Note Back to Main Text — BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART

In these days Lockhart read not only Greek and Latin, but French, Italian, and Spanish. German interested him later. At Balliol he formed some friendships which ended only with life; no man was ever truer to his early friends than he, and few have had friends more loyal.[2] He gained his first class in 1813—he was not yet nineteen—and returned to his father's house in Glasgow, which he was to leave two years later for Edinburgh, there to read law and begin the literary work which was to prove the real business of his life. He became acquainted with William Blackwood, who, when the young advocate was about to visit Germany in the vacation of 1817, enabled him to undertake the then toilsome and expensive journey by paying liberally, not less than £300, it is said, for a translation to be made later. Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature was the work Lockhart selected, and of this incident Mr. Gleig says: "Though seldom communicative on such subjects, he more than once alluded to the circumstance in after-life, and always in the same terms. 'It was a generous act on Ebony's part, and a bold one too; for he had only my word for it that I had any acquaintance at all with the German language!'" It was a generous act, and also one showing keen perception on the part of the publisher. At this time began Lockhart's intimacy with John Wilson, with whom he was so largely to share the achievements, glorious and inglorious, of Mr. Blackwood's magazine in its reckless youth. Unfortunately, the older and more experienced writer was no safe guide for his brilliant but very young co-worker, still with a boy's fondness for mischief and a dangerous wit, to which the almost sublime self-complacency of the dominant Whig coteries would offer abundant opportunities of exercise. Lockhart was not a sinner above others, but in the end he was made something like the scapegoat of all the offenders, whose misdeeds, occasionally serious enough, are sometimes in view of the journalistic and critical amenities then prevailing in the organs of both parties hardly so heinous as to account for the excitement that attended them.