Of his poems, not excepting the Foresters (Philadelphia, 1805), nothing need now be said, save that they no doubt served to develop his descriptive powers. His American Ornithology, however, remains a fundamental classic. In the words of Jardine, “He was the first who studied the birds of North America in their natural abodes and from real observation; and his work will remain an ever to be admired testimony of enthusiasm and perseverance, one certainly unrivalled in description; and, if some plates and illustrations may vie with it in finer workmanship or pictorial splendour, few indeed can rival it in fidelity and truth of delineation.” The eighth and ninth volumes were edited after his decease by his friend Ord, and the work was continued by Lucien Bonaparte (4 vols., Philadelphia, 1828-33). The American Ornithology was also republished by Sir William Jardine (3 vols., London, 1832), and an edition of his entire works has been edited by Rev. A. B. Grosart (Paisley, 1876). A statue was also erected to him at Paisley in 1876.

WILSON, Florence. See Volusenus.

WILSON, Henry (1812-1875), vice-president of the United States from 1873 to 1875, was born at Farmington, N.H., on 16th February 1812. His proper name was Jeremiah J. Colbath. His parents were day-labourers and very poor. At ten years of age he went to work as a farmlabourer. The boy was greedy for reading, and before the end of his apprenticeship had read more than a thousand volumes. At the age of twenty-one, for some unstated reason, he had his name changed by Act of the Legislature to that of Henry Wilson. Walking to Natick, Mass., he learned the trade of shoemaker, and by it supported himself through the Concord academy. After successfully establishing himself as a shoe manufacturer, he became a noted public speaker in support of Harrison during the presidential election of 1840. -For the next ten years he was regularly returned to the State legislature. In 1848 he left the Whig party and became a “Free Soiler.” The Free Soil party nominated him for governor of the State in 1853, but he was defeated. In 1855 he was sent to the United States Senate by the Free Soil and Democratic parties, and remained there by re-elections until 1873. When the Civil War broke out he found a severe test awaiting him. He had been deeply interested from 1840 until 1850 in the militia of his State, and had risen through its grades of service to that of brigadier-general. He was now made chairman of the military committee; and in this position performed most laborious and important work for the four years of the war. The position offered boundless and safe opportunities for becoming wealthy. But so far was Wilson from using them that he died poor, owing to his necessary neglect of his private affairs. Sumner says that in 1873 Wilson was obliged to borrow a hundred dollars from him to meet the expenses of his inauguration as vice-president. The Republicans nominated Wilson for the vice-presidency in 1872, and he was elected; but he died, before completing his term of service, at Washington on 22d November 1875. He left two small but useful works, Anti-Slavery Measures in Congress (Boston, 1864) and Military Measures in Congress (Hartford, 1868), and a larger work in three volumes, The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (Boston, 1871-76). His Life has been written by E. Nason and by J. B. Mann.

WILSON, Horace Hayman (1786-1860), one of the most distinguished Orientalists of England, was born in London on 26th September 1786. He was educated for the medical profession, and on completing his studies went out to India in 1808 as an assistant-surgeon on the Bengal establishment of the East India Company. Instead of entering the regular medical service, however, his knowledge of chemistry and the practical analysis of metals caused him to be attached to the mint at Calcutta, where he was for a time associated with John Leyden, the Scottish poet and Orientalist. It was not long before he himself became deeply interested in the ancient language and literature of India, and attracted the attention of Henry T. Colebrooke, the famous Sanskrit scholar, on whose recommendation he was in 1811 appointed secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In 1813 he published the Sanskrit text —with a graceful, if somewhat free, translation in English rhymed verse—of Kalidasa’s charming lyrical poem, the Meghadüta, or Cloud-Messenger (2d ed. 1843, 3d ed. 1867). He then undertook the arduous task of preparing the first Sanskrit-English Dictionary from materials compiled by native scholars for the college of Fort William, supplemented by his own researches. The work appeared in 1819, prefaced with an excellent general survey of Sanskrit lexicology. A second, much enlarged, edition, but without the introduction, was published in 1832, and has recently been reprinted at Calcutta. The appearance of the Dictionary at once placed Wilson in the first rank of Sanskrit scholars; and, while patiently pursuing his study of the writings and institutions of ancient India, he became one of the most valuable contributors to the Asiatic Researches and the Calcutta Quarterly. Among his more important contributions to these journals may be mentioned essays on the “Medical and Surgical Sciences, of the Hindus” (1823); the “Hindu History of Kashmir” (1824); “Hindu Fiction” (1825); and his masterly “Account of the Religious Sects of the Hindus, their History, Doctrines, and Practices” (1828-32). In 1827 he published Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus, in 3 vols., in which, besides a very full and highly appreciative survey of Indian dramaturgy, which still remains the standard authority on the subject, he offered elegant translations of six complete plays and short accounts of twenty-three others. This work was reprinted in London in 1835, in 2 vols., and again in Wilson’s Collected Works (vols. xi. and xii.). Of considerable importance, alike to Sanskrit and vernacular students, and to Eastern antiquarians generally, was his next publication, the Mackenzie Collection (2 vols., 1828; 2d ed. in one vol., 1882), being a descriptive catalogue of the extensive collection of Oriental, especially South Indian, MSS. and antiquities made by Col. Colin Mackenzie, and purchased from his widow by the Indian Government, now deposited partly in the India Office, London, and partly at Madras. Neither his extensive literary researches, however, nor the official duties of an assay master and mint secretary, at any time prevented Wilson from taking a prominent part in all social amusements of the Anglo-Indian community of Calcutta, especially in musical and theatrical entertainments. His interest in political and economic affairs in India is shown by his Historical Sketch of the First Burmese War, with Documents, Political and Geographical (1827, reprinted in London), and his Review of the External Commerce of Bengal from 1813 to 1828 (1830), as well as by his History of British India from 1805 to 1835, in continuation of Mill’s History, 3 vols. (1844-48), and largely based on his personal impressions and recollections. He also acted for many years as secretary to the committee of public instruction. As such, he not only organized and superintended the studies of the Hindu College from the time of its establishment, but took a leading part in the promotion of public education among the natives, and the introduction of the English language and European science, although, as one of the staunchest opponents, on grounds of expediency and feasibleness, of the proposal that English should be made the sole medium of instruction in native schools, he became for a time the object of bitter attacks. Long, however, before this controversy came to an end he had been called away to a different sphere of scholarly activity. In 1832 the university of Oxford, in recognition of his services to Oriental scholarship, selected Dr Wilson to be the first occupant of the newly founded Boden chair of Sanskrit. Shortly after his return to England he was also appointed librarian to the East India Company. He now found himself in a position singularly favourable to learned research and literary pursuits; and the long record of his subsequent work shows that he made the best of his opportunities. He immediately joined the Royal Asiatic Society, and, succeeding Colebrooke as director (in 1837), he was the very soul of the society up to the time of his death, scarcely a number of its journal appearing without some interesting contribution from his pen. His death took place at London on 8th May 1860.

Of these contributions we need only mention here his ,, Historical Sketch of the Kingdom of Pãndya” (1836), based on documents contained in the Mackenzie collection; the continuation of his “Analysis of the Puränas” (1836), begun in the Bengal Society's Journal (1832); “Civil and Religious Institutions of the Sikhs” and “Religious Festivals of the Hindus” (1848); “Analysis and Revised Translation of the Rock Inscriptions of Kapur di Giri” (1850); and his popular lecture “On the Present State of the Cultivation of Oriental Literature” (1852). Hardly less numerous, and certainly not less valuable, are his separate publications during this period, by which important light was thrown on many departments of Eastern inquiry. The most noteworthy of these works are the text of, and commentary on, the Sãnkhyakãrikã (1837), being a very popular summary of the Sãnkhya philosophy, with a translation (of the text by Colebrooke, and the commentary by Wilson); translation of the Vishnu Parana (1840, 2d annotated ed. by F. E. Hall; Works, vols. vi. -x. ); Ariana Antiqua, Antiquities and Coins of Afghanistan (1841); edition of Basakumãraeharita (1846); Glossary of Indian Revenue, Judicial, <kc., Terms (1855); Translation of the First Four Ashtakas (rather more than one-half) of the Sacred Hymns of the Rigveda, 3 vols., 1850-57; Grammar of the Sanskrit Language, in several editions; and two lectures on the Religious Practices and Opinions of the Hindus, delivered at Oxford in 1840. In the Collected Works (12 vols.) the more valuable of his papers and lectures form three volumes of essays on Sanskrit Literature and two volumes of essays on The Religion of the Hindus, edited by Dr R. Rost. While in point of accurate scholarship Wilson was perhaps scarcely the equal of Colebrooke, any deficiency in this respect is far more than counterbalanced by the many-sidedness of his genius, by literary powers of a very high order, by his admirable artistic taste, and by broad human sympathies, which enabled him fully to appreciate and enjoy the merits and beauties of the ancient Indian literature. A considerable number of Sanskrit MSS. (540 vols.) collected by Wilson in India are now in the Bodleian.

WILSON, John (1785-1854), better known as Christopher North (the pen-name which he used in his contributions to Blackwood' s Magazine), was born at Paisley on 18th May 1785. His father, who bore the same name with himself, was a wealthy gauze manufacturer of no particular family or education. His mother, Margaret Sym, was of gentler blood, possessing also beauty and talents. John was the fourth child, but the eldest son, and he had nine brothers and sisters. He appears, like many Scotchmen of genius, to have been rather irregularly educated in his earlier days,—the best of his physical and sporting, if not of his scholastic, training being received at the manse of the village of Mearns, of which constant notices appear in the Essays. He was only twelve when he was first entered at the university of Glasgow, and he continued to attend various classes in that university for six years, being for the most part domiciled with and under the tutorship of Prof. Jardine. His father’s death had immediately preceded his first entry at Glasgow. In these six years Wilson “made himself” in all ways, acquiring not inconsiderable scholarship, perfecting himself in all sports and exercises, and falling in love with a certain “Margaret,” who was the object of his affections for several years. The most curious literary memorial of these early years is a letter to Words- ∙worth, written in 1802 without any personal acquaintance or introduction, and betraying not a little priggishness, as we should now count it, but in that respect only showing the difference of contemporary manners, and interesting as being the first evidence of what was nearly a lifelong connexion of admiring though sometimes recalcitrant criticism.

In June 1803 Wilson was entered as a gentleman commoner at Magdalen College, Oxford. Men have seldom felt more than Wilson the charm which Oxford exercises on all but a very few, and generally (with some noteworthy exceptions, such as Gibbon and Jeffrey) very worthless, sons; and in much of his later work, notably in the essay called “Old North and Young North,” he has expressed his feeling. But it does not appear that his Magdalen days were altogether happy, though he perfected himself in “bruising,” pedestrianism, and other sports, and read so as to obtain a brilliant first class. His love affairs with “Margaret” did not go happily, and he seems to have made no intimate friends at his own college and few in the university. He took his degree in 1807 and found himself at twenty-two his own master; and he had a good income, no father or guardian to control him, no property requiring management, and apparently was not under the influence of the etiquette which in similar circumstances generally makes it necessary for a young man to adopt some profession, if only in name. His profession was an estate on Windermere called Elleray, and ever since imperishably connected with his name. Here he built, boated, wrestled, shot, fished, walked (he was always an astonishing pedestrian), and otherwise diverted himself for four years, besides composing or collecting from previous compositions a considerable volume of poems. But Wilson was too genuine a man to be happy without a wife, and in 1810 the place of “Margaret” was taken by Jane Penny, a Liverpool girl of some family and fortune, whom he married on 11th May 1811. The Isle of Palms, his first published volume, consisting of poems, was issued not long after this. Four years of married life at Elleray succeeded, which, except as being happier and therefore less historied, do not seem to have differed much from the earlier four. Then came the event which definitely made a working man of letters of Wilson, and without which he would probably have produced a few volumes of verse and nothing more. His whole fortune, or at least the major part of it, was lost by the dishonest speculation of an uncle in whose hands, with no doubt rather culpable carelessness, Wilson had left it. At the same time this hard fate was by no means unqualified in its hardness. His mother had a house in Edinburgh, in which slιe was able and willing to receive her son and his family; nor had he even to give up Elleray, though henceforward he was not able constantly to reside in it. He read law and was called to the Scotch bar, taking plentiful sporting and pedestrian excursions, on some of which his wife accompanied him, publishing in 1816 a second volume of poems (The City of the Plague), and generally leading a very pleasant life, if not such an entirely independent one as formerly. The year 1817 was the turning point in Wilson’s life. The famous Cevallos article, which resulted in the secession of Scott and other Tories from the Edinburgh Review and the establishment of the Quarterly, was years earlier; but there had still been no formal declaration that the “Blue and Yellow” was for Whigs only. Wilson was a Tory and the son of Tories (“If you turn Whig, John,” said his mother to him, “this house will not hold you and me ”), but he was glad to accept Jeffrey’s invitation to contribute. Almost at the same time, however, a far more suitable chance appeared. Wilson was not patient of being edited, and his reckless humour as well as his political bias wou!d in the long run have pretty certainly disqualified him for the Edinburgh. The growth of Blackwood's Magazine, and its sudden transformation from a colourless or Whiggish monthly rival to Constable’s Review into an organ at once of the most red-hot Toryism in politics and of the wildest irreverence towards received notions in literature and other matters, took place in the same year. The petard of the “Chaldee Manuscript,” nominally due to Hogg, but with most of the gunpowder put in by Wilson and Lockhart, determined the character of the new periodical, and Wilson’s career was fixed. He was never exactly editor, for the powers of “Christopher North” in that respect were a fantastic imagination; and we have definite and authoritative assertions, not only that he never received any stipend for editing, but that the publishers always retained a certain supervision even over Wilson’s own contributions. The famous series of the Noctes Ambrosianae is said to have been of Maginn’s invention, and for nearly ten years was so very partially representative of Wi1son’s own work and thought that none of its numbers during that time have been included by his son-in-law in the authorized, but by no means complete, edition. Lockhart, a somewhat less genial but far more concentrated and deliberate writer, was, until his departure for London to take charge of the Quarterly, at least as potent in the management as Wilson; and, although the facts are not known with absolute certainty, there is no doubt that it was a daring “alarum and excursion” of Lockhart’s, under the alias (one of many) of Baron von Lauerwinkel, which caused Jeffrey, nominally because of an attack on Prof. Playfair, but obviously for other reasons, to inform Wilson, almost in so many words, that his further contributions were not desired for the Edinburgh. Wilson had also some share—though, if internal evidence may be trusted, not much—in Lockhart’s Peter's Letters, which, harmless as they seem nowadays, infuriated the Whig society of the Scottish capital.

The first result of this new business on Wilson’s general mode of life was that he left his mother’s house and established himself (1819) in Ann Street, Edinburgh, on his own account with his wife and family of five children. The second was much more unlooked for: it was his candidature for and election to the chair of moral philosophy in the university of Edinburgh (1820). To speak honestly, his qualifications for the post were almost nil, even if the fact that the best qualified man in Great Britain, Sir William Hamilton, was also a candidate, be left out of the question. But, luckily for Wilson and for letters, the matter was made a political one; the Tories still had a majority in the town council; he was powerfully backed up by friends, Scott at their head; and his adversaries played into his hands by attacking, not his competence (which, as has been said, was very vulnerable), but his moral character, which was not open to any fair reproach. Yet he made a very excellent professor, never perhaps attaining to any great scientific knowledge in his subject or power of expounding it, but acting on generation after generation of students with a stimulating force that is far more valuable than the most exhaustive knowledge of a particular topic. His duties left him plenty of time for magazine work, and for many years his contributions to Blackwood were extraordinarily voluminous. Most of the best and best-known of them appeared between 1825 and 1835, that is, between the departure of Lockhart for London in the former year and the death of Blackwood the publisher and of Mrs Wilson in the latter.

The domestic events of Wilson’s life in the last thirty years of it may be very briefly told. He oscillated between Edinburgh and Elleray, with plentiful excursions and summer residences elsewhere, a sea trip on board the Experimental Squadron in the Channel during the summer of 1832, and a few other unimportant diversions. The death of his wife was an exceedingly severe blow to him, especially as it coincided very nearly with that of his friend Blackwood. For many years after it (though he never up to the date of his death gave up writing) his literary work was intermittent, and, with some exceptions, not up to the level of the earlier. Late in 1850 his health showed definite signs of breaking up; and in the next year a civil list pension of £300 a year was conferred on him. He died at Edinburgh on 3d April 1854.

But a very small part of Wilson’s extensive work was published in a collected and generally accessible form during his lifetime, the chief and almost sole exceptions being the two volumes of poems above referred to, the Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (prose tales and sketches), and the Recreations of Christopher North, a selection, mostly limited to sporting and descriptive pieces, of his magazine articles. These volumes, with a selected edition of the Noctes Ambrosianae in four volumes, and of further essays, critical and imaginative, also in four volumes, were collected and re-issued uniformly after his death by his son-in-law, Prof. Ferrier. The collection is very far from exhaustive; and, though it undoubtedly contains most of his best work and comparatively little that is not good, it has been complained, with some justice, that the characteristic, if rather immature, productions of his first eight years on Blackwood are almost entirely omitted, that the Noctes are given but in part, if in their best part, and that at least three long, important, and interesting series of papers, less desultory than is his wont, on “Spenser,” on “British Critics,” and the set called “Dies Boreales,” have been left out altogether. Wilson’s characteristics are, however, uniform enough, and the standard edition exhibits them sufficiently, if not exhaustively. His poems may be dismissed at once as little more than interesting. They would probably not have been written at all if he had not been a young man in the time of the full flood of influence of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. His prose tales have in some estimates stood higher, but will hardly survive the tests of universal criticism. It is as an essayist and critic of the most abounding geniality, if not genius, of great acuteness, of extraordinary eloquence, and of a fervid and manifold sympathy, in which he has hardly an equal, that “Christopher North” lives and will live. The Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of convivial table-talk, giving occasion to wonderfully various digressions of criticism, description, and miscellaneous writing, have been of late years ranked far below their real value. From their origin it necessarily followed that there was much that is ephemeral, a certain amount that is purely local, and something that is purely trivial in them. But their dramatic force, their incessant flashes of happy thought and happy expression, their almost incomparable fulness of life, and their magnificent humour give them all but the highest place among genial and recreative literature. It is often thought, and sometimes said, that no one but a Scotchman can relish them—an utter mistake, against which it is desirable most energetically to testify in the name of lovers of them who have not a drop of Scottish blood in their veins. The same qualities, together with a greater share of purely literary and critical power (to the display of which the form of the Noctes was inimical), and of a sometimes abused but very admirable faculty of word-painting, appear in the miscellaneous essays. Wilson’s defects lay in the directions of measure and of taste properly so called, that is to say, of the modification of capricious likes and dislikes by reason and principle. He is constantly exaggerated, boisterous, wanting in refinement. But these are the almost necessary defects of his qualities of enthusiasm, eloquence, and generous feeling. The well-known adaptation of phrase in which he not recanted but made up for numerous earlier attacks on Leigh Hunt, “the Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live for ever,” shows him as a writer at his very best, but not without a little characteristic touch of grandiosity and emphasis. As a literary critic, as a sportsman, as a lover of nature, and as a convivial humorist, he is not to be shown at equal advantage in miniature; but almost any volume of his miscellaneous works will exhibit him at full length in either capacity or in all.

The chief, if not the sole, authentic source of information for Wilson’s life is the memoir by his daughter, Mrs Gordon (Edinburgh, 1862).

WILSON, Richard (1714-1782), English landscape painter, was born at Penegoes, Montgomeryshire, where his father was a clergyman, on 1st August 1714. His early taste for art was observed by a relative of his mother, Sir George Wynne, who in 1729 sent him to London to study under Thomas Wright, a little-known portrait painter of the time, by whom he was instructed for six years. He then started on his own account, and was soon in a good practice. Among his commissions was a full-length of the prince of Wales and the duke of York, painted for their tutor, the bishop of Norwich. Examples of his portraits may be studied in Greenwich Hospital, in the Garrick Club, and in various private collections. In 1749 Wilson visited Italy, where he spent six years. He had previously executed some landscapes, but it was now that the advice of Zuccarelli and Joseph Vernet decided him to adopt this department of art exclusively. He studied Claude and Poussin, but retained his own individuality, and produced some admirable views of Rome and the Campagna. In 1755 he returned to England, and became one of the first of English landscape painters. Niobe, one of his most powerful works, was exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1760. On the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768 he was appointed one of the original members, and he was a regular contributor to its exhibitions till 1780. He frequently executed replicas of his more important subjects, repeating some of them several times; in the figures which he introduced in his landscapes he was occasionally assisted by Mortimer and Hayman. During his lifetime his landscapes were never widely popular; his temper was consequently embittered by neglect, and so impoverished was he that he was obliged to seclude himself in an obscure, half-furnished room in Tottenham Court Road, London. In 1776, however, he obtained the post of librarian to the Academy; and by the death of a brother he acquired a small property near Llanferras, Denbighshire, to which he retired to spend his last days, and where he died suddenly in May 1782. After his death his fame increased, and in 1814 about seventy of his works were exhibited in the British Institution. The National Gallery, London, contains nine of his landscapes.

The works of Wilson are skilled and learned compositions rather than direct transcripts from nature. His landscapes are treated with great breadth, and with a power of generalization which occasionally led to a disregard of detail. They are full of classical feeling and poetic sentiment; they possess noble qualities of colour, and of delicate silvern tone; and their handling is vigorous and easy, the work of a painter who was thoroughly master of his materials.

See Studies and Designs by Richard Wilson, done at Rome in the year 1753 (Oxford, 1811); T. Wright, Some Account of the Life of Richard Wilson (London, 1824); Thomas Hastings, Etchings from the Works of Richard Wilson , with some Memoirs of his Life (London, 1825). Many of Wilson’s best works were reproduced by Woollett and other engravers of the time.