and add it to his stores.  He was the easy victor in every foot-race, and took the Newdigate prize for poetry, in 1806.  He burned the midnight oil, and looked through ruddy wine at the small hours chasing each other over the dial.  For hours, almost whole days, he would sit silent at the helm of his boat on the Isis, his rapt eye peopling the vacant air with unutterable visions.  He swam like a dolphin, rode like a Centaur, and De Quincey called him the best unprofessional male dancer he had ever seen.  Three times he was vanquished by a huge shoemaker,—­so the story goes,—­champion of the “Town”:  at the fourth meeting, the Gentleman Commoner proved himself the better man, knocked his antagonist out of time, and gave him twenty pounds.  Another professor of the manly art of self-defence, who had ventured to confront the young Titan, and was unexpectedly laid low, said in astonishment,—­“You can be only one of the two:  you are either Jack Wilson or the Devil.”  He proved himself to be the former, by not proclaiming, “Voe victis!” and by taking his prize of war to the nearest alehouse, and then and there filling him with porter.  Sotheby said it was worth a journey from London to hear him translate a Greek chorus; and, at a later day, the brawny Cumberland men called him “a varra bad un to lick.”

Never were such “constitutionals” known, even at old Oxford.  He would wander away alone, sometimes for many days, tramping over the country leagues and leagues away, making the earth tremble with his heavy tread, and distancing everything with his long, untiring stride.  Then, on his return, he would be the prince of good-fellows once more, and fascinate the merry revellers with the witchery of his tongue.  Even when a boy, he had won a bet by walking six miles in two minutes less than an hour.  He once dined in Grosvenor Square, and made his appearance at Oxford at an early hour the next morning, having walked the fifty-eight miles at a tremendous pace.  In his vacations, he walked over all the Lake region of England, the North of Scotland, and the greater part of Wales.  On finishing his course at Oxford, he went on foot to Edinburgh,—­more than three hundred miles.  He was equally remarkable as a leaper, surpassing all competitors.  He once jumped across the Cherwell—­twenty-three feet clear—­with a run of only a few yards.  This is, we believe, the greatest feat of the kind on record.  General Washington, it is known, had great powers in this way; but the greatest distance ever leaped by him, if we remember right, was but twenty-one feet.

The many vagaries into which he was led, and the innumerable odd pranks he played, would be sufficient, in the case of any one else, to prove that he was not a reading man.  But not so with Wilson.  One of his contemporaries at Oxford thus described him:—­“Wilson read hard, lived hard, but never ran into vulgar or vicious dissipation.  He talked well, and loved to talk.  Such gushes of poetic eloquence as I