Page:The Maclise Portrait-Gallery.djvu/35

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JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART.
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bard—horribile dictu,—put his knife in the salt-cellar to help himself to the condiment! Shortly before his death, he read that grand piece, the "Thanatopsis" of Bryant, at the opening of the Exhibition in Suffolk Place, and fairly broke down with emotion when he came to the lines,—

"So live, that when thy summons comes to join
 The innumerable caravan that moves
 To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take
 His chamber in the silent halls of Death,
 Thou go not like the quarry-slave at night,
 Scourged to his dungeon, etc,"

— saying that "nothing finer had ever been written." He was born July 27, 1777, and died at Boulogne, June 15, 1844, aged 67. He Hes in Westminster Abbey, next to Southey's monument, where is an admirable statue of the poet by W. Calder Marshall, R.A., of which there is an engraving by W. H. Mote.

His Life and Letters, by William Beattie, M.D., one of his executors, was published by Moxon, the " poet's publisher," in 3 vols. 8vo, 1849;[1] there are also the "Memoirs" of the poet by his old friend and literary subordinate in the conduct of the New Monthly Magazine, Cyrus Redding, 1860, 2 vols., 8vo.; and two papers entitled "Mornings with Thomas Campbell," in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, Feb. 8 and 15, 1845.

Campbell enjoyed a pension of £184 per annum, given to him by the Government as far back as 1806.



III.— JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART.


As we have just had Campbell, the poet, inhaling solace through the somewhat plebeian conduit of a "Broseley," so do we now find Lockhart, the critic, making use of that later and more elegant device by which mediate fumigation is rendered needless, and the convoluted leaf,—as Ebenezer Cullchickweed happily has it,—is made to serve as its own pipe.[2] Each plan has its own advantages and its advocates, and is good in its way; the whole thing is a matter of taste,—or pocket,—and if Maginn, in his "desultory and autoschediastic, off-hand, and extemporaneous article," declined the controversy for fear of the "acrimony" that might arise, it seems well that a like discretion should be exercised here.

Lockhart was born in the manse or parsonage house of Cambusnethan, on the 14th of July, 1794. After a preliminary education at the High School, he became, at the age of twelve, a matriculated member of the College and University of Glasgow. Three years later he was entered a commoner at Balliol College, Oxford; where, going up into the school in the Easter term of 1813,he came out in the first class in literis humanioribus, although "with unparalleled audacity he devoted part of his time to cari-


  1. An article on Beattie's Life will be found in the Quarterly Review, vol. lxxxv. pp. 37-40.
  2. Every Night Book; or, Life after Dark. By the author of The Cigar. London, 1827, 8vo, p. 91.