On the slopes of Orrest, too, is the house of Elleray, successor to that older one in which Professor Wilson, by no means the least one of the Wordsworthian band, led his breezy, strenuous life. Son of a wealthy Glasgow merchant, winner of the Newdigate and a first classman at Oxford, and scarcely less conspicuous for his athletic feats and sporting wagers, young Wilson bought the land at Elleray while an undergraduate and built a house on it later, after the passing of an unsatisfactory love affair. As "Christopher North" every lover of the rod with any sense of its literature knows him yet. Nor would all this be worthy of record were it not that the brilliant little band who did none of these things held Wilson of Elleray as one of themselves. Losing his fortune ten years later through a defaulting trustee, he became the brilliant supporter of _Blackwood_ and Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh University, though always retaining his connection with Windermere. In fact, when Scott made his memorable visit to the Lake District, and with Lockhart and Canning stayed with the then owner of Storrs Hall, now a hotel on the lake shore, we find Wilson doing the honours of Windermere as commodore of its large fleet of yachts. Country houses, villas, and rich woods cluster thickly up and down either shore; here and there perhaps a little too thickly. But the general prospect up to Ambleside on the one hand, and down past Curwen Island--named after one of the oldest of Cumbrian families--to Newby Bridge on the other, is no whit blemished. One feels it to be a region rather of delightful residence, which indeed it is, than of temporary sojourn for the tourist, with the mountains beckoning him into the deeper heart of Lakeland and to more primitive forms of nature. Shapely yachts flit hither and thither, less alluring steamboats plough white furrows, while the irresponsible pleasure boat is in frequent evidence. Occasionally, too, there are winters when the great lake glistens with thick glassy ice from end to end beneath snow-peaked mountains, and the glories of such a brief period--glories of scene and of physical exhilaration--shine out in the memory yet more luminously than the unfailing pageants of summer; even the pageants of early June when the lake is quiet, and in sequestered bays the angler, like his neighbour of Derwentwater, celebrates the festival of the May-fly, the only one seriously observed by the lusty and wily trout of these two waters. The personal associations of these opulent shores of Windermere are too crowded for us here; but Dr. Arnold of Rugby had, of course, his holiday home of Foxhowe near the Ambleside end, which is still occupied by his daughter.