wiI/Son's utj^rary writings 141 



magic grace and wonderful melody of that ex- 

 quisite lyric. 



We now turn to the poems which were written 

 after he crossed the Atlantic. In his earlier work 

 Wilson had been most greatly influenced by Fer- 

 gusson, Shenstone, Thomson, Goldsmith, and 

 Pope. In a lesser degree Ramsay and the bud- 

 ding genius of Burns left their imprint upon his 

 style. There is no doubt that Wilson knew some- 

 thing of the older Scottish poets, and the influ- 

 ence of the humble writers of verse among his 

 own intimates may have affected him somewhat. 

 Gay, Beattie, Smollett, and Gray were favorites 

 with him, but there was little in their verse to ex- 

 ert a different influence upon him from what he 

 also received from Pope or Goldsmith or Thom- 

 son. These masters of his he followed in these 

 early years with slavish devotion; the result is 

 that his early English pieces are but cold, com- 

 monplace copies of his models. He attained 

 much of the smooth, mechanical ease of these 

 poets, but none of their inspiration, and it was he 

 who was perhaps least among them — Shenstone 

 — that Wilson was most pleased to copy. When 

 he wrote in his own Scotch tongue he was more 

 original and Fergusson and Ramsay were as 

 often mere incentives to his muse as they were 

 models. So it was that his one very noteworthy 

 poem which he produced in Scotland was the 

 Scotch 'Watty and Meg." 



In America new conditions confronted him, 

 and when he sang it was less often with a con- 

 scious sense of copying after another. The man- 



