introduced to her, an attachment soon matured itself; and on the 29th of April, 1820, the young people were married, more Scotico, in the evening, and in the drawing-room at Abbotsford.

Well pleased with the match-which in a worldly point of view was certainly not a great one-Scott fitted up for his daughter and her husband the cottage of Chiefswood, on his own estate; and thither, after spending the winter-months in Edinburgh, they usually repaired as soon as summer set in. It was as charming a residence for the young couple who took possession of it as could well be imagined. Standing within easy distance of half-a-dozen country-houses of which the occupants were personal friends both of Lockhart and. of Sir Walter, it brought continually together those who delighted in each other's society, and afforded not unfrequently to Sir Walter a place of retreat from company which oppressed him at home. But Lockhart himself shall describe, as he alone could do, both the joy experienced by all who shared in it when this intercourse was in its prime, and the deep shadow which fell upon those who survived its dissolution. After telling how Scott saved as many of the creepers which used to cluster round the porch at Abbotsford as seemed likely to bear removal, and planted them with his own hands about a somewhat similar porch erected expressly for their reception at his daughter Sophia's little cottage of Chiefswood, Lockhart goes on to say:

'There my wife and I spent the summer and autumn of 1821, the first of several seasons, which will ever dwell in my memory as the happiest of my life. We were near enough Abbotsford to partake as often as we liked of its brilliant society, yet could do so without being exposed to the worry and exhaustion of spirit which the daily reception of new comers entailed upon all the family except Sir Walter himself. But, in truth, even he was not always proof against the annoyances connected with such a style of open housekeeping. Even his temper sank sometimes under the solemn applauses of learned dulness, the vapid raptures of painted and periwigged dowagers, the horse-leech avidity with which underbred foreigners urged their questions, and the pompous simpers of condescending magnates. When sore beset at home in this way, he would every now and then discover that he had some very particular business to attend to on an outlying part of his estate, and craving the indulgence of his guests overnight, appeared at the cabin in the glen before its inhabitants were astir in the morning. The clatter of Sibyl Grey's hoofs, the yelping of Mustard and Spice, and his own joyous shout of reveillée under our windows, were the signals that he had burst his toils, and meant for that day to take his case in his inn." On descending, he was to be found with all his

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dogs and ours about him, under a spreading ash that overshadowed half the bank between the cottage and the brook, pointing the edge of his woodman's axe for himself, and listening to Tom Purday's lecture touching the plantation that most needed thinning. After breakfast he would take possession of a dressing-room upstairs and write a chapter of the "Pirate," and then, having made up and despatched his packet for Mr. Ballantyne, away to join Purday wherever the foresters were at work, and sometimes to labour among them as strenuously as John Swanstown himself, until it was time either to rejoin his own party at Abbotsford, or the quiet circle of the cottage. When his guests were few and friendly, he often made them come over and meet him at Chiefswood in a body towards evening; and surely he never appeared to more amiable advantage than when helping his young people with their little arrangements upon such occasions. He was ready with all sorts of devices to supply the wants of a narrow establishment. He used to delight particularly in sinking the wine in a well under the brae ere he went out, and hauling up the basket just before dinner was announced; this primitive process being, he said, one he had always practised when a young housekeeper, and, in his opinion, far superior in its results to any application of ice. And in the same spirit, whenever the weather was sufficiently genial, he voted for dining out of doors altogether, which at once got rid of the inconvenience of very small rooms, and made it natural and easy for the gentlemen to help the ladies, so that the paucity of servants went for nothing. Mr. Rose used to amuse himself with likening the scene and the party to the closing act of one of those little French dramas, where M. Le Comte and Mme. La Comtesse appear feasting at a village bridal under the trees. But, in truth, our M. Le Comte was only trying to live over again for a few simple hours his own old life of Lasswade.

"When circumstances permitted, he usually spent one evening at least in the week at our little cottage, and almost as frequently he did the like with the Fergusons, to whose table he could bring chance visitors when he pleased, with equal freedom as to his daughter's. Indeed it seemed to be much a matter of chance any fine day, when there had been no alarming invasion of the Southron, whether the three families, which in fact made but one, should dine at Abbotsford, Huntley Burn, or at Chiefswood. And at none of them was the party considered quite complete unless it included also Mr. Laidlaw. Death has laid a heavy hand upon that circle-as happy a circle, I believe, as ever met. Bright eyes, now closed in dust, gay voices for ever silenced, seem to haunt me as I write. With three exceptions they are all gone. Even since the last of these volumes was finished, she whom I may now sadly record as next to Sir Walter himself the chief ornament and delight at all those simple meetings-she to whose love I owed my own place in them, Scott's eldest daughter-the one of all his children who, in countenance, mind, and manners most resembled himself, and who, indeed, was as like him in all things as a gentle, innocent woman can ever be to a great man deeply tried and skilled in Vol. 116.-No. 232.

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the struggles and perplexities of active life-she, too, is no more; and in the very hour that saw her laid in her grave,* the only other female survivor, her dearest friend Margaret Ferguson, breathed her last also. But enough, and more than I intended.'

Enough at least for the present. It is the old story, often told, and to be told again by-and-by, in reference to Lockhart himself. Meanwhile, we resume the thread of our narrative, which we shall endeavour to make as brief as the importance of the subject will allow.

For five years and a-half Lockhart divided his time pretty regularly between Edinburgh and Chiefswood. Two children were born to him there: the eldest, John Hugh, the same Hugh Littlejohn' to whom his grandfather addressed the charming letters on the History of Scotland; the second, Charlotte, the idol of her father's affections, and the only one who survived him. His youngest, Walter, was born at Brighton, after his connexion with Scotland, as a place of residence, had been severed. Poor little John was a sickly child from his cradle. He became on that account doubly an object of interest and tenderness to his father, who never appeared so happy as when fondling the infant in his arms, unless it were at a subsequent period in trying to amuse and instruct the boy. Alas! neither a father's care nor a mother's devotion sufficed to keep alive a spark so feeble as flickered in the bosom of that child. He lingered on, physically all but helpless,-intellectually and morally precocious to a degree,―till he reached his tenth year; and then, to the inexpressible grief both of his parents and his grandfather, he fell on sleep.'

Besides contributing largely to Blackwood's Magazine,' Lockhart undertook and executed in the interval between 1818 and 1825 a very large amount of literary labour. The proprietors of the Edinburgh Annual Register' engaged him, on Scott's declining the task, to write the historical portions of their work. It was an undertaking which demanded rather accuracy and care than any other qualifications, and both were bestowed upon it. But Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk,' which appeared in 1819, was more in his line; as were the novels which followed in quick succession—' Valerius, a Roman Story;'

*In another place he says (chap. 84) The clergyman who read the funeral service over her was her father's friend, and hers, and mine, the Rev. Henry Hart Milman, one of the Prebendaries of Westminster; and a little incident which he happened to observe during the prayers, suggested to him some verses which he transmitted to me the morning after, and which the reader will not, I believe, consider altogether misplaced in the last page of these Memoirs of her Father.' These beautiful verses are too well known to need to be here transcribed,

'Reginald

'Reginald Dalton;' 'Some Passages in the Life of Mr. Adam Blair; and The History of Mathew Wald.' Of 'Peter's Letters' it may suffice to say (we write for the benefit of the present generation) that, like Goldsmith's 'Citizen of the World,' and Southey's 'Letters of Don Velasquez Espriella,' they profess to give the impressions made upon a foreigner by what he saw of men and things during a brief sojourn in a country which was strange to him. The supposed author was one Dr. Morris, a Welsh physician, whose work was first introduced to public notice by a critique in Blackwood's Magazine;' and by-andby a second edition came out, the first never having had any existence except in the teeming fancy of the author. But more remains to be told. The second edition made its appearance, under the double protection of a ludicrous dedication to the then Bishop of St. David's, and a still more laughable epistle liminary to Mr. Davies, one of the partners of the well-known house of Cadell and Davies, in the Strand. The book, which was probably suggested by the Scotch chapters of 'Humphry Clinker,' gave a full and familiar (many thought too familiar) account of the living celebrities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. But why the good people of Edinburgh should have been so excessively angry with it and with its author it would be difficult to explain. Looking at the performance after an interval of forty-five years, we can discover no single expression which ought to have rankled in the most sensitive of Scottish minds. The manners of the age are delineated, lightly, perhaps, but surely not untruly -the ludicrous preponderating in all cases, whether individuals sit for their portraits, or the General Assembly passes under review. But when the worst is said that can be said of such a performance, it seems impossible to treat it as anything more serious than a very clever and sagacious though perhaps somewhat lengthy jeu d'esprit.* Sir Walter Scott, we suspect, was right in the estimate which he took of the matter. The book, he said to Lockhart one day, gave offence because 'few men-and, least of all, Scotchmen-can bear the actual truth in conversation, or in that which approaches nearest to conversation—a work like the Doctor's, published within

*The passage in the book which caused, perhaps, the greatest annoyance, was that in which the pseudo-Morris represents himself as having been invited to dine with Mr. Jeffrey at Craigerook, and as having witnessed before dinner a leapingmatch in the garden, in which Jeffrey and his circle of lawyer and philosopher guests took part; and he gravely discriminates and comments upon the performances of each. This sportive description was deeply resented by the Whig dignitaries, to whom the sensation of being quizzed was entirely new. Indeed, Lord Cockburn thought it necessary to assure his readers, thirty years afterwards, that no such athletic exercitations had ever taken place. 212

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the circle to which it refers ;' for the Doctor, certainly, rem acu tetigit. His scalpel was not idle; though his lenient hand cut sharp and clean, and poured balm into the wound.' Lockhart was barely twenty-five when the celebrated 'Letters' made their appearance, and at twenty-five men say and do many things which at thirty-five they would either not say and do at all, or say and do differently. We transcribe the account which he thought proper to give of himself in 'Peter's Letters :'

'It was on this occasion that I had an opportunity of seeing and conversing with Mr. Lockhart, who, as well as Mr. Wilson, is supposed to be one of the principal supporters of this Magazine, and so of judging for myself concerning an individual who seems to have cared very little how many enemies he raised up among those who were not personally acquainted with him. Owing to the satirical vein of some of the writings ascribed to his pen, most persons whom I have heard speak of him seem to have been impressed with the notion that the bias of his character inclined towards an unrelenting subversion of the pretensions of others. But I soon perceived that here was another instance of the incompetency of the crowd to form any rational opinion about persons of whom they see only partial glimpses, and hear only distorted representations. I was not long in his company ere I was convinced that those elements which form the basis of his mind could never find their satisfaction in mere satire, and that if the exercise of penetration had afforded no higher pleasure, nor led to any more desirable result than that of detecting error, or exposing absurdity, there is no person who would sooner have felt an inclination to abandon it in despondency and disgust. At the same time, a strong and ever-wakeful perception of the ludicrous is certainly a prominent feature in his composition, and his flow of animal spirits enables him to enjoy it keenly, and to invent with success. I have seen, however, very few persons whose minds are so much alive and awake throughout every corner, and who are so much in the habit of trying and judging everything by the united tact of so many qualities and feelings all at once. But one meets with abundance of individuals every day, who show in conversation a greater facility of expression, and a more constant activity of speculative acuteness. I never saw Mr. Lockhart very much engrossed with the desire of finding language to convey any relation of ideas that had occurred to him, or so enthusiastically engaged in tracing its consequences, as to forget everything else. In regard to facility of expression, I do not know whether the study of languages, which is a favourite one with him—(indeed I am told he understands a good deal of almost all the modern languages, and is well skilled in the ancient ones)-I know not whether this study has any tendency to increase such facility, although there is no question it must help to improve the mind in many important particulars, by varying our modes of perception.

'His features are regular, and quite definite in their outlines; his forehead is well advanced, and largest, I think, in the region of

observation