After studying law at Glasgow and Oxford universities, John Wilson (1785-1854), together with J. G. Lockhart, became editor of Blackwood's Magazine soon after its foundation in 1817, writing under the pseudonym 'Christopher North'. He was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University in 1820. He attacked Coleridge and the 'Cockney School' (a term coined by Blackwood's) of literature, which included John Keats, Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt.