anguages, and a thorough
knowledge and love of English literature. His style is, to me at any
rate, peculiarly attractive. Contrasted with the more brightly coloured
and fantastically-shaped styles, of which, in his own day, De Quincey,
Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame
to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in
tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately
gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's welter of words, now
bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and
heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called
"Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the
essay on Theodore Hook is not easily surpassable as an example of solid
polished prose, which is prose, and does not attempt to be a hybrid
between prose and poetry. The last page of the Tennyson review is
perfect for quiet humour.

But there is no doubt that though Lockhart was an admirable critic
merely as such, a poet, or at least a song-writer, of singular ability
and charm within certain limits, and a master of sharp light raillery
that never missed its mark and never lumbered on the way, his most
unique and highest merit is that of biographer. Carlyle, though treating
Lockhart himself with great politeness, does not allow this, and
complains that Lockhart's conception of his task was "not very
elevated." That is what a great many people said of Boswell, whom
Carlyle thought an almost perfect biographer. But, as it happens, the
critic here has fallen into the dangerous temptation of giving his
reasons. Lockhart's plan was not, it seems, in the case of his _Scott_,
very elevated, because it was not "to show Scott as he was by nature, as
the world acted on him, as he acted on the world," and so forth. Now,
unfortunately, this is exactly what it seems to me that Lockhart,
whether he meant to do it or not, has done in the very book which
Carlyle was criticising. And it seems to me, further, that he always
does this in all his biographical efforts. Sometimes he appears (for
here another criticism of Carlyle's on the _Burns_, not the _Scott_, is
more to the point) to quote and extract from other and much inferior
writers to an extent rather surprising in so excellent a penman,
especially when it is remembered that, except to a dunce, the extraction
and stringing together of quotations is far more troublesome