business, or man of the world, he touched the hidden chord of romance in all. No man less affected the poetical, the mysterious, or the sentimental; no man less affected anything; yet as he stole stiffly away from the knot, which, if he had not enlivened, he had hushed, there was not one who did not confess that a being had passed before them who had stirred all the pulses of the imagination, and realized what is generally only ideal in the portrait of a man. To this impression there is no doubt that his personal appearance greatly contributed, though too entirely the exponent of his mind to be considered as a separate cause. Endowed with the very highest order of manly beauty, both of feature and expression, he retained the brilliancy of youth, and a stately strength of person, comparatively unimpaired in ripened life; and then, though sorrow and sickness suddenly brought on a premature old age, which none could witness unmoved, yet the beauty of the head and of the bearing so fat gained in melancholy loftiness of expression what they lost in animation, that the last phase, whether to the eye of painter or of anxious friend, seemed always the finest."
When dining at Lansdowne House in 1837, Lady Chatterton enjoyed a very pleasant conversation with Fonblanque (editor of the Examiner), and Lockhart. Fonblanque made some cynical remark, and Lady Chatterton notes: —
"At that moment it struck me that he resembled nothing so much as Retsch's engraving of Mephistopheles in Faust. This is never the case with Lockhart, whose splendid dark eyes have always a kindly expression."[1]
Maginn, who had every cause to hold him in gratitude and respect, alludes to his "sempiternal cigar," which seems, indeed, to have been a part of the man. Jamie Hogg gives us a capital picture of him as "a mischievous Oxford puppy, for whom I was terrified; dancing after the young ladies, and drawing caricatures of every one who came in contact with him." Lockhart, indeed, made capital fun out of the simple Shepherd, whom for years he contrived to keep in a state of perfect mystification as to the authorship of the "tremendous articles" in Blackwood. Says the latter: "Being sure I could draw nothing out of either Wilson or Sym, I always repaired to Lockhart to ask him, awaiting his reply with fixed eyes and a beating heart. Then, with his cigar in his mouth, his one leg flung carelessly over the other, and without the symptom of a smile on his face, or one twinkle of mischief in his dark grey eye, he would father the articles on his brother, Captain Lockhart, or Peter Robertson, or Sheriff Cay, or James Wilson, or that queer, fat body, Dr. Scott; and sometimes on James, or John Ballantyne, and Sam. Anderson, and poor Baxter. Then away I flew, with the wonderful news to my other associates; and if any remained incredulous, I swore the facts down through them; so that before I left Edinburgh, I was accredited the greatest liar in it, except one."
If the article in the Times, to which I have alluded, be too laudatory, as Sir George C. Lewis thinks, that in the Daily News should be read as a corrective. Possibly, if the two were taken together, like bread and cheese, as Gray tells us he read poetry and prose, a truthful portraiture might be obtained.
On the whole, the career of Lockhart, though ultimately embittered by those calamities which are inseparable from human destiny, was a
- ↑ Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton, By Edward H. Dering, 1878, 8vo, p. 44.
