and have taken their places at the table, North proposes: "A bumper!
The King! God bless him!" and three times three are given. Then Tickler
proposes: "A bumper! The Kirk of Scotland!" and the rounds of cheers
are repeated. These indispensable ceremonies being over, the Blackwood
council proceeds to discuss men and things over nectar and ambrosia.

Wilson was the centre and best representative of this group. At Oxford,
he had been so democratic that he blacked his own boots on principle.
On leaving Oxford, he had roamed for a time as a wild man in a band of
gypsies. He next took a cottage in the lake district in the North of
England, where he associated with Wordsworth, and occupied himself
alternately with desperate gymnastic exercises and composing slight
descriptive poems. Even after connecting himself with the magazine and
becoming the symposiarch of the "Noctes," and perhaps the greatest Tory
in all broad Scotland, he did not renounce his home among the lakes. He
was a lover of scenery, and an enthusiast and master in manly sports. He
is said to have fished in every trout-brook north of the Clyde, and
he wandered every season over the Highlands. In his sportsman's
accomplishments he took a truly English pride, and made fun of the
Edinburgh Whigs by representing a company of them as getting by chance
into the same room with himself and his associates, and then, pipes and
tobacco being brought, as being fairly smoked out, sickened, and
obliged to retreat by the superior smoking capacities of the Tories. He
ridiculed Leigh Hunt for fancying in one of his poems that he should
like a splendid life on a great estate, when (as Wilson says) he
couldn't even ride without being thrown. Yet, of all the men of this
time, there was probably no one who had wider sympathies or more
delightful prejudices than Professor Wilson, or who made more sagacious
reflections. The centre of a literary clique, he loved to associate
with all the other cliques, and was one of the first to recognize and