would be an apotheosis of loyalty to say that they were also eminently religious, though they drank many bumpers to their religion.  When they meet in the third of the “Noctes” and have taken their places at the table, North proposes:  “A bumper!  The King!  God bless him!” and three times three are given.  Then Tickler proposes:  “A bumper!  The Kirk of Scotland!” and the rounds of cheers are repeated.  These indispensable ceremonies being over, the Blackwood council proceeds to discuss men and things over nectar and ambrosia.

Wilson was the centre and best representative of this group.  At Oxford, he had been so democratic that he blacked his own boots on principle.  On leaving Oxford, he had roamed for a time as a wild man in a band of gypsies.  He next took a cottage in the lake district in the North of England, where he associated with Wordsworth, and occupied himself alternately with desperate gymnastic exercises and composing slight descriptive poems.  Even after connecting himself with the magazine and becoming the symposiarch of the “Noctes,” and perhaps the greatest Tory in all broad Scotland, he did not renounce his home among the lakes.  He was a lover of scenery, and an enthusiast and master in manly sports.  He is said to have fished in every trout-brook north of the Clyde, and he wandered every season over the Highlands.  In his sportsman’s accomplishments he took a truly English pride, and made fun of the Edinburgh Whigs by representing a company of them as getting by chance into the same room with himself and his associates, and then, pipes and tobacco being brought, as being fairly smoked out, sickened, and obliged to retreat by the superior smoking capacities of the Tories.  He ridiculed Leigh Hunt for fancying in one of his poems that he should like a splendid life on a great estate, when (as Wilson says) he couldn’t even ride without being thrown.  Yet, of all the men of this time, there was probably no one who had wider sympathies or more delightful prejudices than Professor Wilson, or who made more sagacious reflections.  The centre of a literary clique, he loved to associate with all the other cliques, and was one of the first to recognize and proclaim the great merits of Wordsworth.

The third group was larger than either of the preceding, retained its esprit de corps longer, and may be most conveniently defined as the associates of Charles Lamb.  Beside Lamb, there were Coleridge, Southey, Lovel, Dyer, Lloyd, and Wordsworth, among the earlier members of it,—­and Hazlitt, Talfourd, Godwin, De Quincy, Bernard Barton, Procter, Leigh Hunt, Gary, and Hood, among the later.  This group, unlike the others, did not make politics, but literature, its leading object.  It was composed of literary men,—­a title of doubtful import, but which certainly in civilized society will always designate a class.  Political life has more of outward importance, religious life is holier, but literary life is the most humane of all the avocations.