devoted than ever to his children, their happiness and well-being having become the object of his life. Of his own rarely expressed feelings, we get a glimpse in a letter to Milman written five years later (October, 1842), after he had attended the funeral of the wife of a friend. His correspondent at this time was mourning the loss of a daughter. "I lived over the hour when you stood by me,—but indeed such an hour is eternally present. After that in every picture of life the central figure is replaced by a black blot; every train of thought terminates in the same blank gulf. I see you have been allowing yourself to dwell too near this dreary region. Escape it while the wife of your youth is still by you; in her presence no grief should be other than gentle."[7]

When the earlier volumes of the Life had been published, Lockhart wrote to Haydon: "Your approbation of the Life of Scott is valuable, and might well console me for all the abuse it has called forth, both on him and me. I trusted to the substantial goodness and greatness of the character, and thought I should only make it more effective in portraiture by keeping in the few specks. I despise with my heels the whole trickery of erecting an alabaster image, and calling that a Man.... The work is now done, and I leave it to its fate. I had no personal object to gratify except, indeed, that I wished and hoped to please my poor wife." From a letter to Miss Edgeworth we learn that Mrs. Lockhart, who had been her husband's secretary for years in the preparation of the Memoirs, only lived to see, not to read, the first volume.[8] It should be said here that the work was in every sense a labor of love on Lockhart's part, as all the profits of the book went towards the payment of Sir Walter's debt.

One of the friends of these years was Carlyle, who had first met Lockhart at a Fraser dinner in 1831, and "rather liked the man, and shall like to meet him again." Long afterward he was to write of him as one "whom in the (p. xxviii) distance I esteemed more than perhaps he ever knew. Seldom did I speak to him; but hardly ever without learning and gaining something." Though the two men did not meet often, Carlyle became warmly attached to Lockhart, and so much of their correspondence as has been preserved forms one of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Lang's biography. Some of the letters show Carlyle in his best mood, and are peculiarly affectionate in tone. On one occasion he writes to Lockhart, as though sure of his sympathy, in a time of sorrow, and the reply, which came quickly, contains a part of a poem which was written in one of Lockhart's diary books in June, 1841, and cannot be omitted from any sketch of his life:—

"When youthful faith has fled,
Of loving take thy leave;
Be constant to the dead,
The dead cannot deceive.
"Sweet, modest flowers of spring,
How fleet your balmy day!
And man's brief year can bring
No secondary May.
"No earthly burst again
Of gladness out of gloom;
Fond hope and vision vain,
Ungrateful to the tomb!
"But 't is an old belief,
That on some solemn shore,
Beyond the sphere of grief,
Dear friends will meet once more.
"Beyond the sphere of time,
And sin, and fate's control,
Serene in changeless prime
Of body and of soul.
"That creed I fain would keep,
That hope I'll not forego;
Eternal be the sleep,
Unless to waken so."[9]

Carlyle earnestly urged that Lockhart's memoirs should be written while his old friends were yet living. Had this been done, not only would more of his letters have been preserved, to the gain of readers, but some misapprehensions regarding him might not have hardened into conventions.[10] When the Lockharts left Scotland, Sir Walter wrote with much feeling to his good friend, Mrs. Hughes, soon to become and to remain their good friend as well, regarding the painfulness of the separation, adding: "I wish to bespeak your affection for Lockhart. When you come to know him you will not want to be solicited, for I know you will love and understand him, but he is not easy to know or to be appreciated, as he so well deserves, at first; he shrinks at a first touch, but take a good hard hammer (it need not be a sledge one), break the shell, and the kernel will repay you. Under a cold exterior, Lockhart conceals the warmest affections, and where he once professes regard he never changes."[11] Long afterwards, the son-in-law of Lockhart was to speak of the "depth and tenderness of feeling which he so often hid under an almost fierce reserve." This reserve, largely the result of constitutional shyness, was intensified by the sharp sorrows of his later life. In truth, as Mr. Leslie Stephen has said: "Lockhart was one of the men who are predestined to be generally misunderstood. He was an intellectual aristocrat, fastidious and over-sensitive, with very fine perceptions, but endowed with rather too hearty a scorn of fools as well as of folly.... The shyness due to a sensitive nature, was mistaken, as is so often the case, for supercilious pride, and the unwillingness to wear his heart on his sleeve, for coldness and want of sympathy. Such men have to be content with scanty appreciation from the outside."[12] Fortunately, there were those, not a few, who did not remain outside, and when any of these have written of their friend, there is a singular agreement in their testimony. In every-day matters, in the performance of his editorial or social duties, he was unfailingly prompt, exact, and courteous. Never a rich man, nor ever extravagant in his personal expenditures, he was a most generous giver, especially to unfortunate members of his own craft. Inclined to be somewhat silent in large companies, among his friends he was a brilliant talker, though always a ready and willing listener. He asserted a power over society, Mr. Gleig has noted, "which is not generally conceded to men having only their personal merits to rely upon. He was never the lion of a season, or of two seasons, or of more. He kept his place to the last." Being a gentleman and a man of sense, he