of indignant eloquence; the tremulous upper lip curving with every wave of thought or hint of passion; and the golden gray hair floating on the old man’s mighty shoulders,—­if, indeed, that could be called age which seemed but the immortality of a more majestic youth.”  In his lecture-room utterances, there was an undue preponderance of rhetoric, declamation, and sentiment over logic, analysis, and philosophy.  Yet he once said of himself, that he was “thoroughly logical and argumentative; not a rhetorician, as fools aver.”  Whether this estimate was right or wrong in the main may be a matter of question:  we think it wrong.  His genius, in our view, lay rather in pictorial passion than in ratiocination.  At all events, as a teacher of philosophy, it appears to us that his conception of the duties of his office, and his style of teaching, were far inferior to those of his competitor and subsequent associate, Sir William Hamilton.  The one taught like a trumpet-tongued poet, and the other like an encyclopaedic philosopher.  The personal magnetism of the former led captive the feelings, while the sober arguments of the latter laid siege to the understanding.  The great fact which impressed Wilson’s students was his overpowering oratory, and not his particular theory, or his train of reasoning.  One of them compares the nature of his eloquence with that of the leading orators of his day, and thinks that in absolute power over the hearers it was greater than that of any other.  The matter, too, as well as the manner of the lectures, receives commendation at the hands of this enthusiastic disciple.  He says,—­“It was something to have seen Professor Wilson,—­this all confessed; but it was something also, and more than is generally understood, to have studied under him.  Nothing now remains of the Professor’s long series of lectures save a brief fragment or two.  Here and there some pupil may be found, who has treasured up these Orphic sayings in his memory or his note-book; but to the world at large these utterances will be always unknown.”

We have been considerably disappointed in Wilson’s “Letters.”  We looked for something racy, having the full flavor of the author’s best spirits.  We found them plain matter-of-fact, not what we should term at all characteristic.  Perhaps it was more natural that they should be of this sort.  Letters are generally vent-holes for what does not escape elsewhere.  Literary men, who are at the same time men of action, seldom write as good letters as do their more quiet brethren.  And this is because they have so many more ways open to them of sending out what lies within.  They are depleted of almost all that is purely distinctive and personal, long before they sit down to pen an epistle to a friend.  The formula might be laid down,—­Given any man, and the quality of his correspondence will vary inversely as the quantity of his expression in all other directions.  If, Wilson being the same man, fortune had hemmed him in, and contracted his sphere of action,—­or if, as author, he had devoted himself to works of solid learning, instead of to the airy pages of “Blackwood,”—­the sprightly humor and broad hilarity that were in him would have bubbled out in these “Letters,” and the “Noctes” and the “Recreations” would have been a song unsung.