bject was fresher in the author's memory.

Lockhart modestly speaks of this book in his _Life of Scott_ as one that
"none but a very young and thoughtless person would have written." It
may safely be said that no one but a very clever person, whether young
or old, could have written it, though it is too long and has occasional
faults of a specially youthful kind. But it made, coming as it did upon
the heels of the _Chaldee Manuscript_, a terrible commotion in
Edinburgh. The impartial observer of men and things may, indeed, have
noticed in the records of the ages, that a libelled Liberal is the man
in all the world who utters the loudest cries. The examples of the
Reformers, and of the eighteenth-century _Philosophes_, are notorious
and hackneyed; but I can supply (without, I trust, violating the
sanctity of private life) a fresh and pleasing example. Once upon a
time, a person whom we shall call A. paid a visit to a person whom we
shall call B. "How sad," said A., "are those personal attacks of the
---- on Mr. Gladstone."--"Personality," said B., "is always disgusting;
and I am very sorry to hear that the ---- has followed the bad example
of the personal attacks on Lord Beaconsfield."--"Oh! but," quoth A.,
"that was _quite_ a different thing." Now B. went out to dinner that
night, and sitting next to a distinguished Liberal member of Parliament,
told him this tale, expecting that he would laugh. "Ah! yes," said he
with much gravity, "it is _very_ different, you know."

In the same way the good Whig folk of Edinburgh regarded it as very
different that the _Edinburgh Review_ should scoff at Tories, and that
_Blackwood_ and _Peter_ should scoff at Whigs. The scorpion which
delighted to sting the faces of men, probably at this time founded a
reputation which has stuck to him for more than seventy years after Dr.
Peter Morris drove his shandrydan through Scotland. Sir Walter (then
Mr.) Scott held wisely aloof from the extremely exuberant Toryism of
_Blackwood_, and, indeed, had had some quarrels with its publisher and
virtual editor. But he could not fail to be introduced to a man whose
tastes and principles were so closely allied to his own. A year after
the appearance of _Peter's Letters_, Lockhart married, on 29th April
1820 (a perilous approximation to the unlucky month of May), Sophia
Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch's "Little Jacobite," the most like her
father of all his children. Every reader of the _Life_ knows the
del