From that time forth, for thirty years or more, John Wilson held the place, and won a popularity with his annual relays of pupils that was unexampled and unshaken. Better lectures in his province may very possibly have been written by others elsewhere--more close, more compact, more thoroughly thought out, more methodic. His were not patterned after Reid and Stewart; indeed, not patterned at all; not wrought into a burnished system, with the pivots and cranks of the old school-men all in their places. But they made up a series--continuous, and lapping each into each, by easy confluence of topic--of discourses on moral duties and on moral relations, with full and brilliant illustrative talk--sometimes in his heated moments taking on the gush and exuberance of a poem; other times bristling with reminiscences; yet full of suggestiveness, and telling as much, I think, on the minds of his eager and receptive students as if the rhetorical brilliancies had all been plucked away, and some master of a duller craft had reduced his words to a stiff, logical paradigm. From this time forward Professor Wilson lived a quiet, domestic, yet fully occupied life. He wrote enormously for the magazine with which his name had become identified; there is scarce a break in his thirty years’ teachings in the university; there are sometimes brief interludes of travel; journeys to London; flights to the Highlands; there are breaks in his domestic circle, breaks in the larger circle of his friends; there are twinges of the gout and there come wrinkles of age; but he is braver to resist than most; and for years on years everybody knew that great gaunt figure, with blue eyes and hair flying wild, striding along Edinboro’ streets. His poems have indeed almost gone down under the literary horizon of to-day; but one who has known _Blackwood_ of old, can hardly wander anywhere amongst the Highlands of Scotland without pleasant recollections of Christopher North and of the musical bravuras of his speech. _Thomas Campbell._ Another Scotsman, who is worthy of our attention for a little time, is one of a different order; he is stiff, he is prim, he is almost priggish; he is so in his young days and he keeps so to the very last. A verse or two from one of the little poems he wrote will bring him to your memory: “On Linden when the sun was low, All bloodless lay the untrodden snow, And dark as winter was the flow, Of Iser, rolling rapidly.” And again: “Then shook the hills with thunder riven, Then rushed the steed to battle driven, And louder than the bolts of heaven, Far flashed the red artillery.”