anship is specially evident in the
Life of Scott. The skill is masterly with which the immense mass of
material has been {p.xxiv} handled, making letters, diaries,
extracts, and narrative one harmonious whole, with never an occasional
roughness to cause the ordinary reader fully to realize the smoothness
of the road he is traversing. The absolute modesty and freedom from
self-consciousness of the author--the editor, he calls himself--in
telling a tale of which for a number of years he formed a part, is as
striking as it is rare. He is one of the actors in a great drama; if
it be necessary now and then that he should come to the front, he does
it simply and naturally--that is all. Always and everywhere the hero
is the central figure to whose full presentation all else is
subsidiary. There is no need to speak of the faultlessness of the
style, or of the deep but always manly feeling with which the more
intimate details of the story are told; effusiveness or sentimentality
was as alien to Lockhart as to Scott, and for these reasons no
familiarity or change in literary fashions can make the matchless
closing pages less moving; they are of the things that remain.

In January, 1837, Lockhart wrote a letter to William Laidlaw, of
singular autobiographic interest. After thanking his friend for a
letter and a present of ptarmigan, "both welcome as remembrances of
Scotland and old days," he says:--

"The account you give of your situation at present is, considering how
the world wags, not unsatisfactory. Would it were possible to find
myself placed in something of a similar locality, and with the means
of enjoying the country by day and my books at night, without the
necessity of dividing most of my time between labors of the desk--mere
drudge labors mostly--and the harassing turmoil of worldly society,
for which I never had much, and nowadays have rarely indeed any
relish! But my wife and children bind me to the bit, and I am well
pleased with the fetters. Walter is now a tall and very handsome
{p.xxv} boy of nearly eleven years; Charlotte a very winsome gypsy of
nine,--both intelligent in the extreme, and both, notwithstanding all
possible spoiling, as simple, natural and unselfish as if they had
been bred on a hillside and in a family of twelve. Sophia is your old
friend,--fat, fair, and by and by to be forty, which I now am, and
over, God bless the mark! but though I think I am wiser, at least more
sober, neither richer nor