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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 65, March, 1863 by Various
page 8 of 275 (02%)
return, he would be the prince of good-fellows once more, and fascinate
the merry revellers with the witchery of his tongue. Even when a boy, he
had won a bet by walking six miles in two minutes less than an hour. He
once dined in Grosvenor Square, and made his appearance at Oxford at an
early hour the next morning, having walked the fifty-eight miles at a
tremendous pace. In his vacations, he walked over all the Lake region
of England, the North of Scotland, and the greater part of Wales. On
finishing his course at Oxford, he went on foot to Edinburgh,--more than
three hundred miles. He was equally remarkable as a leaper, surpassing
all competitors. He once jumped across the Cherwell--twenty-three feet
clear--with a run of only a few yards. This is, we believe, the greatest
feat of the kind on record. General Washington, it is known, had great
powers in this way; but the greatest distance ever leaped by him, if we
remember right, was but twenty-one feet.

The many vagaries into which he was led, and the innumerable odd pranks
he played, would be sufficient, in the case of any one else, to prove
that he was not a reading man. But not so with Wilson. One of his
contemporaries at Oxford thus described him:--"Wilson read hard, lived
hard, but never ran into vulgar or vicious dissipation. He talked well,
and loved to talk. Such gushes of poetic eloquence as I 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
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