t
primitive of all poetical effects; it is Lockhart's merit that he seldom
fails to produce it. The simplicity and spontaneity of his verse may, to
some people, be surprising in a writer so thoroughly and intensely
literary; but Lockhart's character was as complex as his verse is
simple, and the verse itself is not the least valuable guide to it.

It has been said that his removal to London and his responsible office
by no means reduced his general literary activity. Whether he continued
to contribute to _Blackwood_ I am not sure; some phrases in the _Noctes_
seem to argue the contrary. But he not only, as has been said, wrote for
the _Quarterly_ assiduously, but after a short time joined the new
venture of _Fraser_, and showed in that rollicking periodical that the
sting of the "scorpion" had by no means been extracted. He produced,
moreover, in 1828, his _Life of Burns_, and in 1836-37 his _Life of
Scott_. These, with the sketch of Theodore Hook written for the
_Quarterly_ in 1843, and separately published later, make three very
remarkable examples of literary biography on very different scales,
dealing with very different subjects, and, by comparison of their
uniform excellence, showing that the author had an almost unique genius
for this kind of composition. The _Life of Scott_ fills seven capacious
volumes; the _Life of Burns_ goes easily into one; the _Life of Hook_
does not reach a hundred smallish pages. But they are all equally
well-proportioned in themselves and to their subjects; they all exhibit
the same complete grasp of the secret of biography; and they all have
the peculiarity of being full of facts without presenting an undigested
appearance. They thus stand at an equal distance from biography of the
fashion of the old academic _Eloge_ of the last century, which makes an
elegant discourse about a man, but either deliberately or by accident
gives precise information about hardly any of the facts of the man's
life; and from modern biography, which tumbles upon the devoted reader a
cataract of letters, documents, and facts of all sorts, uncombined and
undigested by any exercise of narrative or critical skill on the part of
the author. Lockhart's biographies, therefore, belong equally (to borrow
De Quincey's useful, though, as far as terminology goes, not very happy
distinction) to the literature of knowledge and the literature of
power. They are storehouses of information; but they are, at the same
time, wo