19 i BUSINESS, RECREATION; SUNSHINE, SHADOW. 



and not less happy was the editor who had such a neigh- 

 bour. But happier still was the man himself, who, when 

 an emergency arose, could always meet it, and who, when 

 the forthcoming serial was arrested by a desertion or a 

 downbreak, possessed the ready pen and readier zeal 

 which supplied the gap and saved the capitol. If Sidney 

 Smith claimed it as his function, that he acted in society 

 as a general amalgam ; in the literary and scientific world 

 of Edinburgh — the lecturing world not included, and his 

 own chosen pursuits superadded — Mr Wilson might have 

 claimed it as his province to be the universal succedaneum. 

 His engagement with the Encylopcedia Britannica 

 amounted to a virtual editorship ; for it made him responsi- 

 ble for all the natural history, and, as happens to all editors, 

 his subordinates sometimes left him in the lurch. The 

 following letter was called forth by such a conjuncture : — 



TO SIR WILLIAM JARDINE, BART. 



" Woodville, lltk May 1835. 

 " I have not time to enter into particulars ; suffice it to 

 say that I have been grievously disappointed by what I 

 cannot call otherwise than the misconduct of an indi- 

 vidual, to whom years ago I had intrusted the article 

 Ichthyology for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. To that 

 individual I have written and spoken every two or three 

 months on the subject, have sent books and other necessary 



