Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1882 — Christopher North. [ARTICLE]

Christopher North.

In the prime of his life, at the age of thirty-four, Wilson had obtained the important chair of moral philosophy in tfre greatest university of his native country, and that post is associated with his best fame. In Gloucester Place liia career w r as a pleasant and prosperous one, marked chiefly by the rich arteries which followed from his pen monthly (though there he lost his amiable wife, a loss which he felt keenly, and which cast a gloom over all his actions at the time), the college lectures, and the award at each session end to his rival essayists, the retreat in summer to sylvan Elleray and its circle of poets, or a visit to the Burns’ festival in Ayrshire. The death of Mrs. Wilson affected him deeply, nigh to depriving him of reason, and when he resumed his duties nerft session it was with a solemn and crushed spirit, but when he saw the sympathy of his students who worshiped him, he fairly broke down, and leaning his lionlike head upon his desk, exclaimed in a low voice, never forgotten by those who heard it, “Oh, gentlemen, forgive me! But since we last met I have been in the valley of the shadow of death!” He was elected first president of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution at its formation, and in 1852 he resigned the college chair, after an honorary pension from government had been conferred upon him by Lord John Russell. Many are the personal anecdotes still remembered of the professor in his Edinburgh circle, or elsewhere, from jocose colloquy with Lord Robertson to the incident of the unfortunate printer, who lost some editorial “copy” ih his hat on the way to Blackwood’s, and returning to Gloucester Place to narrate the mishap, was so crushed by Wilson’s silent look as to take forthwith to his bed, so that his terrified w'ife, able to draw no explanation from him, went to the printing-office to ask what had been done to her husband. “I’ll shake my tawny mane at vou,” was another expression which he often used; and, indeed, his magnificent head of hair looked like enough a lion's.