Andrew Lang: The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart

Nevertheless, on the appearance of Lockhart’s “Life of Scott,” Haydon wrote him a long epistle, complaining of his early cruelties. On Haydon’s own showing this conduct was curiously inconsistent, but his unfortunate temperament, and melancholy end, excuse much in the painter.

Lockhart replied (July 11, 1838):—“I thank you for your two letters, though the second has given me a good deal of pain. Your approbation of the ‘Life of Scott’ is valuable, and might console me for all the abuse it has called forth both on him and me. . . .

It was thus that Lockhart, under a blow which struck at his heart, the loss of his beloved wife, reviewed his early days of raillery. His pleas of youth, of association with an elder friend who should have set him a different example, and of freedom from personal malice, may be accepted even

1 Haydon’s “Autobiography” leaves no doubt on this point.

2 The rest of the letter is a vigorous remonstrance with Haydon on his own fortunes and the causes of them.

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by severe judges. What he wrote about Theodore Hook, might be said about himself. “It is fair to recollect, too, that in the case of Theodore Hook, when he was making his paper so formidably famous, there really could not have been any true personal malignity at work. He was fresh from a colonial life, in which few men’s passions are ever much disturbed by sympathy with the ups and downs of the great parties at home. He had sustained no sort of injury as yet at the hands of either Whigs or Radicals. He knew little, and could have cared nothing, about those who became the objects of his satire. Exquisitely cruel as it often seemed, it was with him a mere skiomachy. Certain men and women were stuck up as types of certain prejudices or delusions; and he set to knocking them down with no more feeling about them, as individual human creatures, than if they had been nine-pins. In all this there was a culpable recklessness—a sad want of thought; but, at the same time, want of reflection is not exactly to be confounded with deliberation of malice.”1

To return to Blackwood. In a matter where the chief sinners, both publicly and privately, in later years, “took blame to themselves,” an apologia cannot now be offered. This is not a case of which we may say, tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner, for all the motives could not be understood, as Lockhart frankly admitted, even immediately after the commission of one of the offences. At best we can put ourselves in the position of the culprits, try to see things and men as they must have seen them; make allowance for prejudice, for the manners of the age, for the vivacities of youth. When all this is done there abides an amount of wrong which is not to be palliated, not to be smiled away.

Yet the periodical, if it began as it went on, was under the direction of Mr. Blackwood himself. “Ma Maga,” he used to call it, according to Lockhart.2 Again, in an unpublished note to Maginn, at the time of Byron’s death, Lockhart says that “Blackwood will not have it,” that is, an attack on Byron, proposed by the Irish writer, which Lockhart deprecates himself. Yet Wilson was, from the beginning, supposed by the curious to be actual editor. Thus Scott, in a letter to Sharpe of September 1817, says, “Wilson will be a spirited charioteer, or I mistake him, and take the corner with four starved authors in hand, in great style.” Assuredly neither Lockhart nor Wilson would have publicly disassociated himself from any responsibility and fixed it upon his friend alone.

All this is demonstrably erroneous reasoning: the facts, too, are erroneous. Mrs. Gordon had access, she says, to the arcana imperii of the house of Blackwood, only after the date 1826. To the authorship of early articles, I myself have, what Mrs. Gordon had not, the clues of statements in Lockhart’s hitherto unpublished letters. There is also internal evidence of style, no two styles being (as a rule) so easily distinguishable as the “swashing blow” of Wilson, and the rapier thrust of Lockhart. Again, in 1817-1819, Lockhart knew not one

1 “Thus it is possible his desire to review Coleridge favourably in the Edinburgh may have arisen from a wish to do justice to that great man, the opportunity for which was denied in the pages of Blackwood” (Mrs. Gordon’s note.)

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of the Lake School; Wilson knew them all, and all the ins and outs of their little domestic politics and quarrels. Lockhart’s deep and earnest admiration of Wordsworth’s poems has already been apparent in his letters, nor was Wilson, as a rule, a less ardent advocate. Which of the twain, then, is to blame for personal attacks on men who were the intimates of the elder partner, while they were personally strangers to the junior? On December 5, 1819, Lockhart, in a letter to Christie, disclaims any personal knowledge of any single victim of the Magazine. “With Wilson the case is most different. With Coleridge, Wordsworth, Jeffrey, &c, &c., in short with all that have been attacked, he has lived, at some time or other, on terms of intimacy, and, therefore, they have all in turn complained grievously of him.” Whoever attacked Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lockhart was not the man, and one assault on Wordsworth is included in Wilson’s acknowledged works: in “Noctes Ambrosianæ September 1825.

Lockhart, in the letter cited, refers to an extraordinary “bam” attempted by Wilson on Wordsworth, and much talked of in London, as having occurred during his own absence in Germany. Wilson’s conduct, in fact, is attributable to his amazing lack of consistency, his want of any “tie-beam,” as Mr. Carlyle says. Meanwhile, about Wilson’s friends, “the Lakers,” Lockhart, at twenty-three, knew nothing personally, except what Wilson told him.

“They” (Lockhart’s letters) “are as characteristic of his satirical powers as any of those off-hand caricatures that shred his best friends to pieces, leaving the most poetical of them as bereft of that beautifying property as if they had been born utterly without it.” Pictorial caricature, even in the pages of Mr. Punch or elsewhere, is very seldom resented even by the most thin-skinned of mortals, and Mrs. Gordon herself publishes a caricature of her father. Lockhart, who certainly had whatever “beautifying property” a “poetical” aspect may entail, frequently “shred” himself “to pieces,” with his pencil. Mrs. Gordon’s “Life of Christopher North” has been widely read, as it deserved to be, and has been long in the field—in fact, since 1862. This remonstrance is therefore necessary. For too many years Lockhart has been made the solitary scapegoat of Wilson, and of Blackwood in general.

Lockhart, though he began so young, was, I think, a critic eminently well equipped with learning, and, where he touched on the classics of any language, eminently well endowed with delicacy and breadth of appreciation. But where party prejudice came in, and contemporaries were his themes, he was no better, often, than other literary judges of his

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time. Lest the reader, inexpert in the fugitive productions of that day, should think Lockhart a prodigy of dark critical malevolence, I would ask his attention for the notice of Coleridge’s “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan,” which appeared, a year before, in the Edinburgh Review (September 1816). Coleridge was, of course, a Tory, as Leigh Hunt and Keats were Liberals. He was also a man hardly treated by fortune, and thwarted by much that was now, “humanly speaking,” beyond control in his own constitution and character. Moreover, he was very poor, and had sold his fragment, “Christabel,” to Mr. Murray for a small sum, which two editions probably did not repay to the publisher. His relations with Jeffrey, the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, I shall take on Jeffrey’s own, not on Coleridge’s larger estimate. In 1810 they had met at Southey’s, and, after a pleasant hour or two of talk, had passed the next day “in the fields,” Coleridge dining with Jeffrey at his inn. Jeffrey, who did not care for metaphysics, “exhorted him rather to give us more poetry.” “We spoke, too, of ‘Christabel,’ and I advised him to publish it,” knowing nothing of it but four or five lines quoted by Scott, who “spoke favourably of it,” and said that to “Christabel” “he was indebted for the metrical method of his ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel.’”1

This odious critique is forgotten, perhaps because nobody could say that it “killed” Coleridge. It only killed his hopes of profit and fame (he being poor, ill, and in sad estate) from the most original compositions in the range of English literature. There is no critical vice which his Whig critic does not exhibit. With the blind eye, the deaf ear, the insensible heart, are allied gross and mean personal impudence, frequent imputations of insanity, and the wonted political rancour. An advertisement of the book mentioned that Byron had praised “Christabel” as “a wild and singularly original and beautiful poem.” Jeffrey knew that Scott was of the same mind, but the opinions of poets on poetry were nothing to him and his reviewer. “It seems,” says his man, “nowadays to be the practice of that once irritable race to laud each other without bounds; and one can hardly avoid suspecting, that what is thus lavishly advanced may be laid out with a view to being repaid with interest.” This is an elegant insinuation against Byron and Scott!

I have introduced this digression to show the style of reviewing which was current and admired, in the most celebrated critical organ of the time, when Lockhart, almost as a boy, began to review. This was the model set him by the Whig Aristarchus, “the first of British critics.” And, if Jeffrey, mature, famous, omnipotent, could put his seal on the unspeakable meanness and stupidity, personal insolence, sordid imputations, and political clap-trap of the review of “Christabel,” I ask that some lenience may be shown to political partisanship, personalities, bad taste, as displayed by a raw young Tory of twenty-three, in his remarks on poems, which no one can regard as approaching in excellence to Coleridge’s masterpiece; poems written by persons whose salt he had never eaten, whose faces he had never seen, whom he judged only by hostile rumour, or on the evidence of their own undeniable affectations.

The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (not yet nominally Blackwood’s) commenced in April 1817. The Editors were Mr. Thomas Pringle and Mr.

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Cleghorn, an authority on Farming. The prospectus announced the serial as “a Repository of whatever may be most interesting to general readers.” Antiquarianism was to be made a strong point: the articles in other magazines were to be criticised: “The Register” of public events, foreign and domestic, was almost to supersede the “Annual Registers,” in one of which, the Edinburgh Annual Register, Scott did much work. Nothing could be more blameless and pacific: the periodical, in brief, was to be an improvement on the old Scots Magazine, then in decay. Whether or not Lockhart was the author of the essays on Greek Tragedy, which began in the first number, his biographer has no documentary means of ascertaining. They are attributed to Lockhart by Mr. Gleig, in his Quarterly Review article, and they have none of Wilson’s characteristic diction. They bear the signature “Zeta,” later attached to the essays on the Cockney School, but such signatures were used in the early Blackwoods for the purpose of perplexing.1 The translations from the “Prometheus Bound” are certainly worthy of Lockhart, and do not justify the writer’s own remark, that “the inspiration of poetry vanishes at the touch of translation.” An example may be offered. Prometheus is describing the state of mankind before he came, the hero of the introduction of the Arts:

Shelley would not have thought otherwise, and in these passages we probably discern the true self

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of Lockhart, at ease in the native air of his genius, as in the cold glade of frosty Caucasus.

Possibly the motive is to be found in the end of the article. Maturin had written a tragedy, which Scott, in a letter to Terry, calls (after certain censures), “grand and powerful, the language most animated and poetical, and the characters sketched with a masterly enthusiasm.” This play was “Bertram.” Now Coleridge, in a critique (re-published in his “Biographia Literaria”), had described “Bertram” as “this superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, this felo de se and thief captain, this loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination, whose best deed is the having saved his betters from the degradation of hanging him, by turning Jack Ketch to himself.” “Bertram” had superseded Coleridge’s “Zapolya,” at Covent Garden.

It was thus that men like Coleridge wrote in the brave days of old! The assailant of Coleridge, in

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Blackwood, contrasts his conduct with that of Scott, Byron, and Henry Mackenzie, who had all praised and encouraged the unfortunate Maturin. “Let me entreat you,” says Scott to Maturin (Feb. 26, 1818), “to view Coleridge’s violence as a thing to be contemned, not retaliated—the opinion of a British public may surely be set in honest opposition to that of one disappointed and wayward man. You should also consider, en bon Chrétien, that Coleridge has had some room to be spited at the world.”1

This attack on Coleridge in Blackwood is a fair example, not only of the violence, but of the incalculable waywardness of the Magazine. Wilson, just before the onslaught appeared, was anxious, as we saw, to praise Coleridge; Lockhart, in a very short space of time, is found applauding the author of “Christabel,” and, in later life, liked and admired him greatly. Coleridge was no Whig, no Edinburgh reviewer. Yet he was set upon and mauled, apparently in revenge for Maturin, who was “no kith or kin” to the Edinburgh Tories. The proceeding, whoever the author may have been, was characteristic.2 The vagaries of the Magazine were indeed inexplicable. Coleridge was presently taken into favour; Haydon was insulted till he was known; contributors themselves were as likely as any one else to be attacked. The chief writers, as

1 The real motive for the attack on Coleridge was too vague to be traced, and too childish to be revealed here.

2 The article was not by Lockhart; he names the author in a letter to Christie.

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Haydon reports a saying of Scott’s, were “like bears in a china shop.” As Blackwood could certainly assert himself, while Wilson was a man of mature years, with an ambition to instruct youth from a Chair of Moral Philosophy, the recklessness of their periodical is even more astonishing than its violence.

The chief enemies, while friends were insecure, were of course the Whigs, the Edinburgh Review, the “Cockneys,” and the opposition in the persons of Constable, Cleghorn, and Pringle. In “Peter’s Letters,” written while the Magazine was in the flush of its unamiable youth, Lockhart speaks of the Edinburgh Review as offering “a diet of levity and sarcastic indifference,” as discredited in the perpetual croakings of prophecy, with which it certainly laboured to chill the heart of England during the struggle with Napoleon; and as tedious and odious by virtue of its coldness in criticism. “It never praised even the highest efforts of contemporary genius in the spirit of true and genuine earnestness. . . . They never spoke out of the fulness of the heart, in praising any of our great living poets. . . . Looking back now after the lapse of several years, to their accounts of many of these poems (such as Mr. Scott’s, for example) . . . it is quite wonderful to find in what a light and trivial vein the first notices of them had been presented to the public by the Edinburgh Review.” Wonderful it is to read Jeffrey on Wordsworth,

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Jeffrey on “Marmion,” and to remember that he (as he seems in these articles at least) was taken for Sir Oracle. A generous young man might well resent Jeffrey’s carping; his patronising manner when he praises; his cheery contented inaccessibility to what is noble, and to what is nobly spirited in verse. In “Peter’s Letters” Lockhart adds to the sins of the Edinburgh Review, “its occasional religious mockeries.” On this matter, unluckily, there is more to be said later. The Edinburgh Review, and the Whigs in general, were fair game, if the game was fairly played. How unfairly played it was will presently be apparent.

The criticism is not so strong as Coleridge’s censures on “Bertram,” but it is more personal. This kind of thing went on, and was continued in a letter to Leigh Hunt, by Zeta, in the January number of 1818. Zeta, withholding his name for the present (the Examiner had called him a liar, and so forth), declares that he attacks the poet, not the man, as immoral. It was of the man, however, that Keats spoke. The “Tale of Rimini” is “a smiling apology for a crime at once horrible in its effects, and easy in its perpetration,” which can hardly be denied, if we are to be moral.

These lines, written when Keats was the unknown author of a small book of poems, not all worthy of him, and when Hunt was no nearer Shakespeare than usual, were irritating to the most lenient observer; Keats was confused by the Blackwood men with Hunt and Webb; he knew it, he expected attack, and says that, if insulted, and if he meets his enemy, “he must infallibly call him to an account” (November 5, 1817).

After the affair of “The Cockney School” (which, unluckily, had sequels), it is almost a pleasure to reach the open buffoonery and ingenuity of “The Chaldee Manuscript.” Hogg soon claimed the authorship of “The Chaldee.” “I know not what wicked genius put it into my head,” says the Shepherd.1 He adds that Blackwood never thought of publishing it, but “some of the rascals to whom he showed it almost forced him to insert it.” “There is a bouncer!” cries a reviewer of Hogg, apparently Lockhart, or possibly De Quincey, in Blackwood for August 1821, and he goes on—

1 “The Mountain Bard.” Third edition. To which is prefixed a Memoir of the Author’s Life, p. 65.

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“About the subject of ‘The Chaldee,’ let me now speak the truth.” Christopher North, the writer himself, Blackwood, “and a reverend gentleman of this city, alone know the perpetrator. . . . It was the same person who murdered Begbie,” the bank porter, whose death is an undiscovered mystery to this hour. “Like Mr. Bowles and Ali Pasha, he was a mild man of unassuming manners, a scholar and a gentleman. It is quite a vulgar error to suppose him a ruffian. He was sensibility itself, and would not hurt a fly. But it was a disease with him to excite public emotion. Though he had an amiable wife and a vast family, he never was happy, unless he saw the world staring like a stuck pig. With respect to his murdering Begbie, as it is called, he knew the poor man well, and had frequently given him both small sums of money, and articles of wearing apparel.” However he decided that, by seeming to slay and rob Begbie, “there would be no end of public emotion, to use his own constant phrase on occasions of this nature. He was always kind to the poor man’s widow, who was rather a gainer by her husband’s death. I have reason to believe that he ultimately regretted the act, but there can be no doubt that his enjoyment was great for many years. . . . He confessed ‘The Chaldee,’ and the murder, the day before he died, to the reverend gentleman specified, and was sufficiently penitent; yet, with that inconsistency not unusual in dying men, almost his last words

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were (indistinctly mumbled to himself,) ‘It ought not to have been left out of the other editions.’”

“After this plain statement Hogg must look extremely foolish. We shall next have him claiming the murder likewise, I suppose; but he is totally incapable of either.”

Professor Ferrier, in his edition of “Noctes Ambrosianæ,” does not wholly bear out the statements either of Hogg or of this writer. Hogg, he says, conceived the idea, and wrote, in addition to unpublished portions, Chapter I. i.-xxxvii., with two or three other verses. “The rest of the production was the workmanship of Wilson and Lockhart.”

As to the authorship of “The Chaldee,” habemus confitentem reum. On January 27, 1818, Lockhart wrote from Edinburgh to Christie, “I never certainly have been more troubled in mind than for some two or three months past,”—apparently since Blackwood appeared on October 20, 1817. “The Chaldee Manuscript” has excited prodigious noise here—it was the sole subject of conversation for two months. . . . The history of it is this: Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, sent up an attack on Constable the bookseller, respecting some private dealings of his with Blackwood. Wilson and I liked the idea of introducing the whole panorama of the town in that sort of dialect. We drank punch one night from eight till eight in the morning, Blackwood being by with anecdotes, and the result is before you. . . .”

“The Chaldee” set all Edinburgh in a flame. The Scot is not famed for being able to take a joke, especially a joke aimed at himself. People cried “Blasphemy,” because of the Oriental character of the style, which had good Jacobite precedent in “The Chronicle of Charles, the Young Man,” published in that year of grace abounding 1745.1 The “Chaldean” text was from the “Bibliothèque Royale” (Salle 2, No. 53, B.A.M.M.).2 Monsieur Silvestre de Sacy (of whom the Shepherd can have known little) was understood to be occupied with an edition of the original.

“The great Magician, who dwelleth in the old fortress hard by the river Jordan” was next appealed to. Sir Walter was très Normand, and gave identical answers to the man in plain apparel, and to the man crafty in council. “He afterwards confessed,” says Lockhart, “that the Chaldæan author had given a sufficiently accurate version of what passed on the occasion.” Then came Professor Jamieson, Sir David Brewster, Tytler the historian, and, alas, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe! Now Sharpe, at or about this time, was editing Kirkton’s contemporary MS. “History of the Covenant,” with notes on all the scandals about the Covenanters, for example, about the prowess of the hero of Cherrytrees. Wilson had a leaning to Covenanters, Lockhart’s ancestors had been “Whigs frae Bothwell Brig,” and their fellow-contributor,

1 Letter to Constable, October 8, 1818, in “Archibald Constable,” ii. 339.

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Dr. M’Crie, was extremely Presbyterian. Sharpe’s love of scandal, and his amusing notes to Kirkton, may have suggested what “The Chaldee” says of his voice, “even like the voice of the unclean bird which buildeth its nest in the corner of the temple” (Kirkton). Sharpe was very angry; he complained to Scott, who said that his connection with the magazine was through Will Laidlaw. Laidlaw wrote the historical chronicle of events from month to month. Scott, it seems, had secured for him this appointment, and Laidlaw was his chief link with the magazine. Sharpe sneers at Laidlaw—“a person of whom I never heard.” Scott added that Blackwood had sent him an apologetic letter, “stating that the offensive article had been inserted against his will,” and said that his remonstrances made Blackwood omit the article in later editions.

In “The Chaldee” a Veiled Man now aids Blackwood with a list of names of contributors, “the beautiful Leopard from the valley of the palm trees” (Wilson), and “from a far country, the Scorpion, who delighteth to sting the faces of men” (Lockhart), “and the great wild Boar from the Forest of Lebanon” (which men call Ettrick Forest); “and the Griffin came with a roll of the names of those whose blood had been shed between his teeth; and I saw him stand over the body of one that had been buried long in the grave, defending it from all men.” The Griffin is the Rev. Dr. Thomas M’Crie, the Biographer of

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Knox, and from his part in Blackwood arose contendings, and the shedding of much ink. Sir William Hamilton (who abode not long with them) is “the black Eagle of the desert, whose cry is as the sound of an unknown tongue, which flieth over the ancient cities, and hath his dwelling among the tombs of the wise men.” Constable now appeals to Jeffrey, “a familiar spirit unto whom he had sold himself. But the spirit was a wicked spirit and a cruel,” who helped him not. Leslie (Professor of Mathematics) is appealed to, and next the Rev. Professor Playfair. “He also is of the seed of the prophets, and ministered in the temple while he was yet young; but he went out, and became one of the scoffers” (Edinburgh Reviewers). These, too, would not aid Constable. Scott answered as he did to Blackwood. Macvey Napier, and a crowd of forgotten folk, rallied to the man crafty in council, including “John, the Brother of James, a man of low stature, who giveth out merry things, and is a lover of fables from his youth up,” that is, “Leeing Johnny,” John Ballantyne. “And there followed many women which knew not their right hand from their left, also some cattle.”

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John Knox (1514 c.-1572) The founder of Presbyterianism in Scotland.

William Laidlaw (1779-1845) The early friend of James Hogg and Sir Walter Scott's steward and amanuensis.

Sir John Leslie (1766-1832) Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University, author of Experimental Enquiries into the Nature and Properties of Heat (1804), and contributor to the Edinburgh Review.

John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) Editor of the Quarterly Review (1825-1853); son-in-law of Walter Scott and author of the Life of Scott 5 vols (1838).

John Hugh Lockhart (1821-1831) The first child of John Gibson Lockhart and his wife Sophia, for whom Sir Walter Scott wrote Tales of a Grandfather (1828-1831).

Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831) Scottish man of letters, author of The Man of Feeling (1770) and editor of The Mirror (1779-80) and The Lounger (1785-87).

William Maginn (1794-1842) Irish translator, poet, and Tory journalist who contributed to Blackwood's and Fraser's Magazines under a variety of pseudonyms.

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) English writer and reformer; she published Illustrations of Political Economy, 9 vols (1832-34) and Society in America (1837).

Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824) Anglo-Irish clergyman, novelist, and playwright patronized by Walter Scott; author of the tragedy Betram (1816) and the novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).

Thomas McCrie (1772-1835) Scottish seceding divine and historian; he was professor of divinity at Edinburgh (1816-1818) and wrote Life of John Knox (1812).

John Milton (1608-1674) English poet and controversialist; author of Comus (1634), Lycidas (1638), Areopagitica (1644), Paradise Lost (1667), and other works.

John Murray II (1778-1843) The second John Murray began the Quarterly Review in 1809 and published works by Scott, Byron, Austen, Crabbe, and other literary notables.

Macvey Napier (1776-1847) Scottish barrister, editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and from 1829 editor of the Edinburgh Review.

Emperor Napoleon I (1769-1821) Military leader, First Consul (1799), and Emperor of the French (1804), after his abdication he was exiled to Elba (1814); after his defeat at Waterloo he was exiled to St. Helena (1815).

John Playfair (1748-1819) Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University and Whig man of letters who contributed to the Edinburgh Review.

Thomas Pringle (1789-1834) Scottish poet, journalist, and abolitionist, who after a brief stint as one of the founding editors of Blackwood's Magazine emigrated to southern Africa.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) Scottish poet, novelist, antiquary, biographer, editor, and sheriff.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) The Bard of Avon.

Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781-1851) Scottish poet, painter, editor, antiquary, and eccentric; he edited James Kirkton's Secret and True History of the Church of Scotland (1817) with elaborate notes mocking his author.

John Sheffield, first duke of Buckingham and Normanby (1647-1721) The patron of Dryden and friend of Pope; author of An Essay upon Poetry (1682).

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) English poet, with Byron in Switzerland in 1816; author of Queen Mab (1813), The Revolt of Islam (1817), The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Adonais (1821).

Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838) French linguist and orientalist; he published Exposé de la religion des Druzes, 2 vols (1838).

Robert Southey (1774-1843) Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose works, among them the Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813), History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).

Edmund Spenser (1552 c.-1599) English poet, author of The Shepheards Calender (1579) and The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596).

Sir John Suckling (1609-1641 c.) Cavalier poet and playwright whose Session of the Poets (1637) was often imitated.

Daniel Terry (1789-1829) English actor; after a career in provincial theater made his London debut in 1812. A close friend of Walter Scott, he performed in theatrical adaptations of Scott's novels.

Patrick Fraser Tytler (1791-1849) Sottish barrister, son of Alexander Fraser Tytler; he published The Life of the Admirable Crichton (1819), History of Scotland (1828-43), and other works.

George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham (1592-1628) English courtier and favorite of King James who traveled to Madrid with Prince Charles in pursuit of a spouse (1623).

Cornelius Francis Webbe (1789-1858) English poet and member of Leigh Hunt's circle; he published several collections of poems and contributed to the magazines.

John Wilson [Christopher North] (1785-1854) Scottish poet and Tory essayist, the chief writer for the “Noctes Ambrosianae” in Blackwood's Magazine and professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University (1820).

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) With Coleridge, author of Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. (1817-1980). Begun as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, Blackwood's assumed the name of its proprietor, William Blackwood after the sixth number. Blackwood was the nominal editor until 1834.

Edinburgh Annual Register. 19 vols (1808-1826). Edited by Walter Scott; it was a perennial money-sink for the Ballantyne concern.

The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany. 18 vols (1817-1826). Thomas Pringle and James Cleghorn were among the original editors of this continuation of the venerable Scots Magazine.

The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal. (1802-1929). Founded by Francis Jeffery, Sydney Smith, and Henry Brougham, the Edinburgh Review was for decades a principal organ of Whig opinion in Britain.

The Examiner. (1808-1881). Founded by John and Leigh Hunt, this weekly paper divided its attention between literary matters and radical politics; William Hazlitt was among its regular contributors.

John Bull. (1820-1892). A scurrilous Tory weekly newspaper edited by Theodore Hook.

The Literary Pocket-book: or, Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art. (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1818-1822). Edited by Leigh Hunt; five volumes were published, Keats and Shelley were among the contributors.

The Quarterly Review. (1809-1967). Published by John Murray, the Quarterly was instigated by Walter Scott as a Tory rival to the Edinburgh Review. It was edited by William Gifford to 1824, and by John Gibson Lockhart from 1826 to 1853.

The Scots Magazine. 65 vols (1739-1803). Continued as The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany (1804-17) and The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany (1817-26).

Aeschylus (525 BC c.-456 BC c.) Prometheus Bound. (450 BC c.). The inspiration for Byron's ‘Prometheus’ (1816) and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820).

The Chronicle of Charles, the Young Man. ([Edinburgh]: [1745]). A Jacobite tract, sometimes attributed to William Boyd, 4th Earl of Kilmarnock.

L'Encyclopédie. 17 vols (Paris: 1751-1772). Edited by Diderot and d'Alembert.

“Noctes Ambrosianae” in Blackwood's Magazine. (1822-1835). A series of dialogues on literary topics set in Ambrose's Tavern in which the interlocutors are semi-fictional characters, among them John Wilson and James Hogg.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) Biographia Literaria, or, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions. 2 vols (London: Rest Fenner, 1817). There were also two New York editions in 1817.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) “Christabel” in Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep. (J. Murray, 1816). Only the first part of "Christabel" was published in this volume.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) “Kubla Khan” in Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep. (J. Murray, 1816). A poetical fragment of a dream inspired by reading Purchas's Pilgrimage.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) “The Pains of Sleep” in Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep. (J. Murray, 1816).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) Zapolya: a Christmas Tale, in Two Parts: the Prelude entitled ‘The Usurper's Fortune; ’ and the Sequel entitled ‘The Usurper's Fate ’. (London: Rest Fenner, 1817). In imitation of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale.

Thomas Constable (1812-1881) Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents. 3 vols (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1873). By the bookseller's son.

George Robert Gleig (1796-1888) “Life of John Wilson” in Quarterly Review. Vol. 113 (January 1863): 208-240. A review of Mary Gordon's life of her father.

George Robert Gleig (1796-1888) “Life of Lockhart” in Quarterly Review. Vol. 116 (October 1864): 439-482.

Mary Gordon [née Wilson] (1814-1862 fl.) Christopher North: a Memoir of John Wilson. 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1862). Reprinted 1879.

Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846) Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter: from his Autobiography and Journals. 3 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853). Edited and compiled by Tom Taylor.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) “Coleridge's Christabel” in Edinburgh Review. Vol. 27 (September 1816): 58-67. This hostile review was incorrectly attributed to Thomas Moore.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) “Coleridge's Literary Life” in Edinburgh Review. Vol. 28 (August 1817): 488-515.

James Hogg [The Ettrick Shepherd] (1770-1835) “Chaldee Manuscript” in Blackwood's Magazine. Vol. 2 No. 12 (October 1817): 89-96. A satirical allegory on the Edinburgh Whigs that originated with Hogg and was printed in Blackwood's Magazine for October 1817; it was afterwards suppressed.

James Hogg [The Ettrick Shepherd] (1770-1835) The Mountain Bard, consisting of Ballads and Songs founded on Facts and Legendary Tales. (Edinburgh: Arch. Constable and Co., 1807). With a memoir of the author revised in later editions.

James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. 3 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1850).

James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) The Feast of the Poets, with Notes and other Pieces in Verse. (London: J. Cawthorn, 1814). A Menippean symposium that had originally appeared in Hunt's Reflector 2 No. 4 (1811) 314-23.

James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) The Reflector, a Quarterly Magazine, on Subjects of Philosophy, Politics, and the Liberal Arts . 2 vols (1811). A collection of periodical essays.

James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) The Story of Rimini, a Poem. (London: Murray, 1816). Hunt's Italian tale of illicit love, despite or because of the storm of criticism it aroused, was several times reprinted in Britain and the United States.

John Keats (1795-1821) “The Human Seasons” in Literary Pocket-Book. (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1819). A sonnet.

John Keats (1795-1821) The Letters of John Keats. (London: Reeves & Turner, 1895). Edited by H Buxton Forman.

John Keats (1795-1821) “To Ailsa Rock” in Literary Pocket-Book. (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1819). A sonnet, written during the 1818 tour to Scotland.

John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) “Letter from Z. to Mr Leigh Hunt” in Blackwood's Magazine. Vol. 2 No. 10 (January 1818): 414-17. Responding to Leigh Hunt's remarks in the Examiner.

John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, bart.. 7 vols (Edinburgh: R. Cadell, 1837-38).

John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) “On the Cockney School of Poetry” in Blackwood's Magazine. (1817-1825). A series of eight Blackwood's Magazine articles signed “Z” that ridicule Leigh Hunt's coterie; the first appeared in October 1817, the last in July 1825.

John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk. 3 vols (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1819). An anonymous collection of pen-portraits, several times reprinted; John Wilson contributed to the volumes.

John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) Theodore Hook: A Sketch. (London: John Murray, 1852). Reprinted from the Quarterly Review; fourth edition, 1853.

Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824) Bertram, or, the Castle of St. Aldobrand: a Tragedy in Five Acts. (London: J. Murray, 1816). A Byronic drama produced with great success by Edmund Kean at Drury Lane.

Thomas McCrie (1772-1835) The Life of John Knox: containing Illustrations of the History of the Reformation in Scotland, with Biographical Notices of the principal Reformers, and Sketches of the Progress of Literature in Scotland. (Edinburgh: J. Ogle and W. Blackwood, 1812).

Macvey Napier (1776-1847) Hypocrisy unveiled, and Calumny detected: in a Review of Blackwood's Magazine. (Edinburgh: Francis Pillans, 1818). Once attributed to the advocate James Grahame (1790-1842); there were at least four editions.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) The Lay of the Last Minstrel: a Poem. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805). The first of Scott's metrical romances, the Lay recounts the love of Margaret of Branksome for Henry of Cranstoun during a sixteenth-century border raid.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) Marmion; a Tale of Flodden Field. (Edinburgh: Constable, 1808). A narrative poem set in the sixteenth century; the six cantos are introduced by epistles addressed to William Stewart Rose, James Marriot, William Erskine, James Skene, George Ellis, and Richard Heber.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) The Works of John Dryden, now first collected. 18 vols (W. Miller, 1808).

Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781-1851) The Secret and True History of the Church of Scotland, from the Restoration to the year 1678. By James Kirkton. To which is added, An Account of the Murder of Archbishop Sharp, by James Russell. (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne, 1817). Edited by the arch-Tory antiquary, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the late John Murray, with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the House, 1768-1843. 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1891).

Sir John Suckling (1609-1641 c.) “Session of the Poets” in Fragmenta Aurea. (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1646). Written c. 1637.

John Wilson [Christopher North] (1785-1854) “Observations on Coleridge” in Blackwood's Magazine. Vol. 2 (October 1817): 3-18. A hostile, unsigned review, motivated by the attack on Charles Maturin in Biographia Literaria.

INFORMATION FROM TEI HEADER

Source Description:

Author: Lang, Andrew, 1844-1912

Title: The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897).

Electronic Edition:

Series: Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org

Encoding Description: Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed. Obvious and unambiguous compositors’ errors have been silently corrected.

Markup and editing by: David Hill Radcliffe

Completed January 2011

Publication Statement:

Publisher: Center for Applied Technologies in the Humanities, Virginia Tech

Availability: Published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License