Divine right of kings. But easy, my boys, easy; all free men are kings, and they hold their empire from heaven. That is our political, philosophical, moral, religious creed. In its spirit we have lived, and in its spirit we hope to die.'—Recreations of Christopher North.

IN the days of my youth—say half a century ago—with extraordinary avidity my reading contemporaries devoured the 'Noctes AmbrosianÆ' of 'Christopher North,' mastering the barbaric Scotch dialect of Galloway, in which the Ettrick Shepherd is made to speak, for the delightsomeness of his imagination and his quaintly-expressed notions about men and matters. Nowadays, if I mention the books to any young fellow of twenty-five to thirty-five, I am stared at as blankly as if I had asked was he intimately acquainted with the man in the moon! In Alfred Miles's fine volumes, 'The Poets of the Century,' his poems are not even quoted, and his very name is merely lumped in with a number of the smaller fry of North Britain; while Mr. Stedman, in 'Victorian Poets,' will have it that his verses had become 'antiquated' even before their author's death. Wilson has been overshadowed by our Southeys, Coleridges, Wordsworths, and Ruskins, though he was greater, more interesting, more lovable as a mere human being than any of them, and deserves to be as long remembered for his books. A generation that calls Kipling a poet, and makes an Alfred Austin its Laureate, may indeed be expected to forget many of the men of true genius honoured by their fathers.

Wilson came into the Lake Country in 1807 from Paisley, where he was born twenty-two years previously. He had recently buried his father, from whom he had inherited some £40,000. The property he purchased, and retained in his possession till his decease in 1854, was a small farmhouse and its lands, known as Elleray. It is situated on the slopes of Orrest Head, so well beloved of Windermere residents, and so frequented by tourists on account of the magnificent prospect it commands. He added to the house, and converted it into a charming home for a wife and growing family, and a haven of rest for himself in his frequent retirements from his future busy professional life in Edinburgh. It was pulled down about forty years ago, when the estate changed hands. From either of the lofty ranges enclosing the romantic Troutbeck Valley there is one of the most magnificent mountain views in all England. The tumbled masses, immortal weather-beaten monarchs—Wansfell, Loughrigg, and their compeers and allies, and, farther off, the Langdale Pikes (twin cloud-piercing giants), and Cringle Crags, and 'The Old Man' of Coniston, and, on a clearer day than usual, the dominating summit of distant Scafell—these, their sunshine and shadows, their waving woodlands, their stretches of purple heather and vast brown beds of bracken, their foaming cascades and garrulous streams, and the blue inland sea at their feet dotted with verdant islands and white-sailed yachts, and traversed by elegant steam gondolas thronged with happy 'trippers,' are all visible in one never-to-be-forgotten picture arranged in the wisdom of the Almighty for the pleasure of His people. Such an outlook, but from a lower altitude, delighted daily the eyes of Nature-loving Wilson, whose very prose was poetry, of a calibre not less than Kingsley's in his celebrated 'Devonshire Idylls,' or than Ruskin's rhapsodies on Switzerland. His ardent temperament and unusual virility compelled him to throw himself heartily into almost every possible form of physical and intellectual enjoyment. There never was such a man as he for undertaking everything and anything, and for doing nothing badly, including the art of 'loafing,' when he was in the cue for it. Nearly six feet high, broad-shouldered—'lish,' as they say here (meaning 'lissom,' as Southerners say, or 'lithe,' as the dictionaries have it)—blue-eyed, loosely arrayed, and collarless, he strode along the vales or over the fells, doing his thirty and forty miles at a stretch, or rode his famous pony Colonsay in a still-remembered trotting-match, or, with a couple of like-minded friends he chased a bull by moonlight across the uplands, each of the huntsmen being armed with a long spear. He was a mighty fisherman, storing numberless rods and artificial flies among the books of his library, and even whiling away the tedium of his last illness by arranging and rearranging the latter, and recalling as he did so the exploits of former days accomplished with the aid of this one or that, for sometimes his catches had amounted to as many as eighteen and twenty dozen of trouts in a day. He was an adept at wrestling and at boxing, throwing or being thrown with keen enjoyment of the tussle, and attacking and punishing professional pugilists or bullies of the fair, if in his opinion oppression or unfair play were evidenced. He kept a fleet of sailing-boats on the lake, and was dubbed 'Lord High Admiral of Windermere,' and he was as expert a swimmer as he was a sailor, delighting in occasionally frightening his shipmates by feigned accidents, and then having a boisterous laugh at their fears for him. Cock-fighting was at that time a 'gentlemanly' sport, and his breed of game-cocks was celebrated far and near. He seems never to have kept fewer than fifty at once. As great a conversationist and humorous and jovial companion as he was an athlete, he was much sought after for dinner and supper parties, while at balls he was accounted the best of dancers. So universal a genius in all manly outdoor pastimes, and so genial a friend within doors, was liable to many temptations in that sadly too 'drinking' age, and as a young man he certainly was often the worse for liquor, as his own letters help to prove. Yet was he never quarrelsome, never did he put forth his strength and skill for any low or mean purpose, never but in play or in defence of the ill-used. 'Everybody loved him,' records his daughter, rich and poor, and the dumb animals also. Many stories are told of his chivalrous and gallant conduct, especially towards womanhood, and of the wonderful combination in his character of almost feminine tenderness and sympathy with the roistering vigour of an ancient Viking. He would keep patient watch at night by a sick servant's bed, tend with his own hands some wounded dog; and there is on record the fact of a fledgling sparrow taking refuge in his study, and being fed and cared for and so tamed that it stayed as a denizen of the same room for at least eleven years.

The delightful time at Elleray was crowned with a still higher happiness when he married a beautiful and engaging lady, every way his peer in bodily graces and in mind, whom he loved passionately, and for whose death in middle life he grieved so deeply that he never fully recovered the blow, though so exceptionally blessed with affectionate and able children and eminent sons-in-law. His married days at Elleray were by no means all spent in mere physical enjoyments and recreation. They were full of literary and social occupations. All his great contemporaries and neighbours were frequent guests. At their reunions there was first-rate talk, and often competitions in versifying some given theme, or some other proof was forthcoming that the circle was one of learning and talent. De Quincey was, though insignificant in stature, and obliged to trot by the side of the stalwart Wilson, one of his most valued touring companions. Hartley Coleridge was always welcomed, and on one occasion he was detained a prisoner in his own interest for a fortnight, in order to prevent an outbreak of intoxication, and to secure some promised contribution for an editor who was to pay him cash for his needs. Here, too, came other well-known litterateurs to see and converse with the rising poet and journalist, and perchance to go a-fishing with him in the becks and tarns of the neighbourhood. It was at this period that his greatest poems were written, and some published—for instance, 'The Isle of Palms,' and 'The City of the Plague,' the former a story of shipwrecked lovers, and the latter one of London during the Great Plague, introducing a wandering Magdalene from Grasmere whose memory goes back, in the hour of trouble, to her 'beautiful land of mountains, lakes, and woods,' to the 'green and primrose banks of her own Rydal Lake,' and the 'deep hush of Grasmere Vale,' and the waters 'reflecting all the heavens.' His society and surroundings, as well as his instincts, encouraged the poetic vein, already evinced by his having won the Oxford Newdigate Prize during his University days.

Alas, these halcyon hours were over all too soon for the hitherto-fortunate couple! The wife's dower was a handsome one, but the far larger property of the husband was swept away by the fraudulence of a relative who was his trustee. The family had to leave Elleray for the home of Mrs. Wilson, senior, in Edinburgh, though the Windermere house was retained, and frequently returned to after the early stress of changed circumstances was over. Cruel as was the wrench, it brought out the better side of Wilson's disposition. He murmured not, bowing before the trial with real Christian resignation, and at the same moment bracing himself to the task of earning a subsistence with truly noble fortitude. In the Scotch metropolis he soon became connected with the newly-started Blackwood's Magazine, and was, with Lockhart, one of the ruling spirits of that famous periodical. For long years his wit, his rhetoric, his trenchant and slashing criticisms, his keen insight into literary merit, his almost incredible fertility of subject-matter (he sometimes, under pressure, wrote the whole of the articles for a particular number), speedily lifted it to the foremost place among similar journals, and made it the fiercest organ of the most rampant intellectual Toryism that Britain has ever known, bitterly hated, sorely dreaded, yet bought by friend and foe alike, and read wherever our language was understood. It is worth any reader's while to buy at some second-hand bookseller's 'The Recreations of Christopher North' and the 'Noctes,' both reprints from 'Old Ebony.'

Suddenly there occurred a vacancy in the University Professorship of Moral Philosophy. Wilson tried for the post against Sir William Hamilton. All the influence of a grateful and unscrupulous Tory administration (that of Lord Liverpool, George IV.'s first Premier) was exerted on his behalf, and they handled the unreformed City Corporation, in whose appointment the Professorship lay, as voters in rotten boroughs were then handled. John Wilson secured the chair, to the great scandal of the other side, who truly pointed out that he had had no philosophical training nor known bias to ethical studies, while his previous life had given no evidence of his fitness to teach morals to young men. As a matter of fact, however, this was a turning-point in his own spiritual career. He took the advice of Sir Walter Scott to 'forswear sack, purge, and live cleanly like a gentleman.' He set himself diligently to the study of his new subject, and mastered it. He never published any system of Moral Philosophy. He has made no such mark in the history of philosophy as did his great competitor. Yet, far beyond almost any teacher of modern times, he achieved the highest of all distinctions—that of being beloved, reverenced, almost idolized, by generations of students during a term of thirty years, moulding and shaping the lives of multitudes of public men and of those who create the national welfare in schools and colleges, and filling them with noble aspirations and ideals. His was a 'muscular Christianity,' taught and practised long ere the term was invented and popularized.

His strenuous life was now, at the end of the thirty years of occupancy of the chair, drawing to its close. A paralytic stroke obliged him to resign. After a lingering time of gradual decay the fine spirit—erring, repentant, forgiven, witnessing mightily for the higher and better side of human nature—passed into a world of kindred souls, as he wished it might, ''mid the blest stillness of a Sabbath day.'