have heard from his lips,—­I doubt whether Jeremy Taylor himself, could he speak as well as he wrote, could have kept up with him.  Every one anticipated his doing well, whatever profession he might adopt, and when he left us, old Oxford seemed as if a shadow had fallen upon its beauty.”  Wilson himself confessed that he yielded, for a short time, to “unbridled dissipation,” seeking solace for the agony he experienced from the conduct of his stern mother, who ruthlessly nipped in the bud his affection for a bonny lass at Dychmont.  He might have used the very words of Gibbon, whose father nipped, in a similar way, his attachment for Mademoiselle Susan Curchod, afterward Madame Necker:—­“After a painful struggle, I yielded to my fate:  I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life.”  It is difficult to conceive of Gibbon’s wound as a deep one, or of his struggle as painful.  But Wilson, whose affections were far stronger, suffered much.  He almost made up his mind to run away to Timbuctoo, with Mungo Park; and his deep gloom showed how the iron had entered his soul.  But time and absence and new habits healed his wound, as well as Gibbon’s, without a journey to Africa.

We mentioned above that Wilson carried off the Newdigate prize for the best poem, in 1806.  His subject was, “Painting, Poetry, and Architecture.”  He professed, in general, to put a very low estimate on college prize-poems, and rated his own so low that he would not allow it to be published with his subsequent poems.  But in the “Noctes Ambrosianae” for October, 1825, he was not above saying a good word in favor of these much-berated effusions, as follows:—­

“North. It is the fashion to undervalue Oxford and Cambridge prize-poems; but it is a stupid fashion.  Many of them are most beautiful.  Heber’s ‘Palestine!’ A flight, as upon angel’s wing, over the Holy Land!  How fine the opening!

[We omit the lines quoted,—­the well-known beginning of the poem.]

“Tickler.  More than one of Wrangham’s prize-poems are excellent; Richard’s ‘Aboriginal Brutus’ is a powerful and picturesque performance; Chinnery’s ‘Dying Gladiator’ magnificent; and Milman’s ’Apollo Belvedere’ splendid, beautiful, and majestic.

“North. Macaulay and Praed have written very good prize-poems.  These two young gentlemen ought to make a figure in the world.”

Heber was a contemporary and friend of Wilson at Oxford; as was also Lockhart, among others.  The distant See of Calcutta interrupted the intercourse of the former, in after-life, while Maga and party bound the latter still closer to his old college-friend.  One of Wilson’s college-mates has given an odd anecdote descriptive of his appearance at their social gatherings:—­

“I shall never forget his figure, sitting with a long earthen pipe, a great tie-wig on.  Those wigs had descended, I fancy, from the days of Addison, (who had been a member of our college,) and were worn by us all, (in order, I presume, to preserve our hair and dress, from tobacco-smoke,) when smoking commenced after supper; and a strange appearance we made in them.”