In the Life of Professor Wilson, by his daughter, Mrs. Gordon, edited here by Professor Mackenzie, there might be found enough to disabuse the public upon this point, if it were not read by the lamplight--or twilight--of long-cherished opinions. But as Blackwood, the shrewd, sharp, wary Scotchman, always talked about "our worthy friend Christopher" as a real, and not a mythological personage,--as if, in short, he were himself and nobody else,--and never of Wilson but as one of the contributors, or as the author of "Margaret Lyndsay" or "The Isle of Palms," and then with a look or a smile which he never explained, and which nobody out of the charmed circle ever understood, no wonder the delusion was kept up to the last. "All I can say," he once wrote me, while negotiating for more grist,--"all I can say is, that whatever is good in itself we are always happy to receive; the only difficulty is, that our worthy friend Christopher is a very absolute person, and therefore always judges for himself with regard to everything that is offered." Now this--considering that he himself, William Blackwood, was Christopher North, in spirit, if not in substance, and that he himself, and not Wilson, was the autocrat from whose judgment there was no appeal--might pass anywhere, I think, for one of the happiest examples of persevering, impudent mystification ever hazarded by a respectable man, while writing confidentially to another, and quite of a piece with the celebrated Chaldee manuscript. And now for my acquaintance with the man himself. I was living in Baltimore. I had given up my editorships. I had forsworn poetry and story-telling, (on paper,) and had not only entered upon the profession of the law with encouraging success, but had begun to settle upon my lees. One day, while dining with my friend Henry Robinson, who introduced gas into Boston, after a series of disastrous experiments in Baltimore, and the conversation happening to turn upon that subject, we wandered off into the state of English opinions generally. He was an Englishman by birth and early education, though his heart was American to the core. Something was said about the literature of the day, and the question was asked,--"Who reads an American book?" I blazed out, of course, and, after denouncing the "Edinburgh Review," where the impudent question was first broached, accompanied by the suggestion, that, so long as we could "import our literature in bales and hogsheads," we had better not try to manufacture for ourselves, I made up my mind on the spot, and within the next following half-hour at furthest, to carry the war into Africa.