CHAPTER IV

EDINBURGH, 1815-1817

Edinburgh described in "Peter's Letters."-Letters to Christie.-Description of Wilson.-His inconsistency.-His charm.-Edinburgh populated by authors.-Sir William Hamilton writing on Waterloo.-A dinner with Hamilton.-Description of De Quincey.- Lockhart's Essay on Heraldry. -An Edict of Glasgow University. Study of Wordsworth.-Parodies of Wordsworth by Lockhart.-Sir William Hamilton an elder of the Kirk.— Death of Mrs. Nicoll.-Death of a friend.-Hamilton's baronetcy. -His disadvantages.-Kean acting in Edinburgh.-Literary projects.-Lockhart called to the Bar.—His first fee spent in punch. -Criticism of "Old Mortality."-Needless severity.-" Blacky." -Lockhart's train of negro servants.-Description by the Ettrick Shepherd.-German tour.-Early transaction with Mr. Blackwood. -Problem of Lockhart's attachment to Blackwood's Magazine.— Lockhart on Mr. Blackwood's character.-Intellectual defects of Edinburgh society.-Whig arrogance and ignorance.-Lockhart's mission. Scotland in a state of "facetious and rejoicing ignorance."-Lockhart's ideas resemble those of Carlyle.-His want of earnestness. His opportunity.-" Prophesying not to be done on these terms."

THE Edinburgh to which Lockhart betook himself in November 1815, was, doubtless, already familiar to him, already admired by him in its physical features. "Edinburgh, even were its population as great as that of London, could never be merely a city. Here there must always be present the idea of the comparative littleness of all human works."1 The

1 "Peter's Letters," vol. i. p. 8.

rocks and mountains dwarf the structures erected on them, yet the builders of the Old Town "appear as if they had made Nature the model of their architecture," "piled deep and massy, close and high," as it is. To Lockhart's eye the view—

"Out over the Forth

I look to the North,"

from George Street, where he lodged, must have been a delightful change from anything that Glasgow Green had to show.

As for society, he had friends and introductions enough, through his family and through Sir William Hamilton. Authors he found as common in Edinburgh as tobacco or sugar merchants in Glasgow. The book shops which he describes in "Peter's Letters," Blackwood's, Millar's, Laing's, and the rest, consoled him for the total absence of new works, and of reading fellow-creatures in the capital of the West. The time had not yet come when curls of his raven hair were in such demand, that he expressed (to a sister) his fear of premature baldness (1819). But his handsome face ("Landseer tells me I was a good-looking chap twenty or thirty years ago," he wrote long afterwards), probably made friends for him among the maidens and matrons of Edinburgh; the innumerable scribbling people learned to misdoubt "the laugh about the screwedup mouth of him, that fules ca'd no canny, for they couldna thole the meanin' o't," and some very

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sensitive souls may have dreaded "the bit caricatures," which he drew in pencil, on every odd scrap of paper.1 "We have assemblies here, and routs, and balls, and plays, and concerts, and dinners without end or intermission. I find it all very good fun, and am quite contented," Lockhart had written to Christie, a year before, during a flying visit to Edinburgh. He took Horace's advice, and he also took what a young philosopher in Thackeray calls "his whack." He had made a new friend, of the highest importance in his career, John Wilson, who was writing poetry, angling, revelling with Patrick Robertson, "Lord Peter," and not practising at the Bar. I may here quote, out of due season, Lockhart's later remarks (Dec. 5, 1819) to Christie, on the character of Wilson.

"I fancy you understand him almost as well as I

do. He is thirty-five years of age, has six children and a charming wife, and is, I suppose, very easy in his affairs. . . . He is a very warm, enthusiastic man, with most charming conversational talents, full of fiery imaginations, irresistible in eloquence, exquisite in humour when he talks (but too coarse in his humorous writing for the present age); he is a most fascinating fellow, and a most kind-hearted, generous friend; but his fault is a sad one, a total inconsistency in his opinions concerning both men and things. And thus it is that he continually lauds and abuses the same person within the space

1 See "Noctes Ambrosianæ," November 1826.

of a day, so making neither his praise nor his censure of any avail. . . . He is, I think, afflicted with much despondency as a literary man, having never been able in anything to apply his mind so as to produce satisfaction to his own judgment. But in truth his life in earlier years has been such as to give him a thousand prejudices and sore places of which I know nothing, and I have by no means penetrated his intellectual physiognomy to its roots.

"This much is certain-I have a warm and tender affection for the man, and believe him incapable of deliberately doing anything dishonourable, either in literature or in any other way; but then it is very possible that I am unlucky in having been linked so much at my outset with such a man as this. . . .”1

In the troubles that followed thickly, it has been not unusual to exonerate Professor Wilson at the expense of, or in contrast with, Lockhart. The opposite course cannot be taken, even if it were chivalrous to take it, by the biographer of Lockhart. The young man who wrote the lines just quoted (lines which should be compared with Mr. Carlyle's portrait of Wilson), was clear-sighted enough to take care of himself. But these lines were written (Dec. 1819) after two years' close experience of Wilson's literary vagaries and inconsistencies: his abuse of friends and idols, his sudden returns to his old loves. Four years earlier, in 1815, when Lockhart was just

1 Christie, in London, had heard tales to Wilson's disadvantage.

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of age, the society of Wilson, wildly fascinating, bruyant, full of what he considered practical jokes, (though unkind persons gave them other names), can hardly have been salutary for a young student of literature and law. There is more to be said on this topic, but we may now offer a letter (Nov. 29, 1815) on Edinburgh as Lockhart was seeing it, on his beginnings in miscellaneous literary work, and on a dinner with Wilson and De Quincey.

(Postmark, Nov. 29, 1815.)

"MY DEAR CHRISTIE,-You and I are in general such exemplary correspondents that I begin to feel a degree of wonder at the two months' silence which has prevailed betwixt us, greater than a much longer cessation of any other epistolary traffic could have occasioned in me. Since I wrote you last I have spent a few weeks at Gourock, a few weeks (including the occasion) at Glasgow, and now I have been for a fortnight in this our Athens. Certainly if the name Athens had been derived from the Goddess of Printing-not from the Goddess of Wisdom-no city in the world could with greater justice lay claim to the appellation. An author elsewhere is a being somewhat at least out of the common run. Here he is truly a week-day man. Every other body you jostle is the father of at least an octavo, or two, and it is odds if you ever sit down to dinner in a company of a dozen, without having to count three or four quarto makers in the circle.