the character of
Wastle) in the _ottava rima_ of Whistlecraft and Beppo (1819); the
best known of his comic poems, Captain Paton's Lament; and some lines
from a translation in hexameters of the twenty-fourth book of the
Iliad, that appeared as late as 1843, which must have sent more than
one reader to the magazine, and made them echo the biographer's words,
that "Lockhart had precisely the due qualifications for a translator,
in sympathy, poetic feeling, and severe yet genial taste, and could
have left a name for a popular, yet close and spirited version of the
Iliad," had he not, after this single anonymous publication, abandoned
his half-formed project. As one of his friends wrote with great truth,
"Lockhart was guilty of injustice to his own surpassing powers. With
all his passion for letters, with all the ambition for literary fame
which burnt in his youthful mind, there was still his shyness,
fastidiousness, reserve. No doubt he might have taken a higher place
as a poet than by the Spanish Ballads, as a writer of fiction than by
his novels. These seem {p.xxii} to have been thrown off by a sudden
uncontrollable impulse to relieve the mind of its fulness, rather than
as works of finished art or mature study. They were the flashes of a
genius which would not be suppressed; no one esteemed them more humbly
than Lockhart, or, having once cast them on the world, thought less of
their fame."[5]

[Footnote 5: From the interesting obituary notice in the
_London Times_ for December 9, 1854, supposed to have been
written by Dean Milman and Lady Eastlake.]

The early years of Lockhart's married life were so intimately
connected with the life of Scott as to need no chronicle here. The
young advocate, with many of the qualities essential to the making of
a great lawyer, lacked one most needful to his branch of the
profession, facility as a public speaker; his extreme shyness would
account for this. As he said at the farewell dinner given to him by
his friends in Edinburgh: "You know as well as I, that if I had ever
been able to make a speech, there would have been no cause for our
present meeting." So literature had become more and more his
occupation,--it became entirely so when, in the autumn of 1826, he
accepted the editorship of the Quarterly Review,--a very responsible
and distinguished post for so young a man, when the position of the
Review at that time, in politics, literature, and society, i