A MEETING OF RIVALS 209 



lished anonymously as a penny chap-book in 1782, was 

 his one popular success in the character of poet ; accord- 

 ing to report it was attributed to Burns, who admitted 

 that he would have been glad to have written the verses, 

 which sold so freely that a hundred thousand copies 

 were disposed of in a few weeks. 4 In the disputes be- 

 tween capital and labor which arose at Paisley, Wilson 

 took an active part. In connection with them he pub- 

 lished a number of lampoons in verse, for which he was 

 convicted of libel and was compelled to burn his satires 

 at the town cross. In one instance, which occurred in 

 February, 1793, a petty tyrant whom he had riddled 

 exacted the fine, 5 and because of his inability to pay 

 Wilson was sent to jail, where he languished for over 

 three months. 



Under the pressure of such persecutions, hard times, 

 and possibly from disappointment in an affair of the 

 heart, Wilson decided to emigrate. Practically driven 

 out in rags from the country which one day was to raise 

 a monument to his memory, at the age of twenty-eight 

 he sailed from Belfast with his nephew, William Dun- 

 can, for the Eldorado of the New World. Wilson slept 

 on deck throughout the entire voyage of fifty-three 

 days, and landed at New Castle, Delaware, with the 

 clothes on his back and an old fowling-piece as his only 

 possessions. This was on July 14, 1794, nine years be- 

 fore John James Audubon left Nantes. Taking train 

 "number 11," in the parlance of knights of the road, 

 the two immigrants first walked to Wilmington in search 

 of employment, and finding none there, went on twenty- 

 nine miles farther to Philadelphia. 



4 See Grosart, Poems and Literary Prose of Alexander Wilson, vol. i, 

 p. xxiv. 



For "The Shark, or Lang Mills Detected," a satire directed against 

 William Sharp, a manufacturer of Paisley; Wilson was fined 12 13s. 6d. 



