Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/68



and sweeping, of late, have been the ravages of Time among our men of letters. Now by the hand of death, now of decay (which is nigh unto death, for that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away), and now of changes and chances in this uncertain life. A long list, and as mournful as long, might be drawn up, of setting suns a falling stars, missed, with more or less of regret, from this visible diurnal sphere, in whose greater light to rule our day we rejoiced, or in their lesser, to govern our night. (Happily, this figure is faulty; for the light of such luminaries remains, and often brightens more and more continually, after their earthly orbit has fulfilled its course.) Brief is the space within which we have had to sorrow for the decease of a Wordsworth, though full of years and honours,—of a Moore (and already how "lightly they speak of the spirit that's gone, and o'er his cold ashes upbraid him"),—and, not to name others that might be named, of a Talfourd, the judge upon the judgment-seat, cited before another tribunal, so strangely, solemnly, suddenly, ! And, again, the breaking up of old literary alliances, the evanishing of familiar systems, the scattering of time-honoured but time-dissolving galaxies, is mournfully instanced in the case of two of Scott's "young men," "wild young bloods," who are now compassed with infirmities that require seclusion, as well as stricken with years that yearn for it,—John Wilson, and John Gibson Lockhart. To each may the influences of retirement be healing and restorative—to each may there come a soothing experience of what is a sacred promise, "At evening-time it shall be light"—light with a mellow radiance, fit precursor of the gloaming, and not unfit conclusion of the noonday heat and sunny splendours of their fervid prime.

It is of the latter we have now, and in our desultory way, to mention;—of the son-in-law of Sir Walter, the ready writer of "Peter's Letters," the reckless, dashing attaché to Old Ebony's gay staff, the classical author of "Valerius," the morbid anatomist of "Adam Blair," the manly biographer of Scotland's two chiefest names in song and story, the animated translator of "Spanish Ballads," and the long-reigning editor of the Quarterly Review.

The present generation is little versed in the pages of Mr. Lockhart's first work of note, "Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk"—of which he has, in his riper experience, said, that nobody but a very young and a very thoughtless person could have dreamt of putting forth such a book,—while he protests against denouncing these epistles of the imaginary Welsh Doctor, Peter Morris, "with his spectacles—his Welsh accent—his Toryism—his inordinate thirst for draught porter—and his everlasting shandry-dan,"—as a mere string of libels on the big-wigs therein