He was a great sportsman, and a story is told by his daughter, Mrs. Gordon, of his travelling seventy miles in one day, to fish in a certain favorite loch among the braes of Glenarchy, called Loch Toila. He was also a good shot, and very enthusiastic in sport even to old age. Boating was another favorite pastime; and engaged in one or another of these out-of-door pursuits, he passed a very large portion of his whole life. When he did write, he did it with great rapidity, composing one of the "Noctes" at a sitting. His love for the animal creation was very deep, and he would never submit to seeing any creature abused. He one day saw a man cruelly beating his horse, which was overloaded with coals, and could not move. He remonstrated with the driver, who, exasperated at the interference, took up the whip in a threatening way, as if with intent to strike the professor. In one instant the well-nerved hand of Wilson, not new to these encounters, twisted the whip from the coarse fist of the driver, and walking up to the cart, he unfastened the trams and hurled the whole weight of the coals into the street. He then took the horse and led it away, depositing it in the hands of the authorities, with injunctions to see that the beast was better treated in future.
He made great pets of game-birds, the aristocracy of the species, with their delicate heads and exquisite plumage, and kept at one time no less than sixty-two in the back yard of his house. The noise was simply unendurable to all but Wilson, who was never annoyed by it in the least. He kept one lame sparrow for eleven years, caring for it with the tenderest solicitude.
He was always well known in the houses of the poor, and he never gave up one of his humble friends. He was tender and gentle always to these, as to the members of his own household, where it was said the very strength of his hand was softened, that he might caress the infant, or play with the little ones at his feet. With all children he was a prime favorite, and in his declining years his grandchildren were his daily playmates. Noah's ark, trumpets, drums, pencils, puzzles, dolls, were all supposed by them to possess interest in his eyes equal to their own.
He was thrown much upon these children for his pleasures near the close of his life. That frame of gigantic build and of gigantic strength became almost helpless from paralysis, and he was cared for till death by his daughter, the mother of these favored little ones. Oh, it is sad to think of it! Poor Christopher,—the active, the alert, the keen-sighted, the fleet-footed, the gay and rollicking sportsman, the famous angler, the champion boxer, too, upon occasions,—laid low, and propped helpless upon pillows within walls, which he had always hated so sincerely. He writes:—
"Our spirit burns within us, but our limbs are palsied, and our feet must brush the heather no more. Lo, how beautifully those fast-travelling pointers do their work on that black mountain's breast; intersecting it into parallelograms and squares and circles, and now all a-stoop on a sudden, as if frozen to death. Higher up among the rocks and cliffs and stones, we see a stripling whose ambition it is to strike the sky with his forehead, and wet his hair in the misty cloud, pursuing the ptarmigan. . . . Never shall eld deaden our sympathies with the pastimes of our fellow-men, any more than with their highest raptures, their profoundest griefs."
It is safe to say that he kept his word, and was to the last, the same genial, warm-hearted, impulsive, wayward man who had by these and other engaging qualities made for himself so large a place in the heart of his countrymen, during the long years he had wandered over her moors and hills, seeing all her beauties, and describing them as no other had done.
He was almost the last of that band of strong men who cast such lustre over the beginning of this century. Coleridge had gone before, and Wordsworth, Byron, and Campbell, Shelley, and Canning, and Peel, and Jeffrey, and Moore, and he lingered on in a solitude made greater by that last stroke of calamity which deprived him of motion for a time that was weary and heart-breaking to him, and over which the world yet sheds its sympathizing tears. He died at the age of sixty-eight.
