Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/115

Rh Spice, and his own joyous shout of reveillee under our windows, were the signal that he had burst his toils, and meant for that day to 'take his ease in his inn.' On descending, he was to be found seated with all his 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 Purdie's lecture touching the plantation that most needed thinning." By the year 1837 how completely all this had terminated! In the last volume of the "Life of Sir Walter Scott," Lockhart thus closes the description: "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. . . . 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 in all things as a gentle innocent woman can ever be to a great man, deeply tried and skilled in the struggles and perplexities of active life she, too, is no more." In December, 1831, John Hugh Lockhart, the Master Hugh Littlejohn of the "Tales of a Grandfather," died, and in 1853, Lockhart's only surviving son, Walter Scott Lockhart Scott, leaving no remains of the family except a daughter, Charlotte, married in August, 1847, to James Robert Hope-Stuart, who succeeded to the estate of Abbotsford. In this way the representatives of both Sir Walter Scott and John Lockhart have terminated in one little girl, Monica, the only surviving child of Hope-Scott of Abbotsford.

Leaving this domestic narrative, so full of happiness, disappointment, and sorrow, we gladly turn to the literary life of John Gibson Lockhart. After the publication of "Peter's Letters," his pen was in constant operation; and not- withstanding the large circle of acquaintance to which his marriage introduced him, and the engagements it entailed upon him, he not only continued his regular supplies to "Black wood's Magazine," but produced several separate works, with a fertility that seemed to have caught its inspiration from the example of his father-in-law. The first of these was "Valerius," one of the most classical tales descriptive of ancient Rome, and the manners of its people, which the English language has as yet embodied. After this came "Adam Blair,' a tale which, in spite of its impossible termination, so opposed to all Scottish canon law, abounds with the deepest touches of genuine feeling, as well as descriptive power. The next was " Reginald Dalton," a three-volumed novel, in which he largely brought forward his reminiscences of student-life at Oxford, and the town-and- gown affrays with which it was enlivened. The last of this series of novels was "Matthew Wald," which fully sustained the high character of its predecessors. It will always happen in the literary world, that when a critical censor and sharp reviewer puts forth a separate work of his own, it will fare like the tub thrown overboard to the tender mercies of the whale: the enemies he has raised, and the wrath he has provoked, have now found their legitimate object, and the stinging censures he has bestowed upon the works of others, are sure to recoil with tenfold severity upon his own. And thus it fared with Lockhart's productions; the incognito of their author was easily penetrated, and a thunder-shower of angry criticism followed. But this hostile feeling having lasted its time, is now dying a natural death, and the rising generation, who cannot enter into the feuds of their fathers, regard these writings with a more just apprecia-