ous man, the ominous precedent of
Scott might have deterred him. His journey did him no good, and he died
at Abbotsford on the 25th of November. December, says another authority,
for so it is that history gets written, even in thirty years.

The comparatively brief notices which are all that have been published
about Lockhart, uniformly mention the unpopularity (to use a mild word)
which pursued him, and which, as I have remarked, does not seem to have
exhausted itself even yet. It is not very difficult to account for the
origin of this; and the neglect to supply any collection of his work,
and any authoritative account of his life and character, will quite
explain its continuance. In the first place, Lockhart was well known as
a most sarcastic writer; in the second, he was for nearly a lifetime
editor of one of the chief organs of party politics and literary
criticism in England. He might have survived the _Chaldee Manuscript_,
and _Peter's Letters_, and the lampoons in _Fraser_: he might even have
got the better of the youthful imprudence which led him to fix upon
himself a description which was sure to be used and abused against him
by the "fules," if he had not succeeded to the chair of the _Quarterly_.
Individual and, to a great extent, anonymous indulgence of the luxury of
scorn never gave any man a very bad character, even if he were, as
Lockhart was, personally shy and reserved, unable to make up for written
sarcasm with verbal flummery, and, in virtue of an incapacity for
gushing, deprived of the easiest and, by public personages, most
commonly practised means of proving that a man has "a good heart after
all." But when he complicated his sins by editing the _Quarterly_ at a
time when everybody attacked everybody else in exactly such terms as
pleased them, the sins of his youth were pretty sure to be visited on
him. In the first place, there was the great army of the criticised, who
always consider that the editor of the paper which dissects them is
really responsible. The luckless Harriet Martineau, who, if I remember
rightly, gives in her autobiography a lurid picture of Lockhart "going
down at night to the printer's" and inserting dreadful things about her,
and who, I believe, took the feminine plan of revenging herself in an
obituary article, was only one of a great multitude.

Lockhart does not seem to have taken over from Gifford quite such a
troublesome crew of helpers as Macvey Napier inherited from Jef