Few men ever undertook so important a charge with so little preparation. “But there was,” says one who listened to him, “a genius in Wilson; there was grandeur in his conceptions, and true nobility in the tone and spirit of his lectures. I can compare them to nothing save the braying of the trumpet that sent a body of high-bred cavalry against the foe. ‘Charge! and charge home!’ Wilson’s action upon the better and more pure-minded of his pupils was pre-eminently beneficial. His lectures deeply influenced their characters for humanity, for unselfishness, for high and honourable resolve to fight the battle of life; like the old Danish hero ‘to dare nobly, to will strongly, and never to falter in the path of duty.’ Such was Wilson’s creed; and, till 1850, when he was found stricken down in his private room, ten minutes after the class hour, he astonished and delighted all that was intellectual in Edinburgh by these, aptly termed, ‘volcanic lectures on ethics.’” Much work, however, had to be gone through before that date; his private fortune had been lost some years back by the failure of a house of business, and he was one of those men whom, the more work is thrown on them the more they are able to go through with. In 1822 appeared the first specimen of his power as a novelist in the “Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life,” which went rapidly through edition after edition; and in the March of this year appeared also the first number of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_--a curt dialogue between the editor and Ensign O’Doherty; it was not for seventeen numbers that Wilson, almost sorry, commenced that wonderful series that became one of the literary wonders of the day; and for thirteen years as Christopher North he continued to delight the world, and it is as Christopher North, in his shooting-jacket, with gun or fishing-rod, by the lochs or by the moors, amid the scenery which he has so marvellously limned, and the emotions to which he has given utterance, that he will be remembered to all time. In 1824 we see that Carlyle gets his first pleasant encouragement in _Maga_, and Moir’s most famous production, the “Autobiography of Mansie Wauch,” appears. Moir--a young surgeon of only nineteen when he first appeared in the pages of the original _Edinburgh Monthly Magazine_--had at once attracted the attention of William Blackwood--“a man,” says Moir’s biographer, “of rare sagacity, courage, and persevering energy.” As “Delta,” in the pages of _Maga_, the popularity of Moir’s softer and sweeter pieces was very great; and when “Mansie” appeared, “there were districts,” says Aird again, “where country clubs, waiting impatiently for the magazine, met monthly as soon as it was issued, and had ‘Mansie’ read aloud by one of their number, amid explosions of congregated laughter.”