is an outward fashion in books which, like the salute to an Indian prince, is regulated according to the consequence of the person it is intended to honor, and which makes a magnificent post octavo suitable to one, while a humbler format is good enough for another. Far be it from us to say that our Lockhart-the Lockhart to whom we in this Magazine have the first claimdoes not deserve the most princely of salutes, with all the big guns roaring. It gives us, on the contrary, the sincerest pleasure to see the typographical and other honors with which his shy, proud, modest, and noble figure is presented to the regard and understanding of the world-which Mr. Lang at least believes has not given to him hitherto the applause and honor which certainly are his due.

We cannot but think, however, that in this respect Mr. Lang is a little mistaken, and that the suppressed tone of apology which runs through the book is really uncalled for. Lockhart in his immediate day-or rather in the morning of his day, when, always a free fighter and pugnacious as Donnybrook or Selkirk Fair, he hit out at whosoever came in his way, all for love and without evil meaning-was not perhaps always judged with perfect charity. But surely the missiles of these times are blunt with age and rust, and nowadays make no wounds; while Miss Martineau, whom alone we think Mr. Lang quotes as a serious assailant, was of course entirely incapable of judging the man, and, what is more important, is no more read or thought of. We do not think that the inference which runs through these pages, and calls forth from Mr. Lang many indignant exclamations"And this was the man who was accused," etc.-corresponds with any really existent feelings. Indeed the name of Lockhart in this generation is chiefly connected with one of the greatest books of modern times, that Biography which, without a dissentient voice, is renowned as the first of biographies, the example and high standard of that art, which no English writer has as yet succeeded in reaching, the best and noblest portrait of a man ever made in our language. There were

objections to it, we believe, in the time in which it was brought forth. Some one said let his name be blotted out! "I always thought he hated Scott, and now I am convinced of it." With such blind bats there is no reckoning. But time regulates such matters better even than reason; and we cannot believe that the author of the Life of Scott has any need for an apologist, however reverent and tender that apologist may be.

Let us say at once that no one could be more reverent, more tender, than Mr. Lang; and his picture of the latter part of Lockhart's sad life will be read by many a reader with tears, as we can well believe it was written. The picture of that sad life, so full of separations and trial--so lonely, so uncomplaining, so heroic, with the difficult heroism of silence and patient endurance-is indeed nobly done, and with a strain of human feeling and sympathy which quenches criticism. Mr. Lang is more familiar to us in his lighter aspects; but lately there has developed in him a capacity for entering into the profoundest of human sufferings, in aspects so dissimilar as that of the passion and agony of Jeanne d'Arc, a tale of the highest and purest martyrdom, and that steadfast pacing through the gloom of the valley of death enveloped in all the conventional garments of modern life and society, which makes the other passion of such a man as Lockhart almost more tragic -which nobody could have divined or expected from him. Our object here is not to celebrate Mr. Lang; indeed in his first volume the clang of his sword upon the shield of Maga" is so loud in our ears that even while we write our squire is fastening the breastplate, our page presenting the sword, of mortal combat. Therefore, before the lists are opened, or ever a drop of blood has stained the sand, let us do our antagonist full justice. Neither to us nor to Lockhart has he done justice in the opening of his story. That quarrel between us is open, only to be decided by the chances of the fight, in which, to be sure, it is not always the best cause that prevails; but where there is no question of offence or strife we have nothing but praise to give to

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Sir Andrew of the Fetterlock, while he carries his hero's cognizance downward to the foot of the hill through the shadows. We will not say that the story bears comparison with that noblest picture of the sun-setting which Lockhart himself gave; but narrative and sentiment are alike fine, sincere, and sympathetic. A warm partisan from the beginning, that excellent inspiration grows in him into something better, a true love and admiration for his subject, before he reaches the end; and he carries his reader with him into that atmosphere of emotion, tender respect, and reverent pity with which he surrounds the subject of his history. This is no small praise; we know indeed no higher to give; and Mr. Lang deserves it fully. We present him with the laurel before we draw the sword.

We have in this book, as Lockhart himself declares to be inevitable when ever the hero is a Scotsman, "an ell of genealogy" to begin with, which is perhaps a little too long drawn out. He was a gentleman; after all, had there never been a Simon Loccard in 1190 or at any other date, this man was born so, and could not have helped himself, which is most to the purpose of all that can be said. The lower gentry in all countries are those who harp the most on their gentility; but in fact the territorial designation which we love so much in Scotland by no means ensures the possession of that quality, any more than a ducal title does. Lockhart was a man of innate refinement, fastidious, a little intolerant, snuffing the air with delicate nostrils, much moved by all the traditions, even follies, of the gentilhommerie, not excluding, we think, pace Mr. Lang, a touch of arrogance, quite pardonable considering his nature, but scarcely justified by the glories of descent. was a great lover of heraldry (which is, we think, a weakness of gentle souls) in his youth, and his first published work was on that subject, a fact which touches the present writer with a pang of sympathy. He was a good scholar -nay, a title which sums up achievement in Scotland, a Snell scholar--and after a few years of Balliol took a firstclass, and thus fulfilled all that could

He

be demanded from a young man. After these glorious preliminaries he returned to Scotland eager for fame and fortune, but with very small means of procuring either. He was immediately, to leave aside the tale of his ancestors, the son of a Glasgow minister, one of a numerous family, not a parentage or a condition which permitted a young man to dawdle over his life or neglect the means of securing daily bread. When he was twenty-one he came to Edinburgh to study Scots law, and in little more than a year was called to the Bar, but got no brief save one of three guineas, which he made haste to spend with much glee, as if it had been an unexpected tip. In the mean time, having formed a warm friendship with one John Wilson, also a briefless barrister, a poet, and halffledged literary man, he was, presumably, led by this new friend to a certain bookseller's in Princes Street, where it was the habit of Edinburgh wits of the Tory side to congregate-a very lively assembly, full of wit and sharp speaking, extravagant both in abuse and laudation, as was the habit of the time and still more of the race. are a canny people, our adversaries say, but we never have been canny in speech or criticism or epithets. Mr. Lang throws little light on the first beginning of a connection so momentous for his hero, and which he objects to so strongly as injurious to him. Here is his description of the first known incident in it:

We

"He wished to go to Germany in the vaca tion of 1817, and, though funds were scant and his exhibition (Snell Scholarship) was running out, he managed to pay his way. He had made the acquaintance of Blackwood the publisher, 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 sub

jects, he more than once alluded to this circumstance in after life, and always in the same terms: "It was a generous act on Ebony's part, and a bold one; for he had only my word for it that I had any acquaintance at all with the German language.'

This we think is rather an insufficient acknowledgment, for if not Mr. Lang, at least most of us, must know that £300 for a translation by a young man whose knowledge of German was

taken on his own word, and whose

let fall a petulant word about the complacent proprietor of ma Maga'; yet he wrote occa

wholly unknown, was a very remarkable kind of prospective remuneration. It was not business certainly, whatever it was. Mr. Blackwood acted the part of a magnificent Mæcenas rather than that of a bookseller, and we do not think that less can be said than that he gave young Lockhart his start in life. The transaction is veiled in mystery, never having been once referred to so far as we are aware by the giver, though proclaimed by the recipient, as a generous mind naturally would.

"If thou serve many, tell it not to any;

If any serve thee, tell the tale to many." That admirable maxim could not be better exemplified. The young man went to Germany by means of this windfall. He went to Weimar and made the sublime acquaintance of Goethe, which afterward helped to secure the much more important and valuable friendship of Scott. Pro foundly influential upon his character and life was this beginning. If his biographer thinks that the two volumes of Schlegel, published more than two years afterward, fully repaid and made up for it, we are far from being of his opinion. This initial fact, therefore, published for the first time by Mr. Andrew Lang, whose province is not to glorify but to diminish the benefactor, and whose testimony is therefore doubly to be relied upon so far as it redounds to Mr. Blackwood's credit, is one of very distinct importance in Lockhart's career. Here is Mr. Lang's account of the connection thus begun :

"His [Mr. Blackwood's] 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 remonstrances from Christie and of Sir Walter, in spite of universal disap. proval, cleave to Blackwood's Magazine?

The mere attraction of mischief should soon

have worn off; but from Wilson and Black

wood' Lockhart seemed unable to tear him

self. Christie conceived a distaste for Mr. Blackwood at first sight. Lockhart sometimes

begins to think of Maga' as of a cankered witch, who has spellbound the young man, and holds him lost to life and use, and name and fame.'"

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Now this is not only an irrational sentiment," as Mr. Lang confesses, but a most unjust judgment, and one for which there is no sound foundation whatever. Has "Maga" been unkind to Mr. Lang? All feminine creatures, we are aware, are apt to give rise to prejudice in this way. In some womanish mood they fail to smile, at a critical moment they look coldly upon a suitor's offering; and lo! the enchanting heroine becomes a cankered witch and her graces charm no more— notwithstanding that she is just as fair as before the untoward accident occurred. The sentiment

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If she be not fair for me,

What care I how fair she be"

is a thoroughly wholesome one; but the poet does not go so far as to malign the lady because of her perhaps temporarv, perhaps only pretended, indifference. She can yet call him back with a glance over her shoulder, a crook of her finger. It is half her charm that she is saucy, not always yielding, prickles about her rosebuds, clouds as well as sunshine hovering over her. Has Mr. Lang been so deeply offended as not to remember that when the neglected suitor glooms he is really heightening her triumph? The gentleman must not be cross for his own sake nor call the lady names.

Now let us see the true story of the transaction.

Lockhart came back from this German expedition, upon which, according to appearances, he had been franked by Mr. Black wood, to find that gentleman just gathering into his hands the control of a Magazine which had been begun six months before, and in the mean time had been mismanaged, much to his annoyance, by a pair of incapable editors. The publisher was himself a comparatively young man, and full of ambition and enterprise, and he was clear-sighted enough to perceive how admirable an opening there was for something less ponderous

than the reviews, less trivial than any thing then existing in the form of Magazine. Quite aware of the animosity he had to encounter from the dismissed editors, and the rivalry of the opposing publisher to whom they had carried their complaints and their powers, Blackwood put everything he could command into the venture, and called to him the support of all his friends. If Lockhart had not rushed to his side after what had passed between them, he would not have been the Lockhart Mr. Andrew Lang places before us. But there were also very prevailing arguments of another kind. No doubt he had spent his three hundred pounds, or most of it, on his long holiday; and he came back, as many another young man has done, to a sufficiently blank prospect-an advocate, but without a brief-with nothing better before him than to resume a weary march in the Parliament House, where no man speired his price, and opportunities of making an income. income were few. In these circumstances most of us would find it extremely handy to secure a safe corner even in an evening paper, not to speak of anything more ambitious, by which to make the pot boil; and here were at least the means of living put into the young man's hand. More than this, he was full of things to say, bursting and running over with criticism, commentary, description, and reflection for which he had no outlet; for these are not gifts which can be exercised before the Fifteen, or pleaded in either the Inner or the Outer Courts; and even if they had been, Lockhart had no gift of public speech. Does it reDoes it require any explanation why he flung himself into the new Magazine with fervor and devotion? To us it seems as plain as a pikestaff. It was, in short, the saving of the young man. The new Magazine meant everything to him-work and income and utterance-the last perhaps the most potent attraction of all. His dearest friend had already enlisted in the band. Sober fathers and mothers in those days had a terror of literature, which seemed to them not much better than thieving; but nowadays we can think of no

parents so benighted as not to have exulted in such a chance for their John. So much for the beginning of the connection. Mr. Lang goes on, after some surprise that the Magazine should have been so brutal," issuing from the hands it did, to inform us that it was an ill day for Lockhart when he first put his pen at the service of a journal which for now the term of a long human life has been so eminently reputable and admirable" (cankered witch notwithstanding). The brutality, he admits in other passages, was partly from Lockhart's own hand; and neither the feminine personality of the Magazine nor its kind and respectable publisher forced his pen into the wild and wayward outbursts, mostly fun, but on several occasions pure perversity and mischief, for which it is impossible to give any reason. "The Magazine in its unamiable youth," Mr. Lang says again; but the Magazinc, if unamiable in its youth, was not so by any set purpose of its own, but because Lockhart and Wilson made it so. They, or rather he, for our author has no patience with Wilson nor understanding of him, should have been controlled, Mr. Lang thinks. He was only twenty-three, and Mr. Blackwood should have spoken to him like a father, and stopped his fun, instead of being carried away by it into lawsuits and payment of damages, which was the true state of affairs. Mr. Lang probably in his own mind is more able to estimate the possibility of the task of controlling Lockhart than he allows to appear. But there never was a more ingenious manner of turning the cat in the pan than his method of mourning the sad pity it was for Lockhart to be identified with the unamiable Magazine, whose unamiableness was at least half his own doing, and which of itself had no inborn malignity, nor ever sinned in its own abstract person. This is, however, a kind of special pleading which is not ineffective to the careless reader. Poor youth twenty-three, and mixed up with all the bad actions of that slut Maga," who depraved his young mind and kept him from the fatnesses of the Parliament House, and made him carry out

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only

It is painful for a biographer,' continues Mr. Lang, to be obliged to confess his hero's inalienable attachment to the mother of mischief." But he is well assured that while

Scott did not indeed regard the offences of 'Maga' with our modern horror, still he did most earnestly endeavor on every occasion to withdraw Lockhart and Wilson from the cup of her inexplicable sorceries. Alas! to each might have been said

"La laide dame sans merci

Thee hath in thrall !"'"

Wonderful and whimsical in the extreme is this accusation. Certainly "Maga" must have been unkind, very unkind, to Mr. Lang! We cannot but hope that he has laid her character before a solemn séance of the Psychical Society to be inquired into. The Witch of Atlas, the Witch of the Alps, is nothing to her. This subtle spirit unrevealed in flesh, which held these captive minds in thrall, and bound them with a spell not to be broken, is more mysterious than any ghost. The one thing we know of her is that she seems to have been the familiar spirit of that well-seeming, by-all-men-respected Magician Blackwood, whose cruel behests these meek victims of genius were thus compelled to carry out. Mr. Lang may be very thankful, too thankful for mere words, that he has kept himself safe out of her claws. We might have seen him "slinging flame" across the peaceful levels of literary society had she once clutched him by the brindled locks. What atrocities worse than Bulgarian might not his gentle voice have given utterance to had that weird grasp caught him! The sense of deliverance must be almost stifling in its intensity when he thinks of the peril he has escaped.

As for us, who have drunk of the cup of her inexplicable sorceries, we are, alas! past praying for; but we tell no tales. The fiery draught may consume our vitals, but, slaves of honNEW SERIES.-VOL. LXIV., No. 6.

or as of her, we do not betray her secrets. Pale and scathed, with an undying pang at our hearts, we do not even lay our hand upon that organ, as did the doomed ones in the Hall of Eblis, to indicate where our torture is. No! never shall the eye of man look upon those marks of magic. It may be sadly, it may be proudly, that we exchange glances with our fellow-sufferers, but never in words shall the tale be told. Mr. Lang may guess what black drop it is that has been injected into our veins, but no more than Lockhart, no more than Wilson, shall we blab. Freemasons are not in it, as the vulgar say, in comparison with the stern preservation of our awful secret.

Taking breath, however, after this, we may remark that the remonstrances of Scott, to which he so frequently refers, were by no means directed, as Mr. Lang himself proves, to the severance of the connection with "Maga," but only to a much simpler thing-the cessation of those assaults upon things and persons in general, which Lockhart's malicious and careless wit and Wilson's fictitious schoolboy rages addressed to the world in Maga's" name. The letter upon which he builds this often-repeated assertion was written to Lockhart after Wilson's election-mainly by Sir Walter's own efforts in his favor-to his chair; an event which afforded an excellent opportunity of giving good advice to the young men, which in the first place is chiefly addressed to Wilson through his friend, representing to him the advantage of letting bygones be bygones, and attempting no revenge against his adversaries in that struggle, "who have taken such foul means of opposing him.” "Any attempt on his part or on that of his friends to retaliate on such a fainéant as poor Stookie or on the Scotsman,'" says Sir Walter, "is like a gentleman fighting with a chimney-sweep-he may lick him, but cannot avoid being smutted in the conflict."

"I am sure our friend has been taught the danger of giving way to high spirits in mixed society where there is some one always ready to laugh at the joke, and to put it into his pocket to throw in the jester's face on some future occasion. It is plain Wilson must have walked the course had he been cautious.

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