able fortune by the death of his father, he purchased the beautiful estate of Elleray, in Cumberland, where he went to reside on leaving Oxford in 1807. Here he was at liberty to enjoy all the varied delights of poetic meditation, of congenial society, and of those endless out-door recreations which constituted no small part of his life. Five years after purchasing the Windermere property he married Miss Jane Penny, the daughter of a wealthy Liverpool merchant. JOHN WILSON, the distinguished poet, novel- | the age of twenty-one succeeded to a considerist, and miscellaneous writer, was born at Paisley, May 18, 1785. His father was a prosperous gauze manufacturer in that town, and his mother, Margaret Sym, belonged to a wealthy Glasgow family. The boy's elementary education was received first at a school in Paisley, and afterwards at the manse of Mearns, a parish in Renfrewshire. In this rural situation the youth conned his lessons within doors; but the chief training for his future sphere consisted in many a long ramble among the beautiful scenery with which he was surrounded, and the frolics or conversation of the peasantry, among whom he soon became a general favourite. At the age of thirteen he was sent to the University of Glasgow, where he studied Greek and logic during three sessions under Professors Young and Jardine, and to the training especially of the latter he was indebted for those mental impulses which he afterwards prosecuted so successfully. In June, 1803, he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, as a gentleman-commoner; and there his diligence was attested by the knowledge of the best classical writers of antiquity which he afterwards displayed, and his native genius by the production of an English poem of fifty lines, which gained for him the Newdigate prize. In other kinds of college exercises-as boxing, leaping, running, rowing, and other athletic sports-he was also greatly distinguished. Having at Wilson on leaving college resolved to become a member of the Scottish bar, and after the usual studies he was enrolled an advocate in 1815. It must not, however, be supposed that he was either the most anxious or industrious of barristers. In the same year the unfaithful stewardship of a maternal uncle deprived him of his fortune, and obliged him to remove from Elleray to Edinburgh. He had before this begun his literary and poetic career by the publication of an elegy on the death of the Rev. James Grahame, author of the “Sabbath,” with which Joanna Baillie was so much pleased that she wrote to Sir Walter Scott for the name of the author. He also composed some beautiful stanzas entitled "The Magic Mirror," which appeared in the Annual Register for 1812. During the same year he produced The Isle of Palms, and other Poems, which at once stamped their author as one of the poets of the Lake school; but much as the "Isle of Palms" |