ly part of your conduct that has ever given me pain,
need not now, or ever, disturb the confidence in which it has been of
late a principal consolation for me to live with my son-in-law."[14]

[Footnote 13: _Quarterly Review_, vol. cxvi. p. 475.]

[Footnote 14: Ornsby's _Memoirs of J. R. Hope-Scott_, vol. ii
p. 138.]

Lockhart's letters show how well pleased he was with his daughter's
marriage, though it left him alone in his home. His diary says of
1847: "A year to me of very indifferent health and great anxieties.
Charlotte's marriage _the only good thing_." The beginning of the year
had been saddened by the death of his brother-in-law, Sir Walter
Scott; and the extravagance and waywardness of his son, now the laird
of Abbotsford, had already greatly distressed the father and were to
inflict more torturing anxiety and keener suffering as time went on.
Walter Lockhart, in his happy, healthy boyhood, did not show the
intellectual precocity of his elder brother; but he was a handsome,
intelligent, and winning lad, with no foreshadowing of the
recklessness of his later years. Mr. Lang, who can speak from
knowledge, says: "Could all be known and told, it is not too much to
say that Lockhart's fortitude {p.xxxiii} during these last years, so
black with affliction, bodily and mental, was not less admirable than
that of Sir Walter Scott himself. Thus, the trials from which we are
tempted to avert our eyes, really brought out the noblest manly
qualities of cheerful endurance, of gentle consideration for all, who,
being sorry for his sorrow, must be prevented from knowing how deep
and incurable were his wounds." And it should be said that in these
years Lockhart had to suffer that sharpest of griefs which happily Sir
Walter never knew.

Outwardly, Lockhart's life went on much as usual, save that constantly
failing health made editorial labors more fatiguing, and social
relaxations less and less frequent. But in his letters there is little
change; nothing could overcome "a kind of intellectual high spirits
when his pen was in his hand." His ill health is but slightly dwelt
upon, and only to his daughter is the ever present anxiety revealed.
At last came a ray of hope to the father's heart, a reconciliation,
and then Walter's sudden death. Sorely tried as it had been, the
father's love had never weakened; and after those inexpressibly sad
days at Versailles, recorded with such self-restraint in his