Burns' dinner; and yet, once there, he is the freshest, the blithest, and the most jubilant spirit at the feast. Others, feeling their wine, may be inclined to sleep, or to doze away their dullness. He springs upon the massive table, dances a pas seul among tumblers, wine-glasses, and decanters, and then leaps upon the floor again, to the astonishment and delight of all present. His leap, too, is like the leap of the wild panther, or the cat o'mountain; clearing no less than twenty-three feet on a dead level! the longest leap of any biped of his day in all England. (p. 48.) Surely, a mind lodged in such a body, has a great advantage over other minds, and is far more easily educated. For, as an ingenious writer says, mens sana in corpore sano, is the grand aim and object of all education.

The circumstances, too, attending his childhood and youth, were most favorable to the formation of his character. His home, always so bright and cheerful, surrounded him with an atmosphere of love and tenderness and freedom. Every thing, indeed, from his earliest infancy, conspired to produce a healthful activity, a genuine growth, in the bright and beautiful boy. We can hardly find, in all biographical literature, another instance of circumstances so favorable to the development of genius. Accordingly, in becoming, as he did, not a miserable sham, or perverted specimen of humanity, but a glorious reality; he owed no less to his good fortune, than to his noble and 'high endeavor.'

Among the many circumstances, which so powerfully contributed to the formation of his genius, there was one of such transcendant importance as to demand a special notice. We allude to the choice of his teachers. This was singularly judicious and happy. There were, in those days, as well as in our own, a class of teachers who labored under the conviction that small boys were made for the Latin grammar, and that the whole art of teaching consisted in forcing into their small pericraniums as large an amount of that very useful commodity as they could be made to accommodate. The men to whom the instruction of young Wilson was entrusted, possessed not only the capacity to teach and to train their pupils, but also the far more uncommon gift of knowing when to desist from teaching

and training and boring their minds. Hence they never educated their young and tender pupils into a disgust with their studies; but, allowing them to mingle out-of-door sports with the brain-work of the closet, they made both an equal delight to them, and each a support and encouragement to the other. By this means, their bodies were developed and improved as well as their minds, and, consequently, they became men as well as scholars, and not merely walking, coughing, attenuated, dreaming encyclopædias of useless lore. 'A pleasant idea', says Lady Gordon,' of the relation in which the kind minister of the Mearns stood to his pupils, is given in a note from Sir John Maxwell Pollok, who was a school-fellow of my father: "He was above me in the ranks of the school, in stature, and in mental acquirements. I may mention, as an illustration of the energy, activity, and vivacity of his character, that one morning, I having been permitted to go and fish in the burn near the kirk, and having caught a fine trout, was so pleased, that I repaired to the minister's study to exhibit my prize to Dr. M'Latchie, who was then reading Greek with him. He, seeing my trout, started up; and, addressing his reverend teacher, said, "I must go now to fish." Now, what did the good minister do? Did he drive the little Sir John from his presence, or knock the young rebel, Wilson, on the head, with angry directions to mind his Greek? Did he repress the fine enthusiasm of the boy, declaring, in the presence of 'his revered teacher,' 'I must go now to fish'? Not a bit of it. 'Leave was granted,' says Sir John, and I willingly resigned to him my rod and line; and before dinner he reappeared with a large dish of fish, on which he and his companions feasted, not without that admiration of his achievement which youth delights to express and always feels.' By pursuing the method of some teachers, and, strange to say, of some parents too, the boy John Wilson, 'as beautiful and animated a creature as ever played in the sunshine', might have been developed into as ugly and perverse a character as ever cursed a happy land.

"The kindness and partiality', says his biographer, 'with which he loved to speak of his friends in Paisley, may be seen in the words he made use of in reference to his old friend, (i. e. his former teacher, Mr. Peddie,) as he was taking leave of duties

he had followed for upwards of half a century. They are, (especially after so long an interval,) honorable alike to master and pupil: "It was his method rather to persuade than enforce, and they all saw, even amidst the thoughtlessness of boyhood, that their teacher was a good man; and therefore it was their delight and pride to please him. Sometimes a cloud would overshadow his brow, but it was succeeded by a smile of pleasure as gracious and benign as the summer sky. In his seminary, children of all ranks sat on the same form. In that school there was no distinction, except what was created by superior merit and industry, by the love of truth, and by ability. ability. The son of the poor man was there on the same form with the sons of the rich, and nothing could ever drive him from his rightful status but misconduct or disobedience. No person would deny that the office of a teacher of youth was one of the most important in this world's affairs. A surly or ignorant master might scathe those blossoms, which a man of sense and reflection by his fostering care, would rear up till they became bright consummate flowers of knowledge and virtue."'

In relation to these two teachers of young Wilson, Peddie and M'Latchie, Lady Gordon has beautifully said: 'It is impossible to overrate the influence of such a training as young Wilson had, during these happy years, in forming that singular character, in virtue of which he stands out as unique and inimitable among British men of genius, as Jean Paul, Der Einzige, among his countrymen. In no other writings do we find so inexhaustible and vivid a reminiscence of the feelings of boyhood. There was in that heart of his, a perpetual well-spring of youthful emotion. In contact with him, we are made to feel as if this man were in himself the type, never to grow old, of all the glorious bright-eyed youths that we have known in the world; capable of entering with perfect luxury of abandonment, into their wildest frolics, but also of transfiguring their pastimes into mirrors of things more sublime-of rising without strain or artifice, from the level of common and material objects into the supreme heights of poetic, philosophic, and religious contemplation.'

Beautiful, also, exceedingly beautiful, is the tribute which

Wilson, in after years, paid to two other of his teachers. Lady Gordon says: 'Of the various professors under whom he studied, there were two who won his special love and life-long veneration these were Jardine and Young.

'When the relationship between pupil and teacher has been cemented by feelings of respect and affection, the influence obtained over the young mind is one that does not die with the breaking of the ties that formally bound them. Of this Wilson's experience as a professor afforded him many a delightful illustration. To Jardine, in the first place, as not only his teacher, but his private monitor and friend, he owed, as he himself said, a deep debt of gratitude. He is represented as having been "a person who, by the singular felicity of his tact in watching youthful minds, had done more good to a whole host of individuals, and gifted individuals too, than their utmost gratitude could ever adequately repay. They spoke of him as a kind of intellectual father, to whom they were proud of acknowledging the eternal obligations of their intellectual being. He has created for himself a mighty family among whom his memory will long survive; by whom, all that he said and did — his words of kind praise and kind censure - his gravity and his graciousness, will no doubt be dwelt upon with warm and tender words and looks, long after his earthly labors shall have been brought to a close.'

He thus speaks of the other: 'I own I was quite thunderstruck to find him passing from a transport of sheer verbal ecstasy about the particle apa, into an ecstasy quite as vehement, and a thousand times more noble, about the deep pathetic beauty of one of Homer's conceptions in the expression of which that particle happens to occur. Such was the burst of his enthusiasm, and the enriched mellow swell of his expanding voice, when he began to touch upon this more majestic key, that I dropped for a moment all my notions of the sharp philologer, and gazed on him with a higher delight, as a genuine lover of the soul and spirit which has been clothed in the words of antiquity.

'At the close of one of his fine excursions into this brighter field, the feelings of the man seemed to be rapt up to a pitch I

never before beheld exemplified in any orator of the Chair. The tears gushed from his eyes amidst their fervid sparklings, and I was more than delighted when I looked round and found that the fire of the Professor had kindled answering flames in the eyes of not a few of his disciples.'

'We have sat,' he says, 'at the knees of Professor Young, looking up to his kindling or shaded countenance, while that old man eloquent gave life to every line, till Hector and Andromache seemed to our imagination standing side by side beneath a radiant rainbow glorious on a showery heaven; such, during his inspiration, was the creative power of the majesty and the beauty of their smiles and tears.'

Lady Gordon adds, from another source, the following account of Professor Young: 'It may be seen', says she, 'from these sketches what manner of men had the moulding of that young taste in its perceptions of the good and the beautiful. Nor could his mind fail to have been ennobled by such training.' True. It is mind that wakes up mind, and reveals its powers to itself. The kindling enthusiasm of a Jardine, or a Young, rapt with visions of the true, the beautiful, and the good, and burning with a desire to impart their views to others, could hardly fail to wake up minds, not incurably dull, to a consciousness of their powers and to a new 'intellectual being'; which could find its rest only in

'The high endeavor and the glad success.'

How different from the poor, perfunctory teacher, who, having no enthusiasm and no delight in his work, can kindle none in his pupils, or rather in his victims! His intellectual offspring, if he happens to have any, are, like himself, poor weaklings, half asleep when they are awake, and half awake when they are asleep, not knowing when, nor where, nor how, they were born into the world of mind, nor to whom they owe so very doubtful an honor, much less acknowledging the eternal obligations of their intellectual being' to any one. It is a Jardine or a Young, and not the false or the feeble teacher, who creates for himself a mighty family among whom his memory will long survive', and gladden the decay of life with all its precious recollections of the past.