Early Years

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my day3 to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”

—Wordsworth.

“There are so many ways of writing biography, that it is vain to inquire which is the best. One canon, however, may be safely insisted on, namely, That the record of a man’s career should correspond in tone to the character of him whose life it chronicles.” — Dr George Wilson.

Some thirty years ago, an English tourist was standing on the Castle Rock, with a lank, keen-visaged Scotchman for interpreter and guide.

“Now, my good friend,” said the Southron, “you have talked quite enough about your native town. Pray, forget Paisley for a moment, and let us look at Edinburgh.”

“It ’s no that easy to forget Paisley when ye look at Embro’,” replied the offended cicerone. “Seest ‘ou?” and he pointed towards the University buildings; “that ’s Embro’ College, where they come from England and a’ pairts to learn to be doctors, and chancellors, and members o’ Parliament; and it has the cleverest men in the three kingdoms for its professors: but far the cleverest of them a’ is ane John Wilson, and he’s a Paisley man. And seest ‘ou?” pointing to a distant spire; “yon’s the steeple o’ North Leith. It ’s the best stipend in Scotland, and at this present it ’s allowed to have the best preacher in Scotland for its minister. Ye must have heard tell of the Piev. James Buchanan; but ye may have forgotten that he’s a Paisley man. And seest ‘ou that kirk wi’ the doom on ‘t? That ’s St George’s, where a’ the gentry attend for the sake of the singing; and Fse warrant ye 11 no hear the like o’ the precentor in a’ England. They ca’ him R A. Smith, and he ’s a Paisley man. And seest ‘ou where a’ thae coaches are waiting to start? That ’s the Register Office. Ye may say it ’s the key-stane o’ the kingdom; for lairds and lands a’ hing by it. But though it ’s the place where dukes and earls keep their titles, and the King himself keeps his papers, every day, when the clerks gae hame, and the door is steekit, the entire place is left in charge of an auld wife, and she ’s a Paisley woman.”

Without vouching for the accuracy of this last particular, and whilst begging a little indulgence for the vanity of our fellow-townsman, we must claim for Paisley the rights which its neighbour cities are not sufficiently ready to recognise. But the town which has numbered amongst its ministers Boyd of Troehrig and Archbishop Adamson, Principal Smeton and President Witherspoon; which introduced to professional life “Watt, the laborious compiler of the” Bibliotheca Britannica;” and which from amongst her sons contributed to natural science Wilson, the American ornithologist; to sculpture, John Henning; and to poetry, Robert Tannahill and the author of “The Isle of Palms,” — need not be ashamed, but” THE PARADISE OF SCOTLAND. 5

may speak in the gate to all gainsayers. In the latter half of last century, when the wages of its weavers were good; when they had time to cultivate their little gardens, and grow such polyanthuses and tulips as nowhere else were seen; when they had time to read the Bible and pray with their families every day, and could at leisure hours get through such books as “Henry’s Exposition” and the “Universal History,” we need not wonder that Rowland Hill should have pronounced Paisley “the Paradise of Scotland.” When we add that — partly a result of the disputatious humour inherent in Scotchmen, partly a result of a gregarious or social tendency characteristic of the place — a high degree of intelligence, edged with a peculiar wit, distinguished the inhabitants, the reader will congratulate Mr Wilson on being able to boast such a birthplace, and will only regret that by a removal elsewhere he forfeited its advantages in the second year of his age.*

The native of a country where birthdays are seldom celebrated, the subject of this biography could never tell

* It was the calamity of Mr Wilson’s biographer to quit “the Paradise of Scotland” at an age still more tender: it is therefore little that he can add in the way of personal reminiscence. But in the days of his youth he had a venerable relative (proprietor of the oldest spinningmill in Scotland) who used to say, that when he was young he knew almost every “reeking lum” in Paisley, and that there was a time every morning, when passing almost any door, you were sure to hear the voice of prayer or of psalms.

which was the day when first he saw the light; and as it was Paisley, in the month of November, the likelihood is that there was not much light to be seen. He was born in the year 1795.

His father, a manufacturer in extensive business, and a banker, died before his youngest boy could be conscious of the loss; and, with her numerous sons and daughters, Mrs Wilson removed to Edinburgh, where so many Scottish families, in their day of desolation, seek a second home. Here, with comfortable resources, and with God’s blessing on her kind and sensible administration, she was permitted to see her children grow up; and, what seldom happens in our country, twice over did a son marry without migrating from under the maternal roof. Her house, No. 53 Queen Street, was the residence of her youngest son till the time of his own marriage.

Mrs Wilson’s maiden name was Margaret Sym. Her brother Robert, the “Timothy Tickler” of the “Noctes,” is still an outstanding personage in every Edinburgh memory. At an early hour of any morning his meagre lofty figure, like a peripatetic palm, after eighty summers still retaining its six feet four of altitude, and surmounted by a splendid silvery crown, might be descried by any Qne who was soon enough astir, on its journey from the old town to Trinity, or returning from its quotidian plunge in the sparkling sea. But although advancing years at last deprived him of this luxury, they could not make him effeminate. He had reached his ninety-fourth year before he had ever breakfasted in bed, and the first day on which he did it was his last of life. This kind, methodical, and sprightly uncle was a favourite with his nephews, and went far to supply a father’s place; nor was any one of them a more welcome visitant at 20 George Square than the youngest of the Queen Street band; for alike in his graver and his gayer moods, the delicate sympathy and merry enchantments of his congenial kinsman gladdened the heart of the dear old man.

We have now told who was the father of the subject of this memoir, who were his mother and his uncle, and in the progress of the narrative we hope to shew who he was himself; but in all the dictionary of biographical synonyms there is no other instance where it is so needful to premise who he was not. Knowing him to be a naturalist, many of our friends confound him with another Wilson, whose admirable and original researches amongst the feathered natives of the United States, followed out by Prince Lucien Bonaparte, are still a standard work on American ornithology ;. but although a poet and an ornithologist, and withal a native of Paisley, our Mr Wilson never was a weaver, nor was he ever in the United States, and his Christian name was not Alexander. Nor can he even claim all the honours winch the catalogues have heaped on the industrious head of plain James Wilson. Although he travelled on the Continent in the self-same years, he is not the author of James Wilson’s “Continental Tour in 181G-18;” although a poet and a Paisley man, he is not the author of “Silent Love,” by James Wilson “the Paisley poet;” lawyer though he was, he did not sit in the first Congress, and he had no hand in drawing up the American constitution; aquatic as were many of his tastes, he did not compile a manual on “The Water Cure;” and Scotchman though he was, he never published on statistics, nor did he edit a London newspaper. What is still more worthy of observation, although their mental features somewhat corresponded, and their affection for each other was intense, he was a distinct personality from his own brother John. One day, many years ago. at the dinner-table at Ardencaple the conversation came to turn on Blackwood’s Magazine, which, with its merry mischief, was then vexing or diverting all the world. “Has Professor Wilson any brothers?” exclaimed a guest; but before Lord John Campbell could introduce the quiet gentleman opposite, with a face of impenetrable solidity, James Wilson, turning to the interrogator, made answer for himself. “Oh yes, he has several brothers. But, as you know always happens in such cases, all the brothers are idiots! However, I submit to the laws of nature.”

“With these laws our friend had little cause of quarrel. And now, asking pardon for bestowing on such particulars the space which, in regular biographies, is usually devoted to a genealogical table, we proceed with our narrative.

The books given to children are like the flies with which an angler tries the stream. Few are so dull or sulky as to refuse every bait; but so diverse has the wise Creator made the turn or tendency of different people, that the fisher of men or the teacher of youth, whose hooks have all the self-same mounting, will fail to “raise “some of the most valuable fishes. Fortunately for himself and his fellow-creatures our little orphan was caught betimes. “When only three years of age a kind friend presented him with a book called “The Three Hundred Animals.” It was the very food for which his hungry soul had appetite. He never wearied gazing on its pictures of the elephant and lion, and its monkeys manifold; and as soon as he could read with sufficient ease, he devoured its descriptive letterpress. The barb thus busked was killing, and even before he knew the name, he was carried captive for the rest of life by natural history.

In the fauna of the Pentlands, sheep are doubtfully indigenous, and in Edinburgh itself the mammalia of most frequent occurrence are mice and rats; but for the other great divisions of natural science no European capital is so favourably situated. With a delightfully variegated flora, it exhibits a corresponding diversity of insect forms; and whilst woods and waters are populous with birds of every size, from the wren at Bonally to the gannet on the Bass, it will be long before the marine zoologist exhausts his aquarium in the Frith — it will be long before the cabinets at Craigleith and Burdiehouse have disclosed to the paleontologist all the relics preserved on their shelves of stone. For botany and geology James Wilson never conceived any particular affection; but from earliest childhood the whole of animated nature found entrance to his soul, and acquired new vitality and significance there. Indeed, it was the life that is in them and around them which formed his great attraction to the lower creatures. Some naturalists are mere collectors. They prefer the bird in the hand to any number in the bush, and would rather contemplate a stuffed eagle inside their glass-fronted cupboard than watch the king of birds as, above the peaks of Atlas, he “cleaves the adverse storm, and cuffs it with his wings;” and, like numismatologists, they go on adding cone to cone and carabus to carabus, very forgetful of the living history of which they have there the medal and memorial. Others of a nobler type are mere anatomists. Intent on structure, they would not grudge the industrious years which Lyonnet devoted to the nerves and muscles of a grub, and to their piercing eye a chimpanzee or peer of Parliament is little better than a skeleton with a ticket-ofleave — a preparation still walking about in native fur or exotic ermine. Our friend never became a great proficient in comparative anatomy, and his collecting originated in the desire to possess continually at hand mementoes of the creatures which he had learned to love elsewhere. On the summer evenings, when escaped from the High School, or on the bright and ample holiday when Roslin or Habbie’s How was the delectable mountain of his pilgrimage, and when his quiet gentle spirit had seen the sights and heard the sounds unsurmised by noisier comrades, he was glad to carry home a keepsake from his own private carnival. The stuffed birds and rows of beetles which he began to store up in his little sanctuary at Queen Street, to Professor Jameson and the initiated few would be “specimens,” to the housemaid and the irreverent many they would be “rubbish,” but to the youthful compiler they were symbols and dear memorials. Among the whistling blasts of October they brought back the days of June, and they made mid-winter balmy. That corn-craik recalled a cloudless gloaming, and, caught as it was on Arthur’s Seat, that Artaxerxes butterfly was still surrounded with the whole panorama from Ben Lomond to Berwick Law, whilst rosy reminiscences flitted past from bees and burnet-moths with wings now motionless. “Stolen waters are sweet,” and such a collection is a magical cup which, dry to the stranger, still overflows to the owner.

As we have said, life and living things had the chief attraction for our youthful naturalist. Sir John M’Neill, the distinguished diplomatist, who subsequently married his sister, was one of his earlier companions. “My acquaintance with him,” writes Sir John,” commenced in 1810. He was then at college, and fully occupied with natural history — with entomology especially; although Professor Jameson seemed desirous to direct his attention to his own favourite science. By Jameson he was led for a time to the study of mineralogy and geology, and got involved in the discussion then warmly carried on between Wernerian and Huttonian theorists. In this controversy he took with Jameson the side of Werner, and for a time was rather keenly interested; but to me and his other friends it was obvious that his heart was still given to zoology; and this bias was shortly after confirmed by his intercourse with poor Leach,* from which time forward I do not believe he ever deviated into any other path. He

* William Elford Leach, born at Plymouth in 1790, was brought up to the medical profession; but the same zeal for natural history which drew Mr Wilson aside from law, diverted Leach from physic. In 1818 he obtained an appointment in the Zoological Department of the British Museum; but in 1821, through a failure of health both mental and bodily, he was obliged to resign his curatorship. He went to Italy, and died there of cholera in August 1836. Besides editing the Zoological Miscellany, he was the author of many papers in the “Linna;an Transactions,” and by his researches on insects, crustaceans, &c, obtained a considerable name amongst naturalists. Amongst the few zoologists to be became a very diligent collector of insects, and seemed at all times to be more interested in observing their habits and studying their characters, so to speak, than in ascertaining and classifying their external distinctives. I state this from personal observation, for I was not unfrequently the companion of his entomological rambles, or ’ beetle-hunts,’ as I used to call them.”

Nor was it merely the life that was in them, but the great wide life which was over and around them, so abundant and so beautiful. To James Wilson was given this rare perception — a poet’s intuition rendered still more exquisite by “a natural piety.” Even before the bright hopes of the Christian revelation had lit up his personal future, the surrounding scene was irradiated by the Divine presence; and although there might sometimes be too much of pantheistic vagueness in the recollection, it often kindled up into a consciousness which warmed his heart and filled his eyes. For rough and athletic sports he had no strength, for boisterous festivities no turn: it was therefore his great delight to hie away to the sea-shore or the mountain side, and court those companionships which

found in Edinburgh, in Mr Wilson’s early days, the society of one so ent was a great acquisition; but his rapid and impetuous ways were not in unison with Mr Wilson’s orderly and painstaking disposition. Speaking of Leach’s letters, he says in a note to Sir W. Jardine, “He always wrote like a man standing on one leg, and in a hurry to be done.”

entailed no fatigue, and left no compunction. Nor did it greatly matter in what embodiment the visitation came. The first swallow — a bee coaxed forth by early warmth — a flight of aerial passengers on their clangorous way through the windy clouds — a rainbow, and above all things a sunset, would surcharge his spirit with irrepressible emotion, and, if it did not lift him off this earthly clod altogether, it sent him home with heart elate, and full of unutterable musings. During those first years, it was a struggle between the poet and the naturalist; and although his early rhymes have perished, we need them not to assure us that the fellow-countryman of Thomson and Grahamc could have added a worthy lay to “The Seasons” and “The Birds of Scotland.”

Although the more practical element at last prevailed, there always remained a poetical tincture in Mr Wilson’s science. Placed in circumstances which made no profession absolutely imperative, the recreation of his boyhood became increasingly the labour of his love; and whilst coming more and more to value exactitude and method, the delightful associations of those ardent days continued to the last, and, even in the midst of the severest technicalities, rendered it impossible for him to become a scientific Dryasdust,

Mild, gentle, and affectionate as were James “Wilson’s earlier years, probably no one surmised what a “fountain quizz:.

sealed.’- of sublime and tender feeling that qui - ire

In our own youth we remember being des
on an emba — I Bdinl rgh •. -

‘.-:. — Our miss was “. the I kburn,

then His Ma s Solicitor-^: aL and withal on: L

Sector; and our errand was to bring him through: a casting-vote in his own behalf, so that he might be re-elected to a third year of office. T the staunch old Reformer this sal was too like self -election to be

altogether pala table; bin blast he agreed to do it: and when the interview ended, as L .on th- of his

house in Char, bte Squ the sunbeams glancing on the polished cupola of that hatless cranium which held m shrewdness, wit. and eloquence than any head in Edinburgh,

remember how he WeD, I suppose I must do

and be mortally •:. for the: si f my days. H

I -hall not go about the bush. I shan’t say. I give my r the present Lor IB toi or, ‘I give my I for the Solicitor-general, But the Principal v My I rd,

for whom do and I shall reply. ‘Principal Macfarlan. I vote i — a promise which he fulfil

most literally. This fear of being “quizzed” is an affection

-eminently S ttisl it Irish n ighbours live in an

atmosphere o: and John Bull pa]

Punch a handsome salary for quizzing him; but north of the Tweed we do not like it In a battle betwixt cat and dog a water-engine is an ungenerous piece of ordnance, owing to the greater sensitiveness of the feline constitution; and many a lion-heart around the Grampians which stands fire very well cannot stand fun. This dread of ridicule has many advantages. It snubs a good deal of pedantry, and it keeps back a large amount of maudlin sentiment; but it is to be feared that it also damps a good deal of generous aspiration, and occasionally drives genius in upon itself. Nor was the hero of our tale entirely superior to the national infirmity. All the rather because he was so exquisitely endowed with the sense of the ridiculous, did he deprecate supplying personal illustrations; and, through fear of the banter they might excite, he kept to himself many of the noblest and finest things in his nature. Lest he might be laughed at as another Icarus, although he had very good wings of his own, he forbore to fly; and, in dread of that imperfect sympathy which soon degenerates into perfect derision, he arrested the pathetic or eloquent utterance when already struggling to his lips, and was content to dwell in silence. Or if such utterance did escape, he covered his retreat by quizzing himself. When a boy, a playmate remembers that in a moment of good-nature or vanity, he one evening shewed his companions the press which contained his cherished collections. Of course, they greatly admired the museum; but before there was time for any one to w. s.? 17

nickname him the showman or the little philosopher, or jeer at his favourites, he held the candle so near as to bum the tails of some of the birds. And by some such suicidal stratagem it was his wont to disarm the sardonic furies. A lady remembers his telling at Inverary Castle, late in life, the story of a dog which, in leaping a fence, had spiked itself; and as he described their sitting up over-night with the poor animal, and its pitiful appealing looks to its different friends, and its gradual subsidence into the arms of death, the human touches which he threw in were beginning to be too much for his tender-hearted auditors, when the arch tone in which he ended, “It was very affecting,” compelled every one to laugh just at the moment they were beginning to cry. Of this inverting of the stylus, by which he so far cancels the effect of a powerful passage, his works contain innumerable instances. In order to escape the reproach of romance or sentimentalism, he singed the tail; but when it is the plumage of an ibis or a bird of paradise, we regret the sacrifice.

With all the Latin and Greek which could be acquired at school and college, and with a facility and elegance in writing English which seemed to be inherent in his family, it was time that the youth should choose a profession; and, we suspect, with a very languid preference, he chose the law — in Edinburgh, the natural alternative of one who had no wish to be either a doctor or a minister. He was about eighteen years of age when he entered the office of Messrs Mackenzie & Monypenny, and commenced the usual training of a prospective Writer to the Signet.

But shortly before this he had joined a more congenial copartnership. In 1808, Professor Jameson had succeeded in associating with himself a few ardent cultivators of the natural sciences, and founded the Wernerian Society. Its members were not numerous, but many of them were men of high attainment. A few of them were botanists, such as the venerable Dr William Wright, of Jamaica, great in quassia and cinchona; Hopkirk of Dalbeth, the author of “Flora Glottiana,” one of the first attempts in Scotland to furnish a guide to the local explorer; and Patrick Neill, whose proof-sheets used to be a luxury to the scientific author, and whose horticultural zeal made him a benefactor to his country. The zoologists were few; but after the type of the founder, himself a devoted pupil of the mighty Werner, the mineralogists made a powerful muster; the most ardent and assiduous being the Rev. Dr Macknight, the most accurate and masterly Dr Thomas Thomson, whose gruff, dry lectures and clumsy demonstrations in chemistry still betokened an autocratic ascendency, and crowded his class-room with students who are now among the wealthiest manufacturers of Glasgow, and the most successful pharmacologists of the world. Into this select assembly James Wilson was admitted on the 11th of April 1812; and the election of a member so youthful shews the impression which he had already made on his friend and instructor, Professor Jameson. The meetings were then conducted with a very unassuming simplicity. They were held in the Professor’s private residence, and the members sat round a long table. On the 25th of March 1815, Mr Wilson read his first communication. It was a description of what he believed to be a new species of water ouzel, to which he had given the name Aquatilis undulatus. But although the assembly was never very numerous, it would almost appear to have been too formidable an audience for his retiring temperament; at least, his next communications, on the “Cirl Bunting,” and the “Falconidge,” are reported as having been read by Professor Jameson or the secretary.

Thus, from a mildly playful, affectionate childhood, James Wilson grew up to man. And the manner of man he was will be best understood from the following contemporary sketch, which we owe to the pen of the late Mr J. Gr. Lockhart: —

“I dined with Professor Jameson yesterday, with a small party of his most distinguished pupils. Amonothese there was one whom the Professor particularly introduced me to, a Mr James Wilson, brother to the poet

This young gentleman follows the profession of a Writer to the Signet (which, as I have told yon, is the name for the highest class of attorneys in Edinburgh), but forms, as Mr Jameson assured me, a brilliant exception to the neglect with which matters of science are commonly treated by the members of the profession. He is very young, many years junior to his more celebrated brother, and no casual observer would suspect them to be of the same family. I have already described to you the exterior of the poet. James is a thin, pale, slender, contemplativelooking person, with hair of rather a dark coloui*, and extremely short-sighted. In his manners, also, he is as different as possible from his brother; his voice is low, and his whole demeanour as still as can be imagined. In conversation, he attempts no kind of display, but seems to possess a very peculiar vein of dry humour, which renders him extremely diverting. Notwithstanding all these differences, however, I could easily trace a great similarity in the construction of the bones of the two faces; and, indeed, there is nothing more easy to imagine than that, with much of the same original powers and propensities, some casual enough circumstances may have been sufficient to decide that the one of the brothers should be a poet and the other a naturalist. The parts cf the science of which Mr James Wilson is fondest, are ornithology and entomology — studies so delightful to every true lover of nature, that I suspect they are, in some measure, familiar to every poet who excels in depicting the manifestations, and in tracing the spirit of beauty in the external universe. Professor Jameson, indeed, informed me that his young friend is, in truth, no less a poet than a naturalist, and has already published several little pieces of exquisite beauty, although he has not ventured to give his name

along with them

“I have never, indeed, met with any man who seemed to possess a greater power of illustrating subjects of natural history by quotations from writers of all kinds, and in particular from the poets. Milton and Wordsworth, above all, he appears to have completely by heart; and it was wonderfully delightful to me to hear matters which are commonly discussed in the driest of all possible methods, treated of in so graceful a manner by one who is so much skilled in them. Nothing could be more refreshing than to hear some minute details about birds and insects, interrupted and illuminated by a fragment of grand melancholy music from the ‘Paradise Lost, oi the ‘Excursion.’” *

* Peter’s Letters to Lis Kinsfolk (1819), pp. 256-259.