The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart
Chapter 4: 1815-17
John Gibson Lockhart to Jonathan Christie, 29 November 1815
(Postmark, Nov. 29, 1815.)
“My dear Christie,—You
and I are in general such exemplary correspondents that I begin to feel a
degree of wonder at the two months’ silence which has prevailed betwixt
us, greater than a much longer cessation of any other epistolary traffic could
have occasioned in me. Since I wrote you last I have spent a few weeks at
Gourock, a few weeks (including the occasion) at
Glasgow, and now I have been for a fortnight in this our
Athens. Certainly if the name Athens had been derived from the Goddess
of Printing—not from the Goddess of Wisdom—no city in the world
could with greater justice lay claim to the appellation. An author elsewhere is
a being somewhat at least out of the common run. Here he
is truly a week-day man. Every other body you jostle is the father of at least
an octavo, or two, and it is odds if you ever sit down to dinner in a company
of a dozen, without having to count three or four quarto makers in the circle.
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Poets are as plenty as blackberries—indeed much
more so, unless blackberries mean sloes. And as for travellers—good
Jehovah! I think I am safe in saying that there have appeared at least twenty
different lucubrations in that way concerning Paris alone within these last
eighteen months. Old crambe-recocta
stuff out of Horace Walpole and
Sir Joshua—spouted by one boy
of eighteen, who had never seen in his life but one or two Edinburgh
exhibitions—and profound disquisitions on national character and
Napoleon by another, who never had
seen the tenth milestone from Auld Reekie, or read anything better than
Jeffray and Cobbet’s Parliamentary debates. I have passed my
trials in the Civil Law, which cost me a little fagging, and am now seriously
at work on the Scots.
“Hamilton and I
have been amusing ourselves with doing into English ‘the Relation’
of the Battle of Waterloo. I have done my half, and H. is sitting by me at his.
I have much amusement in seeing his ways—primo, he is against all French
terms and fought hard for Field-assistant, loco,
‘Aide-de-camp.’ Secundo, he insists upon having the pages marked
with Roman numerals, having lately imbibed a bitter spite against the d—d
Arabic cipher. Tertio, he has just been reading Longinus, and would fain have an imitation of his manner in a
note. We are promised half profits by Laing, and I hope to touch £25 for my quarter. I have got
a few articles in ![]()
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the ‘Encyclopædia’ which is going on, and intend reviewing a
little—being convinced that there is nothing I want more than a habit of
writing with ease. The Picnic” (the Oxford Olio) “sleeps
for the present, but will assuredly begin to squall in the spring. The Oxonian
friends here are all very well, Hannay
fighting away in the usury case. Innes
in statu quo. Connel ditto. Traill I saw once—but I have been confined to my room
with a cold since, and have heard no more of him. Tom Traill’s wife has brought him a son and heir, whereof
Tom is very glorious. Such is an epitome of our status
here. I have written it that I may provoke a speedy answer, containing the
minutiæ of your transactions for these last two months. You are now of
course as I left you, grinding Law, and quizzing the Balliolite B.A.’s at
the dinner table—unless you have changed your gown and your butts for
paullo majora! The transition
is not tremendous from Everett to
Dicky. Give my love to Nicoll, and do let me hear from you immediately.—Yours
most affectionately,
“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!)”
Jonathan Henry Christie (1793-1876)
Educated at Marischal College, Baliol College, Oxford, and Lincoln's Inn; after slaying
John Scott in the famous duel at Chalk Farm he was acquitted of murder and afterwards
practiced law as a conveyancer in London. He was the lifelong friend of John Gibson
Lockhart and an acquaintance of John Keats.
Arthur Connell (1794-1863)
Son of Sir John Connell, advocate; he was educated at Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Balliol
College, Oxford (Snell Exhibitioner) and was professor of chemistry in the University of
St. Andrews (1840-62).
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)
English essayist and man of letters; he wrote for the
London
Magazine and
Blackwood's, and was author of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).
Robert Hannay (1789 c.-1868)
Son of James Hannay of Kirkcudbright; he was a classmate of John Gibson Lockhart's at
Balliol College, Oxford, afterwards a Scottish barrister.
Cosmo Nelson Innes (1798-1874)
Scottish historian educated at Aberdeen and Glasgow Universities, and at Balliol College,
Oxford; he was Professor of Constitutional Law and History in the University of Edinburgh
(1846) and edited volumes for the Bannatyne Club.
Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850)
Scottish barrister, Whig MP, and co-founder and editor of the
Edinburgh
Review (1802-29). As a reviewer he was the implacable foe of the Lake School of
poetry.
William Laing (1764-1832)
Edinburgh bookseller who specialized in antiquarian and foreign books; he was the father
of the bookseller and antiquary David Laing.
John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854)
Editor of the
Quarterly Review (1825-1853); son-in-law of Walter
Scott and author of the
Life of Scott 5 vols (1838).
Longinus (50 fl.)
Greek rhetorician about whom nothing is recorded; author of
On the
Sublime. His dates are entirely uncertain.
Emperor Napoleon I (1769-1821)
Military leader, First Consul (1799), and Emperor of the French (1804), after his
abdication he was exiled to Elba (1814); after his defeat at Waterloo he was exiled to St.
Helena (1815).
Alexander Nicoll (1793-1828)
Educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen before becoming a Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol
College, Oxford, he catalogued oriental manuscripts at the Bodleian and was regius
professor of Hebrew (1822).
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)
English portrait-painter and writer on art; he was the first president of the Royal
Academy (1768).
James Traill (1794-1873)
Of Hobbister, Orkney; educated at Balliol College (Snell Exhibitioner) and the Middle
Temple, he was a police magistrate in London. Traill was John Christie's second in the duel
with John Scott.
Thomas Traill (1793 c.-1859)
The son of Rev. Walter Traill of Orkney; he was educated at Wadham College, Oxford; in
1832 he emigrated to Canada with his second wife, the author Catherine Parr Strickland
Traill.
John Wilson [Christopher North] (1785-1854)
Scottish poet and Tory essayist, the chief writer for the “Noctes Ambrosianae” in
Blackwood's Magazine and professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh
University (1820).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
