John Wilson (1785-1854) was a Scottish writer, most frequently identified with the pseudonym Christopher North of Blackwood"s Edinburgh Magazine. In 1803 he was entered as a gentleman commoner at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was inspired by Oxford, and in much of his later work, notably in the essay called Old North and Young North, he expresses his love for it. He took his degree in 1807, and at twenty-two was his own master, with a good income, no guardian to control him, and no need to work for a living. He read law and was elected to the Faculty of Advocates in 1815. Wilson had contributed to Blackwood"s prose tales and sketches, and novels, some of which were afterwards published separately in Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822), The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay (1823) and The Foresters (1825); later appeared essays on Edmund Spenser, Homer and all sorts of modern subjects and authors.