222 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



I believe, he adhered ever after, though, in important respects, he 

 completely altered, in subsequent years, the substance of his lec- 

 tures. 



The opening of a new session is always an interesting occasion, 

 and when it is the professor's first appearance the interest is of 

 course intensified. The crowd that assembled to hear my father's 

 introductory lecture proved too numerous for the dimensions of the 

 room, and it was found necessary to adjourn to the more capacious 

 class-room of Dr. Monro, the Professor of Anatomy. Wilson 

 entered, accompanied by Principal Baird, Professors Home, Jame- 

 son, and Hope in their gowns, " a thing Ave believe quite unusual," 

 remarked the Scotsman, in whose eyes this trifling niaivk of respect 

 seemed a kind of insult to the audience, composed as it was, to a 

 large extent, of persons prepared to give the new Professor any 

 thing but a cordial greeting. An eye-witness* thus describes the 

 scene : — " There was a furious bitterness of feeling against him 

 among the classes of which probably most of his pupils would con- 

 sist, and although I had no prospect of being among them, I went 

 to his first lecture, prepared to join in a cabal, which I understood 

 was formed to jiut him down. The lecture-room was crowded to 

 the ceiling. Such a collection of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, 

 muttering over their knobsticks, I never saw. The Professor 

 entered with a bold step, amid profound silence. Every one ex- 

 pected some deprecatory or propitiatory introduction of himself 

 and his subject, upon which the mass was to decide against him, 

 reason or no reason ; but he began in a voice of thunder right into 

 the matter of his lecture, kept up unflinchingly and unhesitatingly, 

 without a pause, a flow of rhetoric such as Dugald Stewart or 

 Thomas Brown, his predecessors, never delivered in the same place. 

 Not a word, not a murmur escaped his captivated, I ought to say 

 his conquered audience, and at the end they gave him a right-down 

 unanimous burst of applause. Those who came to scofl" remained 

 to praise." 



Another spectator of the scene tells me that towards the conclu- 

 sion of the lecture, the commencement of which had been delayed 

 by the circumstance already mentioned, the Professor was inter- 

 rupted in the midst of an eloquent peroration by the sudden entrance 

 of Dr. Monro's tall figure — enveloped as usual in his long white 



* The author of The Two Cosmos : MS. letter. 



