mple means of discharging it by degrees, a debt which he
acknowledged that he justly owed; the folly and vanity which led him to
waste his time, his wit, and his money in playing the hanger-on at
country houses and town dinner-tables; his hard living, and the laxity
which induced him not merely to form irregular connections, but
prevented him from taking the only step which could, in some measure,
repair his fault, are all fairly put, and blamed frankly. Even in that
more delicate matter of the personal journalism, Lockhart's procedure is
as ingenuous as it is ingenious; and the passage of the sketch which
deals with "the blazing audacity of invective, the curious delicacy of
persiflage, the strong caustic satire" (expressions, by the way, which
suit Lockhart himself much better than Hook, though Lockhart had not
Hook's broad humour), in fact, admits that the application of these
things was not justifiable, nor to be justified. Yet with all this, the
impression left by the sketch is distinctly favourable on the whole,
which, in the circumstances, must be admitted to be a triumph of
advocacy obtained not at the expense of truth, but by the art of the
advocate in making the best of it.

The facts of Lockhart's life between his removal to London and his death
may be rapidly summarised, the purpose of this notice being rather
critical than biographical. He had hardly settled in town when, as he
himself tells, he had to attempt, fruitlessly enough, the task of
mediator in the financial disasters of Constable and Scott; and his own
share of domestic troubles began early. His eldest son, after repeated
escapes, died in 1831; Scott followed shortly; Miss Anne Scott, after
her father's death, came in broken health to Lockhart's house, and died
there only a year later; and in the spring of 1837 his wife likewise
died. Then Fortune let him alone for a little, to return in no better
humour some years later.

It is, however, from the early "thirties" that one of the best known
memorials of Lockhart dates; that is to say, the portrait, or rather the
two portraits, in the Fraser Gallery. In the general group of the
Fraserians he sits between Fraser himself and Theodore Hook, with the
diminutive figure of Crofton Croker half intercepted beyond him; and his
image forms the third plate in Mr. Bates's republication of the gallery.
It is said to be the most faithful of the whole series, and it is
certainly the handsomest, giving even a mo