16 MEMOIK OF JOHN WILSON. 



said and did— bis words of kind praise and kind censure— his gray- 

 icy and his graciousness — will no doubt be dwelt upon with warm 

 and tender words and looks, long after his earthly labors shall have 

 been bi ought to a close."* 



Wilson's intercourse with Professor Young was of a nature equally 

 friendly, and his reminiscences of that " old man eloquent" are not 

 less pleasing : — 



" Vfe have sat," he says, " at the knees of Professor Young, 

 looking up to his kindling or shaded countenance, while that old 

 man eloquent gave life to every line, till Hector and Andromache 

 seemed to our imagination standing side by side beneath a radiant 

 rainbow glorious on a showery heaven ; such, during his inspiration, 

 was the creative power of the majesty and the beauty of their smiles 

 and tears. 



" That was long, long ago, in the Greek class of the College of 

 Glasgow ; and though that bright scholar's Greek was Scotch Greek, 

 and all its vowels and diphthongs, and some of its consonants too, 

 especially that glorious guttural that sounds in lochs, all unlike the 

 English Greek that soon afterwards, beneath the shadow of Mag- 

 dalen Tower, the fairest of all Oxford's stately structures, was poured 

 mellifluous on our delighted ear from the lips of President Routh, 

 the ' erudite and the wise,' still hath the music of that ' repeated 

 strain' a charm to our souls, reminding us of life's morning march 

 when our spirits were young, and when we could see, even as with 

 our bodily eyes, things far away in space or time, and Troy hung 

 visibly before us even as the sun-setting clouds. Therefore, till 

 death, shall we love the Sixth Book of the Iliad ; and, if we under- 

 stand it not, then indeed has our whole life been vainer than the 

 shadow of a dream."f 



A somewhat similar account of this interesting man, from another 

 source, is worthy of insertion here : — 



" I own I was quite thunderstruck to find him passing from a 

 transport of sheer verbal ecstasy about the particle apa, into an 

 ecstasy quite as vehement, and a thousand times more noble, about 

 the deep pathetic beauty of one of Homer's conceptions in the ex- 

 pression of which that particle happens to occur. Such was the 

 burst of his enthusiasm, and the enriched mellow swell of his ex- 



* Blackwood, July, 1818. 



t " Homer ami his Translators," Wilson's Works. 



