ightful pictures, enough for interest and not enough for vulgar
obtrusion, given by Lockhart of life at Chiefswood, the cottage near
Abbotsford which he and his wife inhabited for nearly six years.

They were very busy years for Lockhart. He was still active in
contributing to _Blackwood_; he wrote all his four novels, and he
published the _Spanish Ballads_. _Valerius_ and _Adam Blair_ appeared in
1821, _Reginald Dalton_ and the _Ballads_ in 1823, _Matthew Wald_ in
1824.

The novels, though containing much that is very remarkable, are not his
strongest work; indeed, any critic who speaks with knowledge must admit
that Lockhart had every faculty for writing novels, except the faculty
of novel-writing. _Valerius_, a classical story of the visit of a
Roman-Briton to Rome, and the persecution of the Christians in the days
of Trajan, is, like everything of its author's, admirably written, but,
like every classical novel without exception, save only _Hypatia_ (which
makes its interests and its personages daringly modern), it somehow
rings false and faint, though not, perhaps, so faint or so false as most
of its fellows. _Adam Blair_, the story of the sudden succumbing to
natural temptation of a pious minister of the kirk, is unquestionably
Lockhart's masterpiece in this kind. It is full of passion, full of
force, and the characters of Charlotte Campbell and Adam Blair himself
are perfectly conceived. But the story-gift is still wanting. The reader
finds himself outside: wondering why the people do these things, and
whether in real life they would have done them, instead of following the
story with absorption, and asking himself no questions at all. The same,
in a different way, is the case with Lockhart's longest book, _Reginald
Dalton_; and this has the additional disadvantage that neither hero nor
heroine are much more than lay-figures, while in _Adam Blair_ both are
flesh and blood. The Oxford scenes are amusing but exaggerated--the
obvious work of a man who supplies the defects of a ten years' memory by
deepening the strokes where he does remember. _Matthew Wald_, which is a
novel of madness, has excellent passages, but is conventional and wooden
as a whole. Nothing was more natural than that Lockhart, with the
example of Scott immediately before him, should try novel-writing; not
many things are more indicative of his literary ability than that,
after a bare three years' practice, he left a field which certainly was
not