use, may be made, as of
those addressed to myself at the same time, which all, however
melancholy to compare with those of the better day, have traces of the
man. Out of these confused and painful scraps I think I can contrive
to put together a picture that will be highly touching of a great mind
shattered, but never degraded, and always to the last noble, as his
heart continued pure and warm as long as it could beat."[6]

[Footnote 6: _Abbotsford Notanda_, pp. 190-193.]

A few weeks after this letter was written Mrs. Lockhart was seized
with an illness almost hopeless, it would seem, from the first. She
died May 17, and this bereavement overclouded the rest of her
husband's life, though, after a few months' retirement to
Milton-Lockhart, he returned to his usual occupations, more devoted
than ever to his children, their happiness and well-being having
become the object of his life. Of his own rarely expressed feelings,
we get a glimpse in a letter to Milman written {p.xxvii} five years
later (October, 1842), after he had attended the funeral of the wife
of a friend. His correspondent at this time was mourning the loss of a
daughter. "I lived over the hour when you stood by me,--but indeed
such an hour is eternally present. After that in every picture of life
the central figure is replaced by a black blot; every train of thought
terminates in the same blank gulf. I see you have been allowing
yourself to dwell too near this dreary region. Escape it while the
wife of your youth is still by you; in her presence no grief should be
other than gentle."[7]

[Footnote 7: Lang's _Life of Lockhart_, vol. ii. p. 214.]

When the earlier volumes of the Life had been published, Lockhart
wrote to Haydon: "Your approbation of the Life of Scott is valuable,
and might well console me for all the abuse it has called forth, both
on him and me. I trusted to the substantial goodness and greatness of
the character, and thought I should only make it more effective in
portraiture by keeping in the few specks. I despise with my heels the
whole trickery of erecting an alabaster image, and calling that a
_Man_.... The work is now done, and I leave it to its fate. I had no
personal object to gratify except, indeed, that I wished and hoped to
please my poor wife." From a letter to Miss Edgeworth we learn that
Mrs. Lockhart, who had been her husband's secretary for years in the
preparation of the Memoirs, only lived to see, not