“Hamilton desires his kindest remembrances to you. I dined the other day at his house in company with two violent Lakers—Wilson for one, and a friend of his, a most strange creature, for the other. His name is De Quincey; he was of Worcester. After passing one half of an examination which has never, according to the common report, been equalled,

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he took the terror of the schools, and fled for it to the Lakes. There he has formed the closest intimacy with Wordsworth and all his worthies. After dinner he set down two snuff-boxes on the table; one, I soon observed, contained opium pills—of these he swallowed one every now and then, while we drank our half-bottle apiece. Wilson and he were both as enthusiastic concerning the ‘Excursion’ as you could wish. Wilson is just going to publish a dramatic poem—subject, ‘The Plague in London.’ It opens with the conversation of two shopkeepers, a trunk maker and a calender-mill mender, all whose families have caught the infection. It is in eleven (books?), and includes many lyrics. (The two friends have gone off on a pedestrian tour to Staffa!)”

“Compliments to Nicoll.

“P.S.—Riddel has just told me he heard from you lately, and that you are spending the vacation in Balliol. What means this? Is Connor with you? Write to me, and as soon as the bursar is in College transmit me the ready.1

“John Wilson walked off to Cumberland, a fortnight ago, in the midst of the storm, in spite of his wife, whereupon Mr. Wordsworth wrote two sonnets which I have seen printed at a private press here. One of them runs thus:—

“‘And could thy gentle spirit endure no more The solemn prating of that ignorant town? And would’st thou come in spite of frost and frore And border-torrents leaping furious down, The spirit of the mountains to adore, And human converse hold with thy calm ake? O Wilson! I am glad for the world’s sake The reign of virtuous impulse is not o’er.

Domestic duties we must all partake, And wife and children should to man be dear— But thou did’st well, my Wilson, to forsake Thy little ones, and bear thy spouse’s tear! (When) holier duties call, these might not shake The (resolute) worshipper of this lone Mere.’

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“Wilson went on the top of the Carlisle coach part of the way; it overturned, and Wilson’s head was broken—whence sonnet the second:—

“‘An outside place my Wilson did prefer, Tho’ warmth and bodily ease within were found, So well befits it nature’s worshipper! To gaze more widely o’er the snow-clad ground, Like the world’s joys in barren coldness shining; To list the unseen streamlets’ innocent sound Beneath the snow a small path undermining. Like the poetic eye which moveth slowly, And feeds itself in darkness on things holy— To scatter crumbs, it may be, now and then, To the small redbreast and pure-minded wren. These things were worthy of thy soul’s desire, And, if I know thee, spite of scoffing men, Who have no part in the celestial fire, And spite of this thy bruise, thou wilt seek these again. W. W.’”

“My dear Christie,—Your expressions are very vague, touching everything that regards yourself. I think you intend me to conclude that you are leaving Connor, and yet neither the date of your

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letter, nor the way in which you talk of returning to Oxford, looks exactly that way. Pray let me know what your plans are. If you have no engagement during the summer, I would fain flatter myself with the hopes of your paying us a visit in Scotland, in which case you will know that few can be more anxious for the pleasure of housing you than myself. I am not to be in Oxford this spring. Old John gave me leave of absence very graciously, and I had reasons for preferring to pay my last official visit next year rather than now. Traill also, as his sister told me the other night, got leave from John; but as he is at present at Newcastle acting as supercargo to a ship of kelp, she hinted that, should the sale be favourable, he might still make a run to Oxon, where I have no doubt he may easily find a way to dispose of all his seaweed riches.

“We go on here pretty much in the old way. Innes has been made elder, and serves in this General Assembly as representative of the borough of Kintore. Hamilton also was made an elder last Sunday at a village near this town—at least, the ceremony of his taking the vows was performed, for the legality of the process is still doubtful, a protest having been given in against his nomination by an old farmer in the eldership there, on three grounds: 1st, Hamilton having no domiceal within the bounds; 2nd, His being suspected of Episcopalianism; and 3rd, His having no certificate of moral

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character, &c. The process of Presbytery, wherein the value of these objections is to be discussed, I shall certainly attend. Hamilton desires to be most affectionately remembered to you. He will write to you soon by his cousin the Freshman, and in the meantime earnestly begs you would write him. By-the-bye, do you not think he might have some chance for a Fellowship? and in God’s name, why don’t you stand yourself? There is no open fama clamosa against your character—electing you would not be considered as a sort of premium on idleness, blasphemy, and contempt (as electing some friends of yours might too justly be); and on the whole, as you can lose no character, either by competition with the three idiots you mention, or by any decision of those who have already lost all pretensions to justice in those matters—and as you may gain so much, Hamilton and I both agree that you will act very wrong if, being on the spot, you do not try. Taffy, I presume, will no more trouble them with his fat face and his Greek, both of which are too good for them. I met yesterday at dinner with a Cambridge man, Foster, a craniologist, whom I remember your mentioning last summer. He seems totally cracked, but cleverish withal. He is a professed infidel, but certainly has a well-made forehead above his ugly face. He is cousin to Dicky Meade, as he says—and I believe him. I will send you a copy, by the first private hand, of my Essay on the ‘art noble,’—which is now in the

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press. If you wish to have any sarcasm against anybody inserted in a note, you are still in time.—Yours, my dear Christie,

“My dear Christie,—Hamilton came here on Friday last and stayed till this morning. He brought me the first news of Nicoll’s marriage, and had himself only that morning learned by a very unfeeling paragraph (as he reported it) from the Oxford paper, the sudden calamity which so soon turned all our friend’s happiness into misery. In time I have no doubt the usual lenitives of every distress among us must have their due influence in restoring him to himself—at present, of course, he must be left entirely to the working of his own feelings. The effect which this news produced in both was, I need not say, such as all Nicoll’s friends will easily imagine. For myself I heard, in the

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same breath, both the marriage and the death—being saluted by W. H., ‘Poor Nicoll’s wife’s dead,’ before I had the least suspicion that Nicoll was married. Hamilton made after some time a lawyer’s remark, ‘Patrimonially, ’tis as well.’ If Nicoll is still in London remember us both to him. Hamilton will write in a few weeks when he thinks his letter may be received with calmness. I am sorry your letter did not arrive till after his departure.

“Hamilton, you may have observed in the papers, has at length served himself heir general to Sir Robert H. of Preston, who commanded the Covenanting army at Bothwell Bridge, and is now

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Sir William at your service. Had he followed his original profession this might have much in his favour; at present I see no great good it can do him to be set at the upper end of tables among dowagers instead of the lower end among misses. However, he makes a most respectable baronet, and may, if he pleases, make additional use of his good leg in a matrimonial way; but he is not worldly-wise enough for that, to use a true-blue phrase. So you are, at last, nine hours a day at a conveyancer’s! May the tripling aes not be awanting. I beg of you to write again and more at length on a Sunday. My compliments to Traill.—Yours ever,

With the end of the year 1816 we find Lockhart, like Allan Fairford in “Redgauntlet,” “putting on the gown, and giving a bit chack of dinner to his friends and acquaintances, as is the custom.” Like Scott, Lockhart was to find that “we’ve stood here an hour by Tron, hinny, and deil a ane has speered our price.” However, he does not seem to have foreboded this end of his promenades in the Parliament House, when he writes:—

In later life, when he wrote his “Life of Scott,” Lockhart took a far more favourable review of that masterpiece, “Old Mortality.” His early comments are rather pedantic. A knowledge of the Burley

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and Claverhouse of history does not spoil for us the Claverhouse and Burley of romance. As for Morton, and the shock caused to an historical mind by his absence from history books, his position, at Bothwell Brig, was very much like that of one of Lockhart’s own ancestors, the hero who hid up a tree. Yet that hero needs a good deal of research before we discover him in some obscure Covenanter’s narrative.

There is an unlucky gap in the correspondence between Christie and Mr. Lockhart, in the year 1817, while, of domestic correspondence, there is but one letter. This, to Mr. Lawrence Lockhart, contains a reference to “Blacky,” a servant, probably the negro of whom Hogg tells a story. Lockhart, at the time we have reached, “was a mischievous Oxford puppy, for whom,” says the Shepherd, “I was terrified, dancing after the young ladies, and drawing caricatures of every one who came in contact with him. . . . Even his household economy seemed clouded in mystery, and, if I got any explanation, it was sure not to be the right thing. It may be guessed how astonished I was one day, on perceiving six black servants waiting at his table upon six white gentlemen. Such a train of blackamoors being beyond my comprehension, I asked for an explanation, but got none, save that he found them very useful and obliging, poor fellows, and that they did not look for much wages beyond a mouthful of meat.”

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The real explanation was simple—the coloured gentlemen were friends of Lockhart’s gentleman of colour, and aided him on festive occasions.

Dining out, giving dinners, dancing, drawing caricatures, taking part in the daily babble of the briefless round the stove in the Parliament House, Lockhart passed his time merrily, but not altogether in idleness. He wished to go to Germany in the vacation of 1817, and, though funds were scant, and his exhibition was running out, he managed to pay his way. He had made the acquaintance of Blackwood, the bookseller, and Blackwood paid him £300, or more, for a work in translation, to be written later. Lockhart selected Schlegel’s “Lectures on the History of Literature.” Mr. Gleig says, “Though seldom communicative on such subjects, he more than once alluded to the circumstance in after life, and always in the same terms. ‘It was a generous act on Ebony’s part, and a bold one too; for he had only my word for it, that I had any acquaintance at all with the German language.’”1

Of the German tour scarcely any records remain. In an old notebook, used again twenty years later

1 Mr. Gleig seems to date the German tour in 1815 or 1816, but I find no mention by Mr. Lockhart himself of any date, except that he had just returned from Germany in October 1817. See, however, Quarterly Review, cxvi., p. 452. According to Professor Veitch, in his “Life of Sir William Hamilton,” p. 89, the early autumn of 1817 was the date. Accompanied by Lockhart and a Mr. Hyndman, Hamilton examined, at Leipzig, a library which the Faculty of Advocates wished to purchase.

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in composing the “Life of Scott,” are a few slight drawings of German students, and a sketch, not caricatured, of Fichte lecturing to his class. We know that Lockhart met, at Weimar, Goethe, whom he describes in “Peter’s Letters,” and whom he defended against the sneers of the Edinburgh Review.

More important to him than his brief experience of Germany was his connection with Mr. Blackwood. That gentleman was commencing publisher: the first series of his Magazine had run only a few months: there are traces of Lockhart’s hand in it before July 1817. His liberality to the young writer was, indeed, well judged, for Lockhart, with Wilson, gave the Magazine a success of éclat: by no means wholly to their own advantage.

Gratitude to “Ebony” may, perhaps, partly explain that part of Lockhart’s conduct, which perplexes his biographer as much as Scott’s attitude to the Ballantynes puzzled Lockhart himself. Why would Lockhart, in spite of the remonstrances of Christie, and of Sir Walter, in spite of universal disapproval, cleave to Blackwood’s Magazine? The mere attraction of mischief should soon have worn off, but from Wilson and Blackwood’s Lockhart seemed unable to tear himself. Christie conceived a distaste for Mr. Blackwood at first sight; Lockhart sometimes lets fall a petulant word about the complacent proprietor of “Ma Maga,” yet he wrote occasionally for Maga to the end. One really begins to think

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of Maga as of a cankered witch who has spell-bound the young man, and holds him “lost to life, and use, and name, and fame.”

This, of course, is an irrational sentiment, and unjust to the venerated Maga. She did not make Lockhart and Wilson write as they did: it was they who set their mark on her. Lockhart several times thought of breaking with her, now in deference to Christie and Sir Walter; now, in some temporary displeasure with Mr. Blackwood, in which Wilson shared. But he always “fell to his old love again.” He occasionally attributes this to regard for Mr. Blackwood, and, besides, the payment for his articles was highly necessary to him. But he could have employed his pen elsewhere, though nowhere with such freedom. The love of mischief, as Haydon says, was, no doubt, one cause of his constancy. But a freedom only trammelled by Mr. Blackwood, was very prejudicial to both Wilson and Lockhart. The former is said often to have repented of his articles, when the proofs had just gone beyond recall. The latter assuredly repented, and tried to make amends in his after-life. To love of mischief, of freedom to indulge caprice, to friendship for Wilson, and regard for Mr. Blackwood, one may most plausibly attribute Lockhart’s stormy, and often regretted, but never broken constancy to Maga.

Be the explanation what it may, Lockhart was certainly very loyal to Blackwood. In describing

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Scott’s relations with this bookseller, he styles him “a man of strong talents, and, though without anything that could be called learning, of very respectable information; . . . acute, earnest, eminently zealous in whatever he put his hand to; upright, honest, sincere, and courageous.”1 We know that, in finding fault (as he well might) with “The Black Dwarf,” Mr. Blackwood “did not search about for any glossy periphrase,” he was frank enough. In Mrs. Gordon’s “Life of Christopher North” we meet Mr. Blackwood suppressing, very properly, some literary ferocities of Professor Wilson’s.2 Why, then—Mr. Blackwood deserving Lockhart’s deliberate and duly considered praises; and Lockhart himself being what his letters declare him; and Christopher North being Christopher North—the magazine which they produced should have been so brutal, it is difficult to imagine. These problems, of course, will recur; for the present it suffices to have shown how Lockhart became connected with Mr. Blackwood.

In the absence of exact information as to the first half of Lockhart’s first year as an advocate, we may be certain that, like Allan Fairford and Darsie Latimer, “he swept the boards of the Parliament House with the skirts of his gown; laughed, and made others laugh, drank claret at Bayle’s, Fortune’s, and Walker’s, and ate oysters in the

1 “Life of Scott,” vol. v. pp. 154-155. 2 “Christopher North,” ii. 63-64.

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Covenant Close.” Though his letters, so far, have not contained one word on politics, he was probably regarded, being a friend of Wilson’s and living in his set, as a Tory. Every barrister had to take a side, and we know, from Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials of his Time,” that Tories were dull oppressors, while sweetness, light, knowledge, eloquence, emancipation, wit, wisdom, the Edinburgh Review—everything good but office—were all on the side of the Whigs. The admirable, overweening, unconscious arrogance of party pride in Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials” might make a man turn Tory in sheer irritation to-day. While these scarcely human splendours, Jeffrey, Playfair, Henry Erskine, Gillies, Grahame, Macfarlane, Fletcher,—fortisque Gyas, fortisque Cloanthus—they, or their successors, were dwelling in the serene air of perfect self-complacency; while they had at length set going a Liberal newspaper, the Scotsman; while Tories, like Scott, were calling it “a blackguard print,” a few young men had grown up who were neither stupid nor Whigs. They saw, Lockhart at least saw very well, that these illustrious Whigs, with all their learned professors, and Reviewers, and political economies, were really keeping Scotland in a state of “facetious and rejoicing ignorance.” “In Scotland they understand, they care about none of the three,” namely, the poetry, philosophy, and history of the ancient world. Even Dugald Stewart “has throughout been content to derive his ideas of

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Greek philosophy from very secondary sources.” As for the common Whigs of the debating societies and the Junior Bar, “all they know, worth being known, upon any subject of general literature, politics, or philosophy, is derived from the Edinburgh Review.” The Edinburgh, again, perpetually derides Wordsworth, and all the Whigs grin applause. “The same people who despise and are ignorant of Mr. Wordsworth, despise also and are ignorant of all the majestic poets the world has ever produced, with no exceptions beyond two or three great names, acquaintance with which has been forced on them by circumstances entirely out of their control. The fate of Homer, of Æschylus, of Dante, nay, of Milton, is his.”1

These ideas, expressed in “Peter’s Letters,” and such as these, were in the clear and well-furnished mind of Lockhart, when he looked at the intellectual self-complacency of Edinburgh’s illustrious Whigs. And he was soon to let these magnates hear the full measure of his opinion. That a cold superiority of ridicule did not become Whig witlings when they sat in judgment on the author of “The Excursion”; that a more exalted patriotism than the patriotism of the author of “Marmion” was not really theirs; that Goethe and Kant could not be criticised through the medium of French cribs and summaries; that a facetious and rejoicing ignorance of Greek could not be compensated for

1 “Peter’s Letters,” vol. ii. p. 144.

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by a smattering of geology; that Christianity was a problem to be faced, not an institution to be scornfully patronised; these were among the lessons which the briefless new-gowned advocate was about to teach the Olympians of Whiggery. The spirit of mankind, in fact, was awaking in Lockhart, as it later awoke in a sage who had a strong sympathy with him, in Mr. Carlyle. The Whig view of the world, and notably of poetry, did need to be assailed. But Lockhart, seeing almost as clearly as Carlyle the flaws in the ice palace of Edinburgh’s intellectual despots, was very young, and was constitutionally a mocker. Almost everything that he said in a serious humour, whether as the Baron von Lauerwinkel, or as Dr. Peter Morris, was truly and well said, and the truth has prevailed. But with the same pen, and in the same hour, he was writing humorous ditties as “The Odontist”; or attacks on men of whom, personally, he knew nothing; of whose politics he judged by the catch-words and prejudices of his party, and whose characters he detested mainly on the evidence of Tory gossip. Many a “sham,” many a “windbag” he exposed, or pricked, but to little or no avail, so strong in him, at that time, was the spirit of levity, and the “Imp of the Perverse.” He had great powers, much knowledge, clear ideas, a good opportunity, but the “Imp of the Perverse” had dominion over him. He began to write too young, he enjoyed a latitude far too wide, and he had, in Wilson, an elder

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associate and friend whose genius was perhaps the most unbalanced in the history of literature. Therefore Lockhart never “blazed” in the serenity of the light which assuredly was within him, but only gave forth flashes of brilliance, when he did not pass wholly under the influence of “tenebriferous stars.”