n the contrary, he both practised,
preached, and most formidably defended by bitter criticism of opposite
styles, a manner in prose and verse which was almost classical, or which
at least admitted no further Romantic innovation than that of the Lake
poets and Scott. His authorship of the savage onslaught upon Keats in
_Blackwood_ is not proven; but there is no doubt that he wrote the
scarcely less ferocious, though much more discriminating and
better-deserved, attack on Tennyson's early poems in the _Quarterly_. He
was himself no mean writer of verse. His _Spanish Ballads_ (1823), in
which he had both Southey and Scott as models before him, are of great
excellence; and some of his occasional pieces display not merely much
humour (which nobody ever denied him), but no mean share of the feeling
which is certainly not often associated with his name. But verse was
only an occasional pastime with him: his vocation was to write prose,
and he wrote it with admirable skill and a seldom surpassed faculty of
adaptation to the particular task. It is indeed probable--and it would
be no discredit to him--that his reputation with readers as opposed to
students will mainly depend, as it depends at present, upon his _Life of
Scott_. Nor would even thus his plumes be borrowed over much. For though
no doubt the letters and the diary of Sir Walter himself count for much
in the interest of the book, though the beauty and nobility of Scott's
character, his wonderful achievements, the pathetic revolution of his
fortune, form a subject not easily matched, yet to be equal to such a
subject is to be in another sense on an equality with it. Admiration for
the book is not chequered or tempered, as it almost necessarily must be
in the case of its only possible rival, Boswell's _Johnson_, with more
or less contempt for the author; still less is it (as some have
contended that admiration for Boswell is) due to that contempt. The
taste and spirit of Lockhart's book are not less admirable than the
skill of its arrangement and the competency of its writing; nor would it
be easily possible to find a happier adjustment in this respect in the
whole annals of biography.

But this great book ought not to obscure the other work which Lockhart
has done. His biography of Burns is of remarkable merit; it may be
questioned whether to this day, though it may be deficient in a few
modern discoveries of fact (and these have been mostly supplied in the
edition by th