and after Lockhart's removal to London in 1826 he became the leading spirit and mainspring of Maga, though not formally called its editor. Here he had an admirable vehicle for his extraordinary and exuberant wealth of ideas on all manner of topics. As the presiding genius of the Noctes Ambrosiana-assumed to be records of festive gatherings at Ambrose's tavern in Gabriel's Road, with the Ettrick Shepherd and others as convives-he was clearly more in his element than in the professorial desk. Of the seventy-one Noctes, forty-one were reprinted in his works as Wilson's own. When the series began Lockhart was, often the author or part-author, sometimes Maginn, and Hogg had, or was allowed to suppose he had, a large share in them; latterly they fell more and more entirely to Wilson, who wrote with extraordinary facility and copiousness. Between 1826 and 1852 he contributed over three hundred articles to Blackwood. For one number in especial Mrs Oliphant reports him to have written fifty-six out of one hundred and forty-two pages. The contrast between the professor of ethics and the gymnast and cock-fighter was not more marked than was the contrast between John Wilson, poet and romancer, and Christopher North, critic and miscellaneous writer. In Maga 'Kit North' was a trenchant, and even savage, reviewer and satirist, a humourist vehement, rollicking, and reckless, audacious and luxuriant in diction, at times startling with gleams of profound insight, but often utterly obtuse, perverse, defiant of courtesy, good taste, and good sense. His humour is constantly strained to burlesque and tedious extravaganza, or even degenerates into mere buffoonery. He was often generous, but could be unkind and unfair; in a single number of the Noctes he carped at Wordsworth (whom he had been one of the first to praise) and belittled Scott, while he not so unjustly called a less-known author a jackass. The criticisms sometimes evoked vivacious replies: Tennyson's to 'Crusty Christopher' is well known. The outstanding defect, on the other hand, of his poetry (The Isle of Palms, 1812 The City of the Plague, 1816) and of his prose tales (The Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, 1822; The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay, 1823; The Foresters, 1825) is that he is too uniformly gentle, sweet, tender, pathetic, sentimental, or even mawkish. 'Almost the only passions,' said Jeffrey, with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler sympathies of our nature-tender compassion, confiding affection, and guiltless sorrow. From all these there results, along with a most touching and tranquillising sweetness, a certain monotony and languor, which to those who read poetry for amusement merely will be apt to appear like dullness, and must be felt as a defect by all who have been used to the variety, rapidity, and energy of the popular poetry of the day. In the twenty-four short tales called Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life we find neither the humours of the kailyard nor the characteristics of a vigorous, shrewd, and self-assertive peasantry, with all the defects of their qualities, but a too utterly Arcadian innocence, simplicity, and piety. So likewise in Margaret Lyndsay; the heroine is a humble maiden, whose father, adopting Tom Paine's opinions, is imprisoned on a charge of sedition, becomes an utter reprobate, and elopes with the mistress of a brother-reformer-to the gradual ruin and distress of his innocent family, and their banishment from their country home to a city slum. Of the strongly contrasted, Bohemian Noctes—now to many all but unreadable--Lord Cockburn said: 'There is not so original and curious a work in the English and Scotch languages. It is a most singu lar and delightful outpouring of criticism, politics, and descriptions of feeling, character, and scenery, of verse and prose, and maudlin eloquence, and especially of wild fun. It breathes the very essence of the bacchanalian revel of clever men; and its Scotch is the best Scotch that has been written in modern times.' But it should be added that the Scotch is that of men with a literary training, abounding in doctored English book-words never heard in the vernacular of the Lowlands. Wilson attained to extraordinary eminence in the republic of letters in his own lifetime; Hallam called him a writer of the most ardent and enthusiastic genius, whose eloquence was as the rush of mighty waters. But while his personality is still remembered, even in Scotland the Noctes have lost their extraordinary popularity; the tales are little read, and the poetry quite forgotten. In 1837 Wilson was sore stricken by the death of his wife; in 1840 he suffered from a paralytic affection of the right hand, though he still retained his passion for angling, for Tweed and Yarrow, and for the wilder scenery of Rannoch and Loch Awe. In 1851, when his health was fairly broken, and he had resigned his professorship, he got a pension of £300 per annum; and he died in Edinburgh on the 3rd of April 1854. From Lines 'To a Sleeping Child'. What brighter throne can brightness find Oh, vision fair, that I could be Fair was that face as break of dawn, When o'er its beauty sleep was drawn Like a thin veil that half-concealed The light of soul, and half-revealed. While thy hushed heart with visions wrought, Christopher plays and lands a Tweed Salmon. Springs, summers, autumns, winters-each within itself longer, by many times longer than the whole year of grown-up life, that slips at last through one's fingers like a knotless thread-pass over the curled darling's brow; and look at him now, a straight and strengthy stripling, in the savage spirit of sport, springing over rock-ledge after rock-ledge, nor heeding aught as he plashes knee-deep or waistband-high through river-feeding torrents, to the glorious music of his running and ringing reel, after a tongue-hooked salmon, insanely seeking with the ebb of tide, but all in vain, the white breakers of the sea. No hazel or willow wand, no half-crown rod of ash framed by village wright, is now in his practised hands, of which the very left is dexterous; but a twenty-feet rod of Phin's, all ring-rustling, and a-glitter with the preserving varnish, limber as the attenuating line itself, and lithe to its topmost tenuity as the elephant's proboscis -the hiccory and the horn without twist, knot, or flaw-from butt to fly a faultless taper, 'fine by degrees and beautifully less,' the beauideal of a rod by the skill of cunning craftsman to the senses materialised! A fish-fat, fair, and forty! 'She is a salmon, therefore to be woo'd-she is a salmon, therefore to be won '--but shy, timid, capricious, headstrong, now wrathful and now full of fear, like any other female whom the cruel artist has hooked by lip or heart, and, in spite of all her struggling, will bring to the gasp at last; and then with calm eyes behold her lying in the shade dead, or worse than dead, fast-fading, and to be reillumined no more the lustre of her beauty, insensible to sun or shower, even the most perishable of all perishable things in a world of perishing!-But the salmon has grown sulky, and must be made to spring to the plunging stone. There, suddenly, instinct with new passion, she shoots out of the foam like a bar of silver bullion, and, relapsing into the flood, is in another out. moment at the very head of the waterfall! Give her the butt-give her the butt-or she is gone for ever with the thunder into ten fathom deep !-Now comes the trial of your tackle-and when was Phin ever known to fail at the edge of cliff or cataract? Her snout is southwards -right up the middle of the main current of the hillborn river, as if she would seek its very course, where she was spawned! She still swims swift, and strong, and deep-and the line goes steady, boys, steady-stiff and steady as a Tory in the roar of Opposition. There is yet an hour's play in her dorsal fin-danger in the flap of her tail-and yet may her silver shoulder shatter the gut against a rock. Why, the river was yesterday in spate, and she is fresh run from the sea. All the lesser waterfalls are now level with the flood, and she meets with no impediment or obstruction-the coast is clearno tree-roots here-no floating branches-for during the night they have all been swept down to the salt loch. In medio tutissimus ibis-ay, now you feel she begins to fail-the butt tells now every time you deliver your right. What! another mad leap! yet another sullen plunge! She seems absolutely to have discovered, or rather to be an impersonation of, the Perpetual Motion. Stand back out of the way, you son of a sea-cook!--you in the tattered blue breeches, with the tail of your shirt hanging Who the devil sent you all here, ye vagabonds?Ha! Watty Richie, my man, is that you? God bless your honest laughing phiz! What, Watty, would you think of a Fish like that about Peebles? Tam Grieve never gruppit sae heavy a ane since first he belanged to the Council. - Curse that collie! Ay! well done, Watty! Stone him to Stobo. Confound these stirks -if that white one, with caving horns, kicking heels, and straight-up tail, come bellowing by between us and the river, then, 'Madam! all is lost, except honour !' If we lose this Fish at six o'clock, then suicide at seven. Our will is made—ten thousand to the Foundling -ditto to the Thames Tunnel-ha-ha-my Beauty! Methinks we could fain and fond kiss thy silver side, languidly lying afloat on the foam as if all further resistance now were vain, and gracefully thou wert surrendering thyself to death! No faith in female-she trusts to the last trial of her tail-sweetly workest thou, O Reel of Reels! and on thy smooth axle spinning sleep'st, even, as Milton describes her, like our own worthy planet. Scrope― Bainbridge - Maule-princes among Anglers-oh that you were here! Where the devil is Sir Humphrey? At his retort? By mysterious sympathy-far off at his own Trows, the Kerss feels that we are killing the noblest Fish whose back ever rippled Tom the surface of deep or shallow in the Tweed. Purdie stands like a seer, entranced in glorious vision, beside turreted Abbotsford. Shade of Sandy Govan! Alas! alas! Poor Sandy-why on thy pale face that melancholy smile? - Peter! The Gaff! The Gaff! Into the eddy she sails, sick and slow, and almost with a swirl-whitening as she nears the sand-there she has it-struck right into the shoulder, fairer than that of Juno, Diana, Minerva, or Venus-and lies at last in all her glorious length and breadth of beaming beauty, fit prey for giant or demigod angling before the Flood! (From the Recreations of Christopher North.) Christopher on Wordsworth and Scott. Tickler. How can that be?-Wordsworth says that a great poet must be great in all things. North. Wordsworth often writes like an idiot; and never more so than when he said of Milton, His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart!' For it dwelt in tumult, and mischief, and rebellion. Wordsworth is, in all things, the reverse of Milton-a good man, and a bad poet. Tickler. What!-That Wordsworth whom Maga cries up as the Prince of Poets? North. Be it so; I must humour the fancies of some of my friends. But had that man been a great poet, he would have produced a deep and lasting impression on the mind of England; whereas his verses are becoming less and less known every day, and he is, in good truth, already one of the illustrious obscure. Tickler. I never thought him more than a very ordinary man-with some imagination, certainly, but with no JOHN WILSON. From the Portrait by Sir John Watson Gordon, P.R.S.A. (painted in 1833), in the National Portrait Gallery. grasp of understanding, and apparently little acquainted with the history of his kind. My God! to compare such a writer with Scott and Byron ! North. And yet, with his creed, what might not a great poet have done?-That the language of poetry is but the language of strong human passion! That in the great elementary principles of thought and feeling, common to all the race, the subject-matter of poetry is to be sought and found!-That enjoyment and suffering, as they wring and crush, or expand and elevate, men's hearts, are the sources of song!-And what, pray, has he made out of this true and philosophical creed?-A few ballads (pretty at the best), two or three moral fables, some natural description of scenery, and half-adozen narratives of common distress or happiness. Not one single character has he created-not one incident -not one tragical catastrophe. He has thrown no light on man's estate here below; and Crabbe, with all his defects, stands immeasurably above Wordsworth as the Poet of the Poor. Tickler. Good. And yet the youngsters, in that absurd Magazine of yours, set him up to the stars as their idol, and kiss his very feet, as if the toes were of gold. North. Well, well; let them have their own way awhile. I confess that the Excursion' is the worst poem, of any character, in the English language. It contains about two hundred sonorous lines, some of which appear to be fine, even in the sense as well as the sound. The remaining seven thousand three hundred are quite ineffectual. Then, what labour the builder of that lofty rhyme must have undergone! It is, in its own way, a small Tower of Babel, and all built by a single man! . . . North. Scott's poetry puzzles me-it is often very bad. Tickler. Very. North. Except when his martial soul is up, he is but a tame and feeble writer. His versification in general flows on easily-smoothly-almost sonorously-but seldom or never with impetuosity or grandeur. There is no strength, no felicity in his diction-and the substance of his poetry is neither rich nor rare. The atmosphere is becoming every moment more oppressive. How stands the Therm. ? Tickler. Ninety. But then when his martial soul is up-and up it is at sight of a spear-point or a pennonthen indeed you hear the true poet of chivalry. What care I, Kit, for all his previous drivelling-if drivelling it be-and God forbid I should deny drivelling to any poet, ancient or modern-for now he makes my very soul to burn within me-and, coward and civilian though I be—yes, a most intense and insuperable coward, prizing life and limb beyond all other earthly possessions, and loath to shed one single drop of blood either for my King or country-yet such is the trumpet-power of the song of that son of genius that I start from my old elbow-chair, up with the poker, tongs, or shovel, no matter which, and flourishing it round my head, cry, Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!' and then, dropping my voice and returning to my padded bottom, whisper, 'Were the last words of Marmion!' North. Bravo-bravo- bravo! Tickler. I care not one single curse for all the criticism that ever was canted, or decanted, or recanted. Neither does the world. The world takes a poet as it finds him, and seats him above or below the salt. The world is as obstinate as a million mules, and will not turn its head on one side or another for all the shouting of the critical population that ever was shouted. It is very possible that the world is a bad judge. Well, then-appeal to posterity, and be hanged to you-and posterity will affirm the judgment with costs. North. How you can jabber away so, in such a temperature as this, confounds me. You are indeed a singular old man. Tickler. Therefore I say that Scott is a Homer of a poet, and so let him doze when he has a mind to it; for no man I know is better entitled to an occasional half-canto of slumber. North. Did you ever meet any of the Lake-Poets in private society? Tickler. Five or six times. Wordsworth has a grave, solemn, pedantic, awkward, out-of-the-worldish look about him, that rather puzzles you as to his probable profession, till he begins to speak-and then, to be sure, you set him down at once for a Methodist preacher. North. I have seen Chantrey's bust. Tickler. The bust flatters his head, which is not intellectual. The forehead is narrow, and the skull altogether too scanty. Yet the baldness, the gravity, and the composure are impressive, and, on the whole, not unpoetical. The eyes are dim and thoughtful, and a certain sweetness of smile occasionally lightens up the strong lines of his countenance with an expression of courteousness and philanthropy. North. Is he not extremely eloquent? Tickler. Far from it. He labours like a whale spouting-his voice is wearisomely monotonous-he does not know when to have done with a subject-oracularly announces perpetual truisms-never hits the nail on the head-and leaves you amazed with all that needless pother, which the simple bard opines to be eloquence, and which passes for such with his Cockney idolaters and his catechumens at Ambleside and Keswick. North. Not during dinner, surely? Tickler. Yes-during breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, and supper-every intermediate moment-nor have I any doubt that he proses all night long in his sleep. (From the Noctes.) The Shepherd on the Poor-Laws. North. Thank heaven for Winter! Would that it lasted all year long! Spring is pretty well in its way, with budding branches and carolling birds, and wimpling burnies, and fleecy skies, and dew-like showers softening and brightening the bosom of old mother-earth. Summer is not much amiss, with umbrageous woods, glittering atmosphere, and awakening thunder-storms. Nor let me libel Autumn in her gorgeous bounty and her beautiful decays. But Winter-dear, cold-handed, warmhearted Winter, welcome thou to my fur-clad bosom ! Thine are the sharp, short, bracing, invigorating days, that screw up muscle, fibre, and nerve, like the strings of an old Cremona discoursing excellent music-thine the long snow-silent or hail-rattling nights, with earthly firesides and heavenly luminaries, for home comforts, or travelling imaginations, for undisturbed imprisonment, or unbounded freedom, for the affections of the heart and the flights of the soul! Thine too Shepherd. Thine too skatin, and curlin, and grewin, and a' sorts o' deevilry amang lads and lasses at rockins and kirns. Beef and greens! Beef and greens! O, Mr North, beef and greens! North. Yes, James, I sympathise with your enthu siasm. Now, and now only, do carrots and turnips deserve the name. The season this of rumps and rounds. Now the whole nation sets in for serious eating-serious and substantial eating, James, half leisure, half labourthe table loaded with a lease of life, and each dish a year. In the presence of that Haggis I feel myself immortal. Shepherd. Butcher-meat, though, and coals, are likely, let me tell you, to sell at a perfec' ransom frae Martinmas to Michaelmas. North. Paltry thought. Let beeves and muttons look up, even to the stars, and fuel be precious as at the Pole. Another slice of the stot, James, another slice of the stot-and, Mr Ambrose, smash that half-ton lump of black diamond till the chimney roar and radiate like Mount Vesuvius. - Why so glum, Tickler?-why so glum? Tickler. This outrageous merriment grates my spirits. I am not in the mood. "Twill be a severe winter, and I think of the poor. North. Why the devil think of the poor at this time of day? Are not wages good, and work plenty, and is not charity a British virtue? Shepherd. I never heard sic even-doun nonsense, Mr Tickler, in a' my born days. I met a puir woman ganging alang the brigg, wi' a deevil's dizzen o' bairns, ilka ane wi' a daud o' breid in the tae haun and a whang o' cheese i' the tither, while their cheeks were a' blawn out like sae many Boreases, wi' something better than wun'; and the mither hersel, a weel-faur'd hizzie, tearin awa at the fleshy shank o' a marrow-bane, mad wi' hunger, but no wi' starvation, for these are twa different things, Mr Tickler. I can assure you that puir folks, mair especially gin they be beggars, are hungry four or five times a day; but starvation is seen at night sitting by an empty aumry and a cauld hearthstane. There's little or nae starvation the now, in Scotlan'! North. The people are, on the whole, well off. -Take some pickles, Timothy, to your steak. Dickson's mustard is superb. Shepherd. I canna say that I a'thegither just properly understan' the system o' the puir-laws; but I ken this, that puir folks there will be till the end o' Blackwood's Magazine, and, that granted, maun there no be some kind o' provision for them, though it may be kittle to calculate the preceese amount? North. Are the English people a dependent, ignorant, grovelling, mean, debased, and brutal people? Shepherd. Not they, indeed—they're a powerfu' population, second only to the Scotch. The English puirlaws had better be cut down some twa-three millions, but no abolished. Thae Political Economy creatures are a cruel set greedier theirsels than gaberlunzies-yet grudging a handfu' o' meal to an auld wife's wallet. Charity is in the heart, not in the head, and the open haun should be stretched out o' the sudden, unasked and free, not held back wi' clutched fingers like a meeser, while the Wiseacre shakes his head in cauldrife calculation, and ties a knot on the purse o' him on principle. North. Well said, James, although perhaps your tenets are scarcely tenable. Shepherd. Scarcely tenable? Wha'll take them frae me either by force or reason? Oh! we're fa en into argument, and that 's what I canna thole at meals. Mr Tickler, there's nae occasion, man, to look sae dounin-the-mouth—everybody kens ye're a man o' genius, without your pretending to be melancholy. Tickler. I have no appetite, James. Shepherd. Nae appeteet! how suld ye hae an appeteet? A bowl o' Mollygo-tawny soup, wi' bread in proportion -twa codlins (wi maist part o' a labster in that sass), the first gash o' the jiget-stakes--then I'm maist sure, pallets, and finally guse-no to count jeellies and coosturd, and bluemange, and many million mites in that Campsie Stilton-better than ony English-a pot o' Draught-twa lang shankers o' ale-noos an' thans a sip o' the auld port, and just afore grace a caulker o' Glenlivet, that made your een glower and water in your head as if you had been lookin at Mrs Siddons in the sleep-walking scene in Shakespeare's tragedy of Macbeth. Gin ye had an appeteet after a' that destruction o' animal and vegetable matter, your maw would be like that o' Death himsel, and your stamach insatiable as the grave. Tickler. Mr Ambrose, no laughter, if you please, sir. North. Come, come, Tickler-had Hogg and Hera clitus been contemporaries, it would have saved the shedding of a world of tears. Shepherd. Just laugh your fill, Mr Ambrose. is aye becoming that honest face o' yours. be sae wutty again, gin I can help it. A smile But I'll no (From the Noctes.) Grewin is coursing grews or greyhounds; stot is ox; daud is lump, chunk; whang, large slice; aumry, press; kittle, awkward, difficult; gaberlunzies, professional beggars; thole, endure. Wilson's works were edited by his son-in-law, Professor Ferrier (12 vols. 18551858). The Recreations of Christopher North and the Noctes were separately published (1842 and 1864). Sir J. Skelton published a selection from the Noctes as The Comedy of the Noctes (1876), and Dr Shelton a complete edition (5 vols., New York, 1854; 4th ed. 1857; revised ed. 1866). There was a (depreciatory) article on the Noctes in the Athenæum of 8th July 1876, believed to be by Mr Watts-Dunton. Wilson's Memoir was written by his daughter, Mrs Gordon (1862). His eldest daughter was the wife of Professor Ferrier; the youngest, of Professor Aytoun. See also Mrs Oliphant's William Blackwood and his Sons (1897), Saintsbury's Essays in English Literature (1891), Sir George Douglas's The Blackwood Group (1897), Lockhart's Peter's Letters (1819), and the articles in this work on Lockhart and Hogg. John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) was born in Cambusnethan manse, near Wishaw. His father (who was of gentle blood) having in 1796 been transferred to a Glasgow church, John's boyhood was spent in Glasgow, where at eleven he passed from the High School to the university, and thence at thirteen, with a Balliol Snell exhibition, he went up to Oxford. In 1813 he took a first-class in classics, reading widely the while in modern languages; then, after a visit to the Continent (to Goethe at Weimar), he studied law at Edinburgh, and in 1816 was called to the Scottish Bar. But he was no speaker; and having while still at Oxford written the article Heraldry' for the Edinburgh Encyclopædia, and soon after translated Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature, from 1817 he took more and more to literary work, and with Wilson became the chief mainstay of Blackwood's Magazine. In its pages he first exhibited the sharp and caustic wit that made him the terror of his Whig opponents. He had his full share in the 'vilipending' of the 'Cockney School' of which Leigh Hunt was assumed to be chief, but he afterwards relented towards Keats, and he was not responsible for the attacks on Coleridge and Wordsworth. Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk (2nd ed. 1819), a clever satirical view of Scottish society, was followed by four novels-Valerius (1821), a romance of the times of Trajan; Adam Blair (1822); Reginald Dalton (1823), a tale of university life; and Matthew Wald (1824). Of these Adam Blair alone retains its vitality-the strong, sad story of a good man's fall and repentance : Henry James has likened it to Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. The spirited Ancient Spanish Ballads appeared in 1823; lives of Burns-an admirable picture on a small canvas-and of Napoleon in 1828 and 1829; and the Life of Scott, Lockhart's masterpiece and one of the greatest biographies in our or any tongue, in 1837-38. He had met Scott first in May 1818, in April 1820 had married his eldest daughter Sophia, and for five and a half years had divided his time pretty equally between Edinburgh and Chiefswood near Abbotsford. In 1825 he removed to London to assume the editorship of the Quarterly Review at a salary of £1000 (ultimately £1300) per annum; and this post he retained till 1853, writing more than a hundred articles on the most varied subjects—from dry-rot in timber to Mure's Literature of Greece, Croker's Boswell, Taylor's Artevelde, and on the lives of Theodore Hook, Maginn, Kean, Wilkie, and Southey. He severely handled Tennyson for his poems of 1833, but praised his work of 1842. He was singularly reserved and cold in manner; Miss Martineau and many others charged him with malignity; but his intimate friends were warmly attached to him. Mr Andrew Lang in summing up his 'strong and complex character,' while admitting faults of undue acerbity, especially in early years, and occasional perversity, argued from his life and his letters that 'the intensity of his affection rivalled and was partly the cause of his reserve; and held that, despite his 'reputation for skill in satire, it must be said that in satire (save in the "chaff" about Tennyson) he is always at his worst, and is always at his best when he is most sympathetic'-as in his account of Scott's declining days and death. He wrote good verse besides the Spanish ballads: 'Captain Paton' is still chanted on festive occasions as a humorous picture of a 'fine old Glasgow gentleman,' and the memorable verses sent by Lockhart to Carlyle in bereavement are quoted below. In 1843 Lockhart became auditor of the duchy of Cornwall, a sinecure worth £400 a year. His closing years were clouded by illness and deep depression; by the secession to Rome of his only daughter, with her husband, Mr Hope-Scott; and by the loss of his wife in 1837, of his two boys in 1831 and 1853. The elder of them was the 'Hugh Littlejohn' of Scott's Tales of a Grandfather; the younger, Walter, was a scapegrace in the army. Like Scott, Lockhart visited Italy in search of health; like Scott, he came back to Abbotsford to die-25th November 1854. He is buried in Dryburgh at Sir Walter's feet. Very unlike the rest of Lockhart's work in substance and temper is the following heartfelt religious lyric which Carlyle used to quote with fervour, which Froude said no one who had read it could ever forget, and to whose consoling power for the distressed Mr Andrew Lang gives personal testimony: When youthful faith has fled, Of living take thy leave; Be constant to the dead, The dead cannot deceive. Of gladness out of gloom: Ungrateful to the tomb! |