than
original writing. But even then the extracts are always luminous. With
ninety-nine out of a hundred biographies the total impression which
Carlyle demands, and very properly demands, is, in fact, a total absence
of impression. The reader's mind is as dark, though it may be as full,
as a cellar when the coals have been shot into it. Now this is never the
case with Lockhart's biographies, whether they are books in half a dozen
volumes, or essays in half a hundred pages. He subordinates what even
Carlyle allowed to be his "clear nervous forcible style" so entirely to
the task of representing his subject, he has such a perfect general
conception of that subject, that only a very dense reader can fail to
perceive the presentment. Whether it is the right or whether it is the
wrong presentment may, of course, be a matter of opinion, but, such as
it is, it is always there.

One other point of interest about Lockhart has to be mentioned. He was
an eminent example, perhaps one of the most eminent, of a "gentleman of
the press." He did a great many kinds of literary work, and he did all
of them well; novel-writing, perhaps (which, as has been said, he gave
up almost immediately), least well. But he does not seem to have felt
any very strong or peculiar call to any particular class of original
literary work, and his one great and substantive book may be fairly
taken to have been much more decided by accident and his relationship to
Scott than by deliberate choice. He was, in fact, eminently a
journalist, and it is very much to be wished that there were more
journalists like him. For from the two great reproaches of the craft to
which so many of us belong, and which seems to be gradually swallowing
up all other varieties of literary occupation, he was conspicuously
free. He never did work slovenly in form, and he never did work that was
not in one way or other consistent with a decided set of literary and
political principles. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the
unprincipled character of journalism, no doubt; and nobody knows better
than those who have some experience of it, that if, as George Warrington
says, "too many of us write against our own party," it is the fault
simply of those who do so. If a man has a faculty of saying anything, he
can generally get an opportunity of saying what he likes, and avoid
occasions of saying what he does not like. But the mere journalist
Swiss of heaven (or the other place),