h life; no man was ever
truer to his early friends than he, and few have had friends more
loyal.[2] He {p.xvii} gained his first class in 1813--he was not yet
nineteen--and returned to his father's house in Glasgow, which he was
to leave two years later for Edinburgh, there to read law and begin
the literary work which was to prove the real business of his life. He
became acquainted with William Blackwood, who, when the young advocate
was about to visit Germany in the vacation of 1817, enabled him to
undertake the then toilsome and expensive journey by paying liberally,
not less than L300, it is said, for a translation to be made later.
Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature was the work Lockhart
selected, and of this incident Mr. Gleig says: "Though seldom
communicative on such subjects, he more than once alluded to the
circumstance in after-life, and always in the same terms. 'It was a
generous act on Ebony's part, and a bold one too; for he had only my
word for it that I had any acquaintance at all with the German
language!'" It was a generous act, and also one showing keen
perception on the part of the publisher. At this time began Lockhart's
intimacy with John Wilson, with whom he was so largely to share the
achievements, glorious and inglorious, of Mr. Blackwood's magazine in
its reckless youth. Unfortunately, the older and more experienced
writer was no safe guide for his brilliant but very young co-worker,
still with a boy's fondness for mischief and a dangerous wit, to which
the almost sublime self-complacency of the dominant Whig coteries
would offer abundant opportunities of exercise. Lockhart was not a
sinner above others, but in the end he was made something like the
scapegoat of all the offenders, whose misdeeds, occasionally serious
enough, are sometimes in view of the journalistic and critical
amenities then prevailing in {p.xviii} the organs of both parties
hardly so heinous as to account for the excitement that attended them.

[Footnote 2: To one of these friends, the Rev. George Robert
Gleig, Chaplain General of the Forces, we owe the only
authoritative account of Lockhart's early life. This is to be
found in the interesting article, the _Life of Lockhart_, in
the Quarterly Review for October, 1864. Like his friend, Mr.
Gleig was educated at Glasgow University, was a Snell
Scholar, and was an early contributor to _Blackwood_ and