24:2 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



and must have sadly jumbled the devotions of the church-goers. I 

 believe every professor received a full share of this man's attentions 

 except Wilson. His literary ally, the Professor of Civil law, a man 

 endowed with a great fund of humor, which, however, he could not 

 convert like him into defensive armor, suffered dreadfully from Syn- 

 tax, and when the pale face was visible in the highest desk, we 

 knew that a day was lost, the poor lecturer having enough to do in 

 keeping down internal convulsions of laughter, which seemed as if 

 they would explode and shatter his frame to pieces. 



" Both these tormentors, of whom I have, perhaps, said too much, 

 stood in wholesome dread of Wilson. It was, I have no doubt, by 

 effectually treating them according to their folly, that he earned this 

 exemption, in which his brethren must have greatly envied him. 



" Before that session came to an end, an event occurred momen- 

 tous to all of us — the Reform Bill was brought in. We youths had 

 previously indulged in no politics, or if in any, they were of a mild 

 Aristides and Brutus kind, tinged perhaps by De Lolme and the 

 Letters of Junius. Now, however, we were at once separated into 

 two hostile forces. To the liberals, fflackiooocV s Magazine, ceasing 

 to be the guiding-star of literature, had become the watchfire of 

 the enemy. The bitterness of the hostility felt at that time by the 

 young men of the two opposite political creeds cannot easily be un- 

 derstood by those in the same stage of life at the present day. The 

 friendship must have been fast indeed that remained after one friend 

 had become a reformer and the other an anti-reformer. We used to 

 make faces at each other as we passed ; and if a few words were ex- 

 changed, they were hostile and threatening. I suppose our hostility 

 was a type of a stage of transition between the ferocity of times of 

 civil war and the mild political partisanship of the present day. 



" The Professor was known to take his stand against the Bill 

 with great vehemence, but I never knew more than one instance 

 of an approach to an ebullition of it upon any of his friends on our 

 side. There had been many Reform meetings of all kinds, some- 

 times assembling vast multitudes, when it occurred to attempt a 

 Tory meeting — the word Conservative had not then been invented. 

 A question arose among us whether they should be allowed to have 

 it their own way, and, since they called the meeting public, whether 

 our party should not go and out-vote them. The tactic of public 

 meetings, as simply one-sided demonstrations of the strength of a 



