years, it is difficult to see why the good people of Edinburgh should have been so exasperated by the book and its author; or why the Whig magnates,—Jeffrey at Craigcrook and his legal and literary guests,—should have felt so galled by the innocent quizzing of the pseudo-Morris. But so it was; and Lord Cockburn, himself, some thirty years later, felt it necessary to assure his readers seriously that no such gymnastic exercitations had ever taken place, as the leaping-match in the garden, described and criticized by the Welshman with such awful verisimilitude! If the reader has a copy, he will find "second edition" upon the title-page; but it may save inquiry to state that the "first" has no existence but in the suggestion of the author. It may be worth while also to say that the portrait of "Peter Morris, M.D.," prefixed to the first volume, is mentioned by Jackson and Chatto, in their admirable History of Wood Engraving (2nd, and best ed. p. 633), as being one of the earliest published specimens of the invention of Mr. Lizars, of Edinburgh, for " metallic relief engraving." A review of Peter's Letters will be found in Blackwood's Magazine, vol. iv. pp. 612, 745; and vol. vi. p. 288.
Only a word on his novels,—Valerias, a Roman Story, coldly and sternly classical as a romance of Apuleius or Barclay; Adam Blair, with its burning passion and guilt, which startled the kirk like a bombshell; Reginald Dalton, light, easy and superficial, in which the author sought to depict, with a difference,—as "Tom Brown" has done for us in later days,—undergraduate life at Oxford, as it was during the earlier period of his own academical career; and lastly, not the least remarkable, Matthew Wald, forcibly portraying a character, which, though redeemed by some better impulses, gradually sinks downward, by reason of its innate selfishness, to degradation and madness. These stories are, one and all, powerfully written; they exhibit force of narrative, passages of surpassing beauty and pathos, and elegance of style; but they have failed to gain for their writer an exalted or permanent place among the great masters of fiction.
In the literary career of Lockhart, no circumstance is of greater moment than his connection with the Quarterly Review. On the retirement of William Gifford in 1826, it was proposed to Lockhart that he should fill the vacant post. He accepted, and at once removed to London. He proved an admirable editor; maintaining the pleasantest relations between himself and his contributors. As he himself says of Jeffrey,[1] "he was excellent in beautifying the productions of his 'journeymen;'" and as Gifford, his predecessor, had curtailed Southey, so did he feel himself at liberty to permit Croker to interpolate Lord Mahon's article on the French Revolution.[2] His conduct of the Quarterly extended over the long period of twenty-eight years; and his conscientious and most punctual labours on its behalf necessarily absorbed a large portion of his time and talents. But his seemed to be one of those minds which obtain,—or fancy they obtain,—their needful relaxation in change of labour; and he found time for many articles in Blackwood, to assist Wilson. He wrote for Constable's Miscellany, in 1828, the most charming life of Burns which we yet possess; he assumed the superintendence of Murray's Family Library, for which he wrote the opening volume, a Life of Napoleon; and later on, came the Life of Sir Walter Scott, the last and greatest of his separate works, one of the best
