INTRODUCTION 



reprint. Of Wilson, the boy, the "Young 

 Kit" of the Sporting Jacket, Mrs. Gordon, 

 his daughter, writes in her biography : "In his 

 childish years John Wilson was as beautiful 

 and animated a creature as ever played in 

 the sunshine." And he was indeed a brilliant 

 and beautiful boy, with a touch of that ideal, 

 Wordsworthian boyhood about him that hghts 

 up those "coarser pleasures" which he followed 

 with such zest, with real "intimations of im- 

 mortaUty." It is no wonder that, as he him- 

 self tells us at the end of Christopher at the 

 moment of leave-taking, when at the age of 

 twelve he was about to go to the University 

 of Glasgow, his friends and teachers even then 

 under the spell of the personahty of one so 

 precocious and yet so bUthe and gay and 

 high-spirited, should have predicted for him 

 "a life that was sure to lead to honor, and 

 riches, and a splendid name." 



At eighteen, he went to Magdalen College, 

 Oxford, where, so prominent was he as an 



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