University of Virginia Library

127. LETTER CXXVII.

One of my most valued letters to Scotland was an
introduction to Professor Wilson—the “Christopher
North” of Blackwood, and the well-known poet.
The acknowledgment of the reception of my note
came with an invitation to breakfast the following
morning, at the early hour of nine.

The professor's family were at a summer residence
in the country, and he was alone in his house in
Gloucester-place, having come to town on the melancholy
errand of a visit to poor Blackwood—(since
dead). I was punctual to my hour, and found the
poet standing before the fire with his coat-skirts expanded—a
large, muscular man, something slovenly
in his dress, but with a manner and face of high good
humor, and remarkably frank and prepossessing address.
While he was finding me a chair, and saying
civil things of the noble friend who had been the medium
of our acquaintance, I was trying to reconcile
my idea of him, gathered from portraits and descriptions,
with the person before me. I had imagined a
thinner and more scholar-like looking man, with a
much paler face, and a much more polished exterior.
His head is exceedingly ample, his eye blue and restless,
his mouth full of character, and his hair, of a
very light sandy color, is brushed up to cover an incipient
baldness, but takes very much its own way,
and has the wildness of a highlander's. He has the
stamp upon him of a remarkable man to a degree seldom
seen, and is, on the whole, fine-looking and certainly
a gentleman in his appearance; but (I know
not whether the impression is common) I expected in
Christopher North, a finished and rather over-refined
man of the world of the old school, and I was so far
disappointed.

The tea was made, and the breakfast smoked upon
the table, but the professor showed no signs of being
aware of the fact, and talked away famously, getting
up and sitting down, walking to the window and
standing before the fire, and apparently carried quite
away with his own too rapid process of thought. He
talked of the American poets, praised Percival and
Pierpont more particularly; expressed great pleasure
at the criticisms of his own works that had appeared
in the American papers and magazines—and still the
toast was getting cold, and with every move he seemed
less and less aware of the presence of breakfast.
There were plates and cups for but two, so that he
was not waiting for another guest, and after half an
hour had thus elapsed, I began to fear he thought he
had already breakfasted. If I had wished to remind
him of it, however, I should have had no opportunity,
for the stream of his eloquence ran on without a
break; and eloquence it certainly was. His accent is
very broadly Scotch, but his words are singularly well
chosen, and his illustrations more novel and poetical
than those of any man I ever conversed with. He
spoke of Blackwood, returning to the subject repeatedly,
and always with a softened tone of voice and a
more impressive manner, as if his feelings were entirely
engrossed by the circumstances of his illness.
“Poor Blackwood,” he said, setting his hands together,
and fixing his eyes on the wall, as if he were soliloquising
with the picture of the sick man vividly before
him, “there never was a more honest creature, or
a better friend. I have known him intimately for
years, and owe him much; and I could lose no friend
that would affect me more nearly. There is something
quite awful in the striking down thus of a fa
miliar companion by your side—the passing away—
the death—the end for ever of a man you have been
accustomed to meet as surely as the morning or evening,
and have grown to consider a part of your existence
almost. To have the share he took in your
thoughts thrown back upon you—and his aid and
counsel and company with you no more. His own
mind is in a very singular state. He knows he is to
die, and he has made every preparation in the most
composed and sensible manner, and if the subject is
alluded to directly, does not even express a hope of
recovery; yet, the moment the theme is changed, he
talks as if death were as far from him as ever, and
looks forward, and mingles himself up in his remarks
on the future, as if he were to be here to see this and
the other thing completed, and share with you the advantage
for years to come. What a strange thing it
is—this balancing between death and life—standing on
the edge of the grave, and turning, first to look into
its approaching darkness, and then back on the familiar
and pleasant world, yet with a certain downward
progress, and no hope of life, beyond the day over
your head!”

I asked if Blackwood was a man of refined literary
taste.

“Yes,” he said, “I would trust his opinion of a
book sooner than that of any man I know. He might
not publish everything he approved, for it was his business
to print only things that would sell; and, therefore,
there are perhaps many authors who would complain
of him; but, if his opinion had been against my
own, and it had been my own book, I should believe
he was right and give up my own judgment. He was
a patron of literature, and it owes him much. He is
a loss to the world.”

I spoke of the “Noctes.”

He smiled, as you would suppose Christopher
North would do, with the twinkle proper of genuine
hilarity in his eye, and said, “Yes, they have been very
popular. Many people in Scotland believe them to
be transcripts of real scenes, and wonder how a professor
of moral philosophy can descend to such carousings,
and poor Hogg comes in for his share of
abuse, for they never doubt he was there and said
everything that is put down for him.”

“How does the Shepherd take it?”

“Very good humoredly, with the exception of one
or two occasions, when cockney scribblers have visited
him in their tours, and tried to flatter him by convincing
him he was treated disrespectfully. But five
minutes' conversation and two words of banter restore
his good humor, and he is convinced, as he ought to
be, that he owes half his reputation to the Noctes.”

“What do you think of his Life of Sir Walter,
which Lockhart has so butchered in Fraser?”

“Did Lockhart write that?”

“I was assured so in London.”

“It was a barbarous and unjustifiable attack; and,
oddly enough, I said so yesterday to Lockhart himself,
who was here, and he differed from me entirely.
Now you mention it, I think from his manner, he must
have written it.”

“Will Hogg forgive him?”

“Never! never! I do not think he knows yet who
has done it, but I hear that he is dreadfully exasperated.
Lockhart is quite wrong. To attack an old
man, with gray hairs, like the Shepherd, and accuse
him so flatly and unnecessarily of lie upon lie—oh, it
was not right!”

“Do you think Hogg misrepresented facts wilfully?”

“No, oh no! he is perfectly honest, no doubt, and
quite revered Sir Walter. He has an unlucky inaccuracy
of mind, however; and his own vanity, which
is something quite ridiculous, has given a coloring to
his conversations with Scott, which puts them in a

very false light; and Sir Walter, who was the best
natured of men, may have said the things ascribed to
him in a variety of moods, such as no one can understand
who does not know what a bore Hogg must
sometimes have been at Abbottsford. Do you know
Lockhart?”

“No, I do not. He is almost the only literary man
in London I have not met; and I must say, as the
editor of the Quarterly, and the most unfair and unprincipled
critic of the day, I have no wish to know
him. I never heard him well spoken of. I probably
have met a hundred of his acquaintances, but I have
not yet seen one who pretended to be his friend.”

“Yet there is a great deal of good in Lockhart. I
allow all you say of his unfairness and severity; but
if he were sitting there, opposite you, you would find
him the mildest and most unpresuming of men, and so
he appears in private life always.”

“Not always. A celebrated foreigner, who had
been very intimate with him, called one morning to
deprecate his severity upon Baron D'Haussez's book
in a forthcoming review. He did his errand in a
friendly way, and, on taking his leave, Lockhart, with
much ceremony, accompanied him down to his carriage.
`Pray don't give yourself the trouble to come
down,' said the polite Frenchman. `I make a point
of doing it, sir;' said Lockhart, with a very offensive
manner, `for I understand from your friend's book,
that we are not considered a polite nation in France.'
Nothing certainly could be more ill-bred and insulting.”

“Still it is not in his nature. I do believe that it is
merely an unhappy talent he has for sarcasm, with
which his heart has nothing to do. When he sits
down to review a book, he never thinks of the author
or his feelings. He cuts it up with pleasure, because
he does it with skill in the way of his profession, as a
surgeon dissects a dead body. He would be the first
to show the man a real kindness if he stood before
him. I have known Lockhart long. He was in Edinboro'
a great while, and when he was writing `Valerius,'
we were in the habit of walking out together
every morning, and when we reached a quiet spot in
the country, he read to me the chapters as he wrote
them. He finished it in three weeks. I heard it all
thus by piecemeal as it went on, and had much difficulty
in persuading him that it was worth publishing.
He wrote it very rapidly, and thought nothing of it.
We used to sup together with Blackwood, and that
was the real origin of the `Noctes.”'

“At Ambrose's?”

“At Ambrose's.”

“But is there such a tavern, really?”

“Oh, certainly. Anybody will show it to you. It
is a small house, kept in an out-of-the-way corner of
the town, by Ambrose, who is an excellent fellow in
his way, and has had a great influx of custom in consequence
of his celebrity in the Noctes. We were
there one night very late, and had all been remarkably
gay and agreeable. `What a pity,' said Lockhart,
`that some short-hand writer had not been here to
take down the good things that have been said at this
supper.' The next day he produced a paper called
`Noctes Ambrosianæ,' and that was the first. I continued
them afterward.”

“Have you no idea of publishing them separately?
I think a volume or two should be made of the more
poetical and critical parts, certainly. Leaving out the
politics and the merely local topics of the day, no book
could be more agreeable.”

“It was one of the things pending when poor
Blackwood was taken ill. But, will you have some
breakfast?”

The breakfast had been cooling for an hour, and I
most willingly acceded to his proposition. Without
rising, he leaned back, with his chair still toward the
fire, and seizing the tea-pot as if it were a sledge-hammer,
he poured from one cup to the other without
interrupting the stream, overrunning both cup and
saucer, and partly flooding the tea-tray. He then set
the cream toward me with a carelessness which nearly
overset it, and in trying to reach an egg from the centre
of the table, broke two. He took no notice of his
own awkwardness, but drank his cup of tea at a single
draught, ate his egg in the same expeditious manner,
and went on talking of the Noctes and Lockhart and
Blackwood, as if eating his breakfast were rather a
troublesome parenthesis in his conversation. After a
while he digressed to Wordsworth and Southey, and
asked me if I was going to return by the Lakes. I
proposed doing so.

“I will give you letters to both, if you haven't
them. I lived a long time in that neighborhood, and
know Wordsworth perhaps as well as any one. Many
a day I have walked over the hills with him, and listened
to his repetition of his own poetry, which of course
filled my mind completely at the time, and perhaps
started the poetical vein in me, though I can not agree
with the critics that my poetry is an imitation of
Wordsworth's.”

“Did Wordsworlh repeat any other poetry than his
own?”

“Never in a single instance, to my knowledge. He
is remarkable for the manner in which he is wrapped
up in his own poetical life. He thinks of nothing
else. Everything ministers to it. Everything is done
with reference to it. He is all and only a poet.”

“Was the story true that was told in the papers of
his seeing, for the first time, in a large company some
new novel of Scott's, in which there was a motto taken
from his works; and that he went immediately to
the shelf and took down one of his own volumes and
read the whole poem to the party, who were waiting
for a reading of the new book?”

“Perfectly true. It happened in this very house.
Wordsworth was very angry at the paragraph, and I
believe accused me of giving it to the world. I was
as much surprised as himself, however, to see it in
print.”

“What is Southey's manner of life?”

“Walter Scott said of him that he lived too much
with women. He is secluded in the country, and surrounded
by a circle of admiring friends who glorify
every literary project he undertakes, and persuade
him in spite of his natural modesty, that he can do
nothing wrong or imperfectly. He has great genius
and is a most estimable man.”

“Hamilton lives on the Lakes too—does he not?”

“Yes. How terribly he was annoyed by the review
of his book in the North American. Who
wrote it?”

“I have not heard positively, but I presume it was
Everett. I know nobody else in the country who
holds such a pen. He is the American Junius.”

“It was excessively clever but dreadfully severe,
and Hamilton was frantic about it. I sent it to him
myself, and could scarce have done him a more ungracious
office. But what a strange thing it is that
nobody can write a good book on America! The ridiculous
part of it seems to me that men of common
sense go there as travellers, and fill their books with
scenes such as they may see every day within five
minutes' walk of their own doors, and call them American.
Vulgar people are to be found all over the
world, and I will match any scene in Hamilton or
Mrs. Trollope, any day or night, here in Edinburgh.
I have always had an idea that I should be the best
traveller in America myself. I have been so in the
habit of associating with people of every class in my
own country, that I am better fitted to draw the proper
distinctions, I think, between what is universal over
the world or peculiar to America.”

“I promise you a hearty welcome, if you should
be inclined to try.”

“I have thought seriously of it. It is, after all,
not more than a journey to Switzerland or Italy, of
which we think nothing, and my vacation of five
months would give me ample time, I suppose, to run
through the principal cities. I shall do it, I think.”

I asked if he had written a poem of any length
within the last few years.

“No, though I am always wishing to do it. Many
things interfere with my poetry. In the first place I
am obliged to give a lecture once a day for six months,
and in the summer it is such a delight to be released,
and get away into the country with my girls and boys,
that I never put pen to paper till I am driven. Then
Blackwood is a great care; and, greater objection still,
I have been discouraged in various ways by criticism.
It used to gall me to have my poems called imitations
of Wordsworth and his school; a thing I could not
see myself, but which was asserted even by those who
praised me, and which modesty forbade I should disavow.
I really can see no resemblance between the
Isle of Palms and anything of Wordsworth's. I think
I have a style of my own, and as my ain bairn, I think
better of it than other people, and so pride prevents
my writing. Until late years, too, I have been the
subject of much political abuse, and for that I should
not have cared if it were not disagreeable to have
children and servants reading it in the morning papers,
and a fear of giving them another handle in my poetry
was another inducement for not writing.”

I expressed my surprise at what he said, for, as far
as I knew the periodicals, Wilson had been a singularly
continued favorite.

“Yes, out of this immediate sphere, perhaps—but
it requires a strong mind to suffer annoyance at one's
lips, and comfort oneself with the praise of a distant
and outer circle of public opinion. I had a family
growing up of sons and daughters, who felt for me
more than I should have felt for myself, and I was annoyed
perpetually. Now, these very papers praise
me, and I really can hardly believe my eyes when I
open them and find the same type and imprint expressing
such different opinions. It is absurd to mind
such weathercocks; and, in truth, the only people
worth heeding or writing for are the quiet readers in
the country, who read for pleasure, and form sober
opinions apart from political or personal prejudice. I
would give more for the praise of one country clergyman
and his family than I would for the momentary
admiration of a whole city. People in towns require
a constant plantasmagoria, to keep up even the remembrance
of your name. What books and authors,
what battles and heroes, are forgotten in a day!”

My letter is getting too long, and I must make it
shorter, as it is vastly less agreeable than the visit itself.
Wilson went on to speak of his family, and his
eyes kindled with pleasure in talking of his children.
He invited me to stop and visit him at his place near
Selkirk, in my way south, and promised me that I
should see Hogg, who lived not far off. Such inducement
was scarce necessary, and I made a half
promise to do it and left him, after having passed several
hours of the highest pleasure in his fascinating
society.