13 is one of severa' pictures of its class by which Faed is chiefly remembored. Next to Scott, who sits on the extreme left foreground, is II. Macker zie. The others in their order from the spectator's left are Wilson, Crabbe, Lockhart, Wordsworth, Jeffrey (all in the rear of the table), Ferguson and Campbell in front), Moore, Allen. Wilkie and Constable.

JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART

(1794-1854)

HIEFLY remembered as the son in law and biographer of Sir Walter Scott, John Gibson Lockhart was in his own generation a literary man of great distinction. He edited the Quarterly Review from 1826 to 1853; and in his official capacity as the leading critic of England, did not hesitate to pronounce Tennyson a melancholy failure in his first attempts at poetry. Lockhart's own best work was done in verse as the translator of "Ancient Spanish Ballads," which are never likely to lose their popularity with lovers of spirited, narrative poetry. He was born at Cambusnethan, in Lanarkshire, Scotland, July 14th, 1794, and was educated for the bar. After joining the staff of Blackwoods in 1818, he never attempted to practice his profession. In 1820 he married Sir Walter Scott's eldest daughter, Sophia. His association with Sir Walter was intimate, qualifying him in every way for his principal prose work, "Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott," which appeared in seven volumes from 1837 to 1839. He died at Abbotsford, November 25th, 1854.

N°

THE CHARACTER OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

O MAN was a firmer or more indefatigable friend. I know not he ever lost one; and a few with whom, during the energetic middle stage of life, from political differences or other accidental circumstances, he lived less familiarly, had all gathered round him, and renewed the full warmth of early affection in his later days. There was enough to dignify the connection in their eyes; but nothing to chill it on either side. The imagination that so completely mastered him when he chose to give her the rein was kept under most determined control when any of the positive obligations of active life came into question. A high and pure sense of duty presided over whatever he had to do as a citizen and a magistrate; and as a landlord he considered his estate as an extension of his hearth.

Of his political creed, the many who hold a different one will of course say that it was the natural fruit of his political devo

tion to the mere prejudice of antiquity; and I am quite willing to allow that this must have had a great share in the matter and that he himself would have been as little ashamed of the word Prejudice as of the word Antiquity. Whenever Scotland could be considered as standing separate on any question from the rest of the empire, he was not only apt, but eager to embrace the opportunity of again rehoisting, as it were, the old signal of national independence; and I sincerely believe that no circumstance in his literary career gave him so much personal satisfaction as the success of "Malachi Malagrowther's Epistles." He confesses, however, in his diary, that he was aware how much it became him to summon calm reason to battle imaginative prepossessions on this score; and I am not aware that they ever led him into any serious political error. He delighted in letting his fancy run wild about ghosts and witches and horoscopes but I venture to say, had he sat on the judicial bench a hundred years before he was born, no man would have been more certain to give juries sound direction in estimating the pretended evidence of supernatural occurrences of any sort; and I believe, in like manner, that had any anti-English faction, civil or religious, sprung up in his own time in Scotland, he would have done more than any other living man could have hoped to do, for putting it down. He was on all practical points a steady, conscientious Tory of the school of William Pitt; who, though an anti-revolutionist, was certainly anything but an anti-reformer. He rejected the innovations, in the midst of which he died, as a revival, under alarmingly authoritative auspices, of the doctrines which had endangered Britain in his youth, and desolated Europe throughout his prime of manhood. May the gloomy anticipations which hung over his closing years be unfulfilled! But should they be so, let posterity remember the warnings and the resistance of his and other powerful intellects were probably in that event the appointed means for averting a catastrophe in which, had England fallen, the whole civilized world must have been involved.

Sir Walter received a strictly religious education under the eye of parents, whose virtuous conduct was in unison with the principles they desired to instill into their children. From the great doctrines thus recommended he appears never to have swerved; but he must be numbered among the many who have incurred considerable risk of doing so, in consequence of the rigid