John Wilson would one day rank among Britain's leading cultural and literary critics; he would contribute regularly to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine under the pseudonym Christopher North and eventually assume the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. But in May 1802 Wilson was a precocious seventeen-year-old writing a fan letter to poetry's bright new star, William Wordsworth. The epistle reads like an early exercise in Wilson's literary criticism, with his comments on Lyrical Ballads being part analysis and part adulation. ‘[T]hough I am not personally acquainted with you, I may almost venture to affirm, that the qualities of your soul are not unknown to me’, he writes to Wordsworth. ‘In your poems I discovered such marks of delicate feeling, such benevolence of disposition, and such knowledge of human nature as has made an impression on my mind that nothing will ever efface’ (quoted in Brett and Jones 1991: 334). Wordsworth's poetry, he writes, is ‘the language of nature’, written ‘not … merely for the pleasure of philosophers and men of improved taste, but for all who think – for all who feel’ (335). He claims further that the poems ‘are of a very great advantage to the world’, thanks to their ‘system of philosophy’ and ‘morality of the purest kind’, and praises how ‘they represent the enjoyment resulting from the cultivation of the social affections of our nature’ (336).