Fortunately many of these sketches, prob ably all of the best of them, will serve as illustrations for a biography of Sir Frank Lockwood, which it is understood is now in course of preparation, and which, it is safe to say, will be one of the most interesting books of the kind that has ever been com piled, irrespective of the skill of the com piler. The death of so prominent and beloved a man came as a great shock to the com munity, for he was of robust frame and hardly more than in the prime of life. He died on Sunday, and on the following morn ing the newspapers devoted large spaces to sketches of his character, while at the open ing of the courts the judges and the leaders of the bar paid affectionate tributes to his memory. Of all the pleasant things love and memory prompted his friends to say about him, none so well sums up the man liness of his character as the following, which was contributed to one of the daily papers by an anonymous correspondent a few days after his death : — "One feature of his character may, for the sake of all of us, be brought into still higher prominence. Frank Lockwood loved life and the world in all its phases; his wit and vivid dramatic insight were never more
brilliant than in his description of its men and women, its scenes and events; yet as in Sidney Smith, whom in some respects he resembled, his art and humor were as clean and wholesome, his satire as kindly, and his fancy as pure as were his truth and loyalty in private and domestic life. The writer of these lines would claim no exclusive place in Lockwood's friendship, but perhaps none of his many friends dwelt more intimately with him or during a long series of years knew more of his mind and life and disposi tion; my witness will, therefore, be readily believed when I say that never in the least guarded moments of private conversation or in the most exacting moments of society was a coarse or lewd jest found in his mouth. His infinite humor and gaiety sprang from no such sources; and, lover of the turf and the field, he retained a woman's delicacy in his instinctive aversion from close associa tion with men of loose life. From his Cambridge days, in spite of a somewhat stormy undergraduate career, his college loved him for his manliness and rectitude, unto later days his life was a perpetual example of moral elevation and hatred of all meanness and dissolute living. Such an example the society of to-day can ill afford to lose."
