So that city of Edinburgh is still maintaining its high literary reputation.In Jeffrey they have a representative of the talent, and in Scott, with Wilson in an inferior degree, representatives of the genius of their country.The " blue and yellow " is the organ of the one and old " ebony of the other.The one favors taste and judgment; the other originality and literary beauty.The one is seeking to improve things, has no great {412} reverence for the wisdom of the ancients, looks forward to the future, and is considerably cool and indifferent towards religion; the other likes things as they are, has a profound reverence for old customs and feudal castles, and speaks highly of the forms of religion as established by law and custom, "Blackwood's Magazine" is the great work of Wilson.his tales are full of sentiment too; much in the manner of Mackenzie, -- so much so as to be at times cloying as treacle.He professes to describe the trials and sorrows of the poor; but it is clear that he paints them as one who, with a warm heart, has viewed them at a distance, and who has never truly be come one of them.His poor are certainly not the Scotch poor, with their deep feeling, which oppresses them all the more that it cannot get an out let except in brief and restrained phrases, showing that they are repressing what should be allowed to flow out.His poetry is certainly beautiful in imagery and expression, but has too redundant foliage in proportion to the stem and branches which support it, and often wants a healthy air and a manly bearing.But the whole soil of Wilson comes out in the "Noctes Ambrosianm." We have here an extravaganza full of all excellencies and defects, of fun and frolic, wit and humor, fancies and imaginations, shrewd wisdom and ingenious nonsense, of offensively personal comment and genuine pathos, of drinking, swearing, morality, and religion, --which, however, always smells of the whiskey punch of the tavern.The whole is a sort of rhapsody which reads like an inspiration, but breathing more of the soil of earth than the air of heaven.It is a waste, newly turned up, and yielding an exuberance of seeds and trees, flowers and fruit; but with weeds and chills and fevers.
In 1820, when Brown died, there was a keen struggle for the chair of moral philosophy.Sir James Mackintosh might have had it, but could not resist the temptations of politics and London society.The contest lay between Wilson and Sir William Hamilton known already as a scholar, but not as an author.The town council was unreformed; the tories had the political power of the city; they were annoyed by the attacks of Jeffrey and jealous of the growing liberal spirit fostered by the philosophical professors of the University.So Wilson was started and warmly supported by the government.Scott, the literary genius of Edinburgh, threw himself thoroughly into the canvass for Wilson, who received the appointment.Every one felt that Scottish metaphysics had suffered a reverse; but some rejoiced at this, as feeling that the Scottish colleges were too exclusively metaphysical, and introduced students to philosophy at too early an age, and they expected Wilson to give an impulse to literary culture.
We have a record in the "Memoir" of the attempts of the literary man and the poet to produce a course of lectures on philosophy.He would commence with some attractive and eloquent introductory lectures of a "popular though philosophical character, so as to make a good impression at first on his students and also on the public," and so he proposes to give eight or ten lectures on the moral systems of ancient Greece.Then he is to have six or more lectures on the physical nature of man.And now the difficulties meet him.Must he tread in the steps of Reid and Stewart {413}