cheeks and, indeed, there was not a dry eye in the class. He waved his hand to us as we all stood up, and hurried into his robing-room.

But let me turn to more cheerful phases in our Professor's life. One of these was the establishment of one of the greatest coups ever achieved by Blackwood-the Noctes Ambrosianæ. For a long time it was popularly believed in Scotland that the Noctes were actual reports of unpremeditated conversations, and that the poetic rhapsodies with which Christopher North, the Shepherd, and several other characters, one of which was introduced every month, used to favour each other, were all made on the spur of the moment, and that all the poetry and all the philosophy would have vanished into thin air were it not that the rapid pencil of Mr. Gurney took down every flight of fancy behind the curtain, every profound disquisition, perhaps on Brahmanism, perhaps on "leistering" salmon, or the Corn Law question, or the Poor Law question, diverging into Plato, or settling the manner in which Hannibal crossed the Rhone and climbed the Alps, and a hundred other similar topics. No. The real case was this. The gentlemen in question did meet every month, perhaps oftener, at Ambrose's Tavern, in Gideon Street, a narrow Edinburgh lane, and so called from the Christian name of a miscreant who had committed a most atrocious murder within its precincts, and there concocted the topics for the next month's Noctes, allotting to each member of the coterie that class of a subject which generally fell to his share. I have great suspicions that at one of these meetings was invented the famous Chaldee manuscript, which set all the evangelical, dissenting, presbyterian, and every other sect, persuasion, and creed whatever in Edinburgh, in a blaze of roaring indignation. The article which excited such a ferment was an account of all the intrigues and scandals of the authors and the publishers of Edinburgh, set forth in the style of the Old Testament, and done in a style in which it was scarcely possible to discover which predominatedthe sarcastic humour, or the pungency with which it was applied to the Whig writers and the Whig publishers of the day. The Shepherd, with his characteristic impudence, proclaimed himself the author of the whole, and went trumpeting the falsehood in all companies, pious and otherwise. Of course the number was speedily suppressed, but not until about two hundred copies of it had been circulated, from which, of course, thousands of copies of the Chaldee manuscript were flung broad-cast over the land, at a penny a-piece, so that the zealots, instead of crushing the blasphemous publication, found that their bigotry had reacted on themselves. I have seen one copy in MS., but probably a good many of the old penny tracts might yet be picked up on the book-stalls which abound in the back streets and lanes of "Auld Reekie."

I heard the other day a most characteristic anecdote of Wilson but it may have been in print in the Edinburgh papers of the period. The incident took place in the days of "Auld Lang Syne." It is well known that Blackwood's back shop was wont to be the resort of

all the Tory literati of Edinburgh, and that works of art, consisting of portraits, or busts, or even sketches of the members of their own party, used to be exhibited as soon as they were published. On one occasion were displayed a portrait and a bust-the first by an Edinburgh painter named Clinton, who used to say that he was "the only gentleman in the profession;" the second by a young sculptor of great promise, a townsman of Wilson's, named Fillans. Wilson was praising the bust with great vehemence and enthusiasm, when Clinton's father, who was present, said, "I think, sir, you might say a few words about my son's portrait." Sir," said Wilson, "your son's portrait is the portrait of a gentleman painted by a gentleman; but that, sir," turning to the bust, "is the head of a Greek god."

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I approach the closing scene. For more than a year past we have had reports that Professor Wilson was not himself, and that certain articles appearing under the name of Christopher North were old papers furbished up to suit contemporary events. Be these reports true or false, there could be small doubt but that the Herculean frame was failing, that those muscular limbs were weakening, and that that grand intellect, so complete in all the phases of intellect, but more particularly in those of a most glowing and fertile imagination, and a most sparkling and exhilarating fancy, that all these great gifts were slowly ebbing away. I am not aware of what the insidious disease which slowly prostrated so strong a constitution and so firm a brain was, but it could only have been one of the most subtle and unconquerable of human maladies which laid Wilson low at the age of sixty-six. The last time he appeared in public was when he was supported up the poll-ladder to vote for Macaulay. Strange mutations of human opinions! Wilson and Macaulay were once bitter political enemies; they have parted for ever-political friends.

The funeral took place on the 7th of April, and was, of course, attended by all the officials of the college, and one hundred of the students, the Directors of the Philosophical Institution, of which Professor Wilson was president, and all the members of the corporation, and all the Directors of all the Philosophical and Literary and Artistic Societies with which Edinburgh so much abounds. The procession, also, included the most eminent members of the Scottish bench and bar, the most eminent medical professors, and, in fact, all the notabilities of Edinburgh, and all Professor Wilson's private friends - and they reckoned not a few of the whole number. Including all these persons of distinction, there could not be less than a hundred gentlemen of the city grouped around the remains of their departed and lamented friend.

He was buried in a lonely spot in the Dean Cemetery, and I understand that two or three trees wave their branches over all that is mortal of John Wilson.

ANGUS B. REACH.

LIFE OF AN ARCHITECT.

LITERARY ASPIRATIONS.

My deceased father's Chancery affairs were on the eve of satisfactory settlement; and, on the strength of this, my fatherin-law suggested my coming into Devonshire, and there making another professional attempt. During my remaining stay in London, I succeeded in obtaining a little remunerative literary occupation, which still left me leisure for trying my pen in the dramatic and novel lines. Of course, these are simply honest confessions,-not records of self-imagined genius. Never was a young aspirant to mere professional practice more willing to stick exclusively to his T square and compasses than I: but, when my legitimate pursuits positively became little less than expensive amusements, some excuse was afforded for amusing myself in any manner that might for the time be more agreeable. I wrote a play,-tragedy of course; and of course it was sent, with modest presumption, to the great tragedian of my idolatry; to him who had so kindly given me friendly advice some few years before, on the matter of my then desire to turn actor. A reply, couched in the gentlest language of courtesy, invited me to call upon him; and this opportunity of merely having one other interview with so admired a man, was in itself sufficient, as the result of five acts of blank verse,-of verse "blank" enough, the reader may rest assured. Never was a wooer of the Muse rendered more content in his rejection. Of course my responder admitted it had poetic, but not, he feared, stage merits. His judgment, however, was very fallible;" and he would put it into the hands of the manager if I wished. He "remembered the pleasure he derived from my former visit to him, much more vividly than the kindness he had shown on that occasion, and was only too happy to think that I had proved any worth in the poor advice he then gave me." I was soon content to drop the "immediate subject" and to lead him into matter of more interest. At the end of a charming halfhour, his carriage was announced, and he shook my hand at parting. There's an end of it, thought I; I shall see the individual W. C. M. no more; but it is something to have shaken hands, at once, with Macbeth and Rob Roy Macregor, Othello and Gambia, Coriolanus and Virginius.

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Mr. Ridgway, the publisher, of Piccadilly, was imprudently more encouraging to my literary efforts as a novelist; and he at once accepted the manuscript of "The Life and Remains of Wilmot Warwick;" engaging to take upon himself all the cost and risk of publication, and equally to divide with me such profits as might accrue. The "Life" was a fiction founded on fact; the "Remains" comprised a series of tales or essays, sentimental

and humorous, strung together like the contents of Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall." It duly appeared in two small octavos, and met with very kind favour from the critics generally. The "London Magazine" alone abused me, as "a meagre humorist," a "mawkish sentimentalist," a "fifth-rate imitator of Washington Irving." The "Examiner," with just the amount of regard which I now think due to the book, acknowledged it as good enough "for lassitude and a sofa ;" but the "Gentleman's, and the "New Monthly," Magazines, with several of the daily papers, permitted their good-will to over-run their judgment, in the expression of much more decided eulogy. One critic found "a spice of the Shandean" in my volumes, and prophesied my future popularity in the lighter class of ephemeral literature. Another, however, closed his commendations by truthful reference to the too obvious imitation of the "Sketch Book" and "Bracebridge Hall," of which, says he, "the volumes before us exhibit throughout a very fair, and, in some passages, a highly successful copy. But an imitator, to rival his original in desert, must, in fact, greatly surpass him in essential excellence. Only to come near him is utterly to fail. And such, we apprehend, will be the verdict passed upon the present writer-in spite even of not a few passages in his work which may be thought to merit a better fate."

Such has been "the verdict passed." The error was in making a "book" of what was only suitable at best for the pages of a periodical, wherein my matter might have less ostentatiously passed its probation, either to remain "shelved" among better things, or to reappear in a distinct form, as expressed public favour might thereafter warrant. At all events, I was guiltless of any self-assurance in my own merits. If Mr. Ridgway had notrather to my surprise than otherwise-taken my manuscript, I should have, with very likely more benefit to myself, submitted it to the editor of some magazine. As it was, it served my purpose in the way of practice, experience, and encouraging, though corrective, comment. I need hardly say, in conclusion, that there were no "profits" to divide; and I was only unhappy in the fear that my too sanguine friend James Ridgway had some "loss" to submit to. Far am I below the reach of comfort from such consideration; but what fine things have first appeared in magazines ! The "Essays of Elia," the " Opium Eater," " Oliver Twist," and many others of equal, or more than equal, merit. Constantly, in the present, as in former times, are writings issuing from our periodical press, far surpassing what appears in all the dignity of distinct book-presentment, proud in its type, broad margin, and cover of "cloth of gold." How many of these volumes are issued forth on the responsibility of their authors, it is impossible to say; but, to repeat a hackneyed quotation

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T is a great thing to see one's name in print:

A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't."

I was not, however, as before stated, writing wholly without pay; and I managed, without further drawing on my friend H. B., conclude my London sojourn with sufficient money in hand for

the expenses of my removal into Devonshire. But I must not leave the metropolis without a farewell reference to its then existing architectural condition. In a former part of these memoirs, pictures were given of " London as I found it, and as it was some sixty years before." Twelve years had elapsed since my advent, when the sight of St. Paul's confirmed my architectural aspirations; and a general retrospect of what had been done and manifested during that interval, in the improvement of the great city and in the advance of professional taste, will be the subject of my next chapter.

LONDON AS I LEFT IT IN 1827.

George Augustus Frederick, first as Regent, then as King, was sovereign of the national taste during the twelve years which had passed away since my first coming to the metropolis, and Mr. Nash was his architectural prime minister. Whether the architect's Welsh extraction recommended him to the Prince of Wales is, I believe, a perfectly novel question. It is only certain that neither master nor man was competent to make the best of the grand opportunities then afforded, and that they gave an impetus to meretriciousness which it has cost better men infinite trouble to correct. The royal patron may have been a good judge of a Flemish picture, and Mr. Nash may have been competent to his first occupation as a miniature painter; but they were alike incapable of any conceptive grandeur in architecture, though Mr. Nash seems to have had a great aptitude for the business part of the profession he subsequently adopted. Had he been originally a capitalist, he would have made a spirited speculative builder, with "a quick eye to see" how city parks and new thoroughfares might be formed out of neglected spaces and inferior localities. The idea was a grand one, of opening a park on the north of Portland Place, and of continuing a handsome street from the latter, across Oxford Street, Piccadilly, and Pall Mall, into St. James's Park,-forming a pleasingly-varied line of more than a mile and a half in length,-a noble opportunity for such an architectural display, as would have exceeded the display made, not less than the improvements effected went beyond the previous condition of this part of the metropolis. Regent Street has length and width to an enviable amount; nor was it even, as it first appeared, wanting in architectural quantity; but the quality was indifferent, and the general lowness of the ranges on either hand left it utterly deficient in grandeur. It was, therefore, only most favourably to be appreciated by those who could, and would, recollect the comparative inferiority of what it superseded. Height is the very first essential of imposing street-architecture. The over-famed "street of palaces at Genoa, and the "Corso" of Rome, are narrow, even as London "lanes;" but the altitude of the buildings renders them impressive. The High Street of old Edinburgh varies from the wide to the narrow; but it derives effect from the mere loftiness of its houses, for, saving that they are