It is one of the painful duties which devolve on those connected with a work like the present, to be called on from time to time to commemorate the removal from this earthly scene, of those by whose original and inventive minds its peculiar character was impressed, or to whose genius and labours in after life it owed its continued influence and reputation. More than once that melancholy task has been ours, for Death has made more than his usual gaps in the ranks of those who were associated with the rise of this Magazine and its early success. But the greatest and most distinguished of that gifted band, whose name has been identified with it from first to last, had till now been spared;—withdrawn, indeed, for some time from those circles which he had enlightened and adorned—and already surrounded by some shadow of the coming night, but still surviving among us as a link connecting the present and the past, and forming the centre of a thousand sympathising and reverential associations. He also has at last been gathered to his fellows. Professor Wilson expired at his house in Gloucester Place on the morning of the 3d April 1854. Born in May 1785, he was thus in his sixty-ninth year when he died;—not prematurely taken, it may be said, for he had nearly touched the period which is proverbially allotted as the measure of human life, yet passing from among us long before he had attained that advanced old age, which, when united with health, wisdom, and worth, seems to afford one of the happiest conditions of existence, and of which, in his case, the vigour and elasticity both of his mental and bodily frame, had seemed to human calculation to promise the attainment. It is consolatory to think that his period of seclusion and sickness passed in tranquillity both of mind and body; not perhaps painless, yet without acute or prolonged suffering;—the bodily energies waning gently, like the twilight, and the mind, though clear, partaking of that growing languor which had crept over the frame with which it was associated. As a proof of how long his mental vigour and capacity of exertion survived the effects of physical decline, it may be mentioned that two of the papers entitled “Dies Boreales,” the last of a fine series on Milton’s _Paradise Lost_, were written by him in August and September 1852, some months after the occurrence of that calamity by which his strong frame had been stricken down; papers written with his usual fine perception and impressive diction, but in a hand so tremulous, so feeble and indistinct, as to prove the strong effort of will by which alone such a task could have been accomplished. These were the last papers he ever wrote: they want, as is evident enough, the dazzling splendour of his earlier writings: they do not stir the heart like the trumpet tones of his prime, but they breathe a tone of sober grandeur and settled conviction; and these subdued and earnest words,