opinion that they in themselves are a sufficient answer to all who doubt
whether the great powers of their author ever found adequate expression.
We are unable to agree with her. Able and brilliant as these
articles unquestionably were, we cannot think that such glimpses and
fragments--or, in fact, all the relics left by their author--furnish
results at all commensurate with the man. Though Maga increased his
immediate reputation, we think it diminished his lasting fame, by
leading him to scatter, instead of concentrating his remarkable powers
on some one great work. Scott and other great authorities saw so much
native genius in Wilson, that they often said that it lay in him
to become the first man of his time, though they feared that his
eccentricities and lack of steadiness might prove fatal to his success.

Though never really the editor of "Blackwood," Wilson was from the first
its guiding spirit,--the leaven that leavened the whole lump. The way in
which he threw himself into his work he described as follows:--"We love
to do our work by fits and starts. We hate to keep fiddling away, an
hour or two at a time, at one article for weeks. So off with our coat,
and at it like a blacksmith. When we once get the way of it, hand over
hip, we laugh at Vulcan and all his Cyclops. From nine of the morning
till nine at night, we keep hammering away at the metal, iron or gold,
till we produce a most beautiful article. A biscuit and a glass of
Madeira, twice or thrice at the most,--and then to a well-won dinner. In
three days, gentle reader, have We, Christopher North, often produced
a whole magazine,--a most splendid number. For the next three weeks we
were as idle as a desert, and as vast as an antre,--and thus on we go,
alternately laboring like an ant, and relaxing in the sunny air like a
dragon-fly, enamored of extremes." Of all his contributions, we think
the "Noctes Ambrosianae" give by far the best idea of their author. They
are perfectly characteristic throughout, though singularly various.