at
almost every one considers the second best biography on a large scale,
in English. His _Spanish Ballads_ are admitted, by those who know the
originals, to have done them almost more than justice; and by those who
do not know those originals, to be charming in themselves. His novels,
if not masterpieces, have kept the field better than most: I saw a very
badly printed and flaringly-covered copy of _Reginald Dalton_ for sale
at the bookstall at Victoria Station the day before writing these words.
He was a pillar of the _Quarterly_, of _Blackwood_, of _Fraser_, at a
time when quarterly and monthly magazines played a greater part in
literature than they have played since or are likely to play again. He
edited one of these periodicals for thirty years. "Nobody," as Mr.
Browning has it, "calls him a dunce." Yet there is no collected edition
of his works; his sober, sound, scholarly, admirably witty, and, with
some very few exceptions, admirably catholic literary criticism, is
rarely quoted; and to add to this, there is a curious prepossession
against him, which, though nearly a generation has passed since his
death, has by no means disappeared.[18] Some years ago, in a periodical
where I was, for the most part, allowed to say exactly what I liked in
matters literary, I found a sentence laudatory of Lockhart, from the
purely literary point of view, omitted between proof and publication. It
so happened that the editor of this periodical could not even have known
Lockhart personally, or have been offended by his management of the
_Quarterly_, much less by his early _fredaines_ in _Blackwood_ and
_Fraser_. It was this circumstance that first suggested to me the notion
of trying to supply something like a criticism of this remarkable
critic, which nobody has yet (1884) done, and which seems worth doing.
For while the work of many of Lockhart's contemporaries, famous at the
time, distinctly loses by re-reading, his for the most part does not;
and it happens to display exactly the characteristics which are most
wanting in criticism, biographical and literary, at the present day. If
any one at the outset desires a definition, or at least an enumeration
of those characteristics, I should say that they are sobriety of style
and reserve of feeling, coupled with delicacy of intellectual
appreciation and aesthetic sympathy, a strong and firm creed in matters
political and literary, not excluding that catholicity of judgment which
men of