Lockhart

Lockhart, JOHN GIBSON, was born in Cambusnethan manse, near Wishaw, 14th July 1794. All his boyhood was spent in Glasgow, where at eleven he passed from the high school to the college, and whence at thirteen, with a Balliol Snell exhibition, he went up to Oxford. In 1813 he took a first-class in classics; then, after a visit to the Continent (to Goethe at Weimar), studied law at Edinburgh, and in 1816 was called to the Scottish bar. But he was no speaker; and having while still at Oxford written the article 'Heraldry' for the Edinburgh Encyclopædia, and soon after translated Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature, from 1817 he took more and more to literature, and with Wilson became the chief mainstay of Blackwood's Magazine. In its pages he first exhibited the sharp and caustic wit, his most salient characteristic, that made him the terror of his Whig opponents. Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk ('2d ed.' 1819), a clever skit on Scottish society, was followed by four novels—Valerius (1821), a romance of the times of Trajan; Adam Blair (1822); Reginald Dalton (1823), a tale of university life; and Matthew Wald (1824). Of these Adam Blair alone retains its vitality—the strong, sad story of a good man's fall and repentance: Henry James has likened it to Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. The spirited Ancient Spanish Ballads appeared in 1823; Lives of Burns and Napoleon in 1828 and 1829; and the Life of Scott, Lockhart's masterpiece, in 1837–38. He had met Scott first in May 1818, in April 1820 had married his eldest daughter, Sophia, and for five and a half years had divided his time pretty equally between Edinburgh and Chiefswood, near Abbotsford. In 1825 he removed to London to assume the editorship of the Quarterly Review, at a salary of £1 00 per annum; and this post he retained till 1853, in 1843 becoming also auditor of the duchy of Cornwall, a sinecure worth £400 a year. But his closing years were clouded by illness and deep depression; by the secession to Rome of his only daughter, with her husband, Mr Hope-Scott (q.v.); and by the loss of his wife in 1837, of his two boys in 1831 and 1853. The elder of them was the 'Hugh Littlejohn' of Scott's Tales of a Grandfather; the younger, Walter, was a scapegrace in the army. Like Scott, Lockhart visited Italy in search of health; like Scott, he came back to Abbotsford to die—25th November 1854. He is buried in Dryburgh at Sir Walter's feet. See his Life and Letters, by Andrew Lang (1896).