The most engaging stories of Christopher North tell of his feats of endurance. After he was a grave professor he would throw off his coat and tackle successfully with his fists an obstreperous bully. He would walk seventy miles in the waking part of twenty-four hours. Once, in the braes of Glenorchy, he called at a farmhouse at eleven at night for refreshment. They brought him a bottle of whisky and a can of milk, which he mixed and consumed in two draughts from a huge bowl. He was called to the Scots bar in 1815, and from influence, or favour, agents at first sent him cases. He afterwards confessed that when he saw the papers on his table, he did not know what to do with them. But he speedily drifted into literature, wherein he made a permanent mark. We have all dipped into that huge mine of wit and wisdom, the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_. You would say of him, and you would of Scott, they were splendid men, their very faults and excesses lovable. What a strange power both had over animals! As in the case of Queen Mary, their servants were ever their faithful and devoted friends. Wilson kept a great number of dogs. Rover was a special favourite. As the animal was dying, Wilson bent over it, “Rover, my poor fellow, give me your paw,” as if he had been taking leave of a man. When Camp died, Scott reverently buried him in the back garden of his Castle Street house; his daughter noted the deep cloud of sorrow on her father’s face. Maida is with him on his monument as in life. Wilson kept sixty-two gamebirds all at once; they made a fearful noise. “Did they never fight?” queried his doctor. “No,” was the answer; “but put a hen amongst them, and I will not answer for the peace being long observed. And so it hath been since the beginning of the world.” These gifted men played each other tricks of the most impish nature. Lockhart once made a formal announcement of Christopher North’s sudden death, with a panegyric upon his character in the _Weekly Journal_; true, he confined it to a few copies, but it was rather a desperate method of jesting. Patrick Robertson, as Lord Robertson, a Senator of the College of Justice, published a volume of poems. This was duly reviewed in the _Quarterly_, which Lockhart edited, and a copy sent to the author; it finished off with this mad couplet: “Here lies the peerless paper lord, Lord Peter, Who broke the laws of God and man and metre.”