his.

In the early autumn of 1825, just before the great collapse of his
affairs, Scott went to Ireland with Lockhart in his company. But very
early in the following year, before the collapse was decided, Lockhart
and his family moved to London, on his appointment as editor of the
_Quarterly_, in succession to Gifford. Probably there never was a better
appointment of the kind. Lockhart was a born critic: he had both the
faculty and the will to work up the papers of his contributors to the
proper level; he was firm and decided in his literary and political
views, without going to the extreme Giffordian acerbity in both; and his
intelligence and erudition were very wide. "He could write," says a
phrase in some article I have somewhere seen quoted, "on any subject
from poetry to dry-rot;" and there is no doubt that an editor, if he
cannot exactly write on any subject from poetry to dry-rot, should be
able to take an interest in any subject between and, if necessary,
beyond those poles. Otherwise he has the choice of two undesirables;
either he frowns unduly on the dry-rot articles, which probably interest
large sections of the public (itself very subject to dry-rot), or he
lets the dry-rot contributor inflict his hobby, without mercy and
unedited, on a reluctant audience. But Lockhart, though he is said (for
his contributions are not, as far as I know, anywhere exactly
indicated) to have contributed fully a hundred articles to the
_Quarterly_, that is to say one to nearly every number during the
twenty-eight years of his editorship, by no means confined himself to
this work. It was, indeed, during its progress that he composed not
merely the _Life of Napoleon_, which was little more than an abridgment,
though a very clever abridgment, of Scott's book, but the _Lives_ of
Burns and of Scott himself. Before, however, dealing with these, his
_Spanish Ballads_ and other poetical work may be conveniently disposed
of.

Lockhart's verse is in the same scattered condition as his prose; but it
is evident that he had very considerable poetical faculty. The charming
piece, "When youthful hope is fled," attributed to him on Mrs. Norton's
authority; the well-known "Captain Paton's Lament," which has been
republished in the _Tales from Blackwood_; and the mono-rhymed epitaph
on "Bright broken Maginn," in which some wiseacres have seen ill-nature,
but which really is a masterpiece of humorous pathos, are all in very
different styles, a