born in 1771 and died in 1832, and all
that is special in his life belongs to the last six years of it. Even
so the materials for the story are of the simplest--enough, perhaps,
under the hand of an artist to furnish forth a tale of the length of
Trollope's _The Warden_. In picturesqueness, in color, in wealth of
episode and +peripeteia+, Scott's career will not compare for a
moment with the career of Coleridge, for instance. Yet who could
endure to read the life of Coleridge in six volumes? De Quincey, in an
essay first published the other day by Dr. Japp, calls the story of
the Coleridges "a perfect romance ... a romance of beauty, of
intellectual power, of misfortune suddenly illuminated from heaven, of
prosperity suddenly overcast by the waywardness of the individual."
But the "romance" has been written twice and thrice, and desperately
dull reading it makes in each case. Is it then an accident that
Coleridge has been unhappy in his biographers, while Lockhart
succeeded once for all, and succeeded so splendidly?

It is surely no accident. Coleridge is an ill man to read about just
as certainly as Scott is a good man to read about; and the secret is
just that Scott had character and Coleridge had not. In writing of the
man of the "graspless hand," the biographer's own hand in time grows
graspless on the pen; and in reading of him our hands too grow
graspless on the page. We pursue the man and come upon group after
group of his friends; and each as we demand "What have you done with
Coleridge?" answers "He was here just now, and we helped him forward a
little way." Our best biographies are all of men and women of
character--and, it may be added, of beautiful character--of Johnson,
Scott, and Charlotte Bronte.

There are certain people whose biographies _ought_ to be long. Who
could learn too much concerning Lamb? And concerning Scott, who will
not agree with Lockhart's remark in the preface to his abridged
edition of 1848:--"I should have been more willing to produce an
enlarged edition; for the interest of Sir Walter's history lies, I
think, peculiarly in its minute details"? You may explore here, and
explore there, and still you find pure gold; for the man was gold
right through.

So in the present volume every line is of interest because we refer it
to Scott's known character and test it thereby. The result is always
the same; yet the employment does not weary. In themselves the letters
cannot stand, as mere w