e late Mr. Scott Douglas), it is not the best book on the
subject. The taste and judgment, the clear vision and sound sense, which
distinguished Lockhart, are in few places more apparent than here. His
abridgment of Scott's _Life of Napoleon_ is no ordinary abridgment, and
is a work of thorough craft, if not even of art. His novels, with one
exception, have ceased to be much read; and perhaps even that one can
hardly be said to enjoy frequent perusal. _Valerius_, the first, is a
classical novel, and suffers under the drawbacks which have generally
attended its kind. _Reginald Dalton_, a novel in part of actual life at
Oxford, and intended to be wholly of actual life, still shows something
of the artificial handling, of the supposed necessity for adventure,
which is observable in Hook and others of the time, and which has been
sufficiently noticed in the last chapter. _Matthew Wald_, the last of
the four, is both too gloomy and too extravagant: it deals with a mad
hero. But _Adam Blair_, which was published in the same year (1821) with
_Valerius_, is a wonderful little book. The story is not well told; but
the characters and the principal situation--a violent passion
entertained by a pious widowed minister for his neighbour's wife--are
handled with extraordinary power. _Peter's Letters_, which is half a
book and half journalism, may be said to be, with rare exceptions (such
as an obituary article on Hook, which was reprinted from the
_Quarterly_), the only specimen of Lockhart's miscellaneous writing that
is easily accessible or authentically known. He was still but in his
apprenticeship here; but his remarkable gifts are already apparent.
These gifts included a faculty of sarcastic comment so formidable that
it early earned him the title of "the Scorpion"; a very wide and sound
knowledge of literature, old and new, English and foreign; some
acquirements in art and in other matters; an excellent style, and a
solid if rather strait-laced theory of criticism. Except that he was, as
almost everybody was then, too much given to violent personalities in
his anonymous work, he was a very great journalist indeed, and he was
also a very great man of letters.

Thomas de Quincey was not of the earliest _Blackwood_ staff (in that
respect Maginn should be mentioned before him), but he was the older as
well as the more important man of the two, and there is the additional
reason for postponing the founder of _Fraser_, that this latter