his Edinburgh residence. He was imprisoned in Edinburgh castle, but probably, through the favour of the duke of Argyll, he was released without being brought to trial; but his brother Philip was taken prisoner at the battle of Preston and condemned to be shot, the sentence being executed on the 2nd of December 1715. After his liberation Lockhart became a secret agent of the Pretender; but his correspondence with the prince fell into the hands of the government in 1727, compelling him to go into concealment at Durham until he was able to escape abroad. Argyll’s influence was again exerted in Lockhart’s behalf, and in 1728 he was permitted to return to Scotland, where he lived in retirement till his death in a duel on the 17th of December 1731. Lockhart was the author of Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland, dealing with the reign of Queen Anne till the union with England, first published in 1714. These Memoirs, together with Lockhart’s correspondence with the Pretender, and one or two papers of minor importance, were published in two volumes in 1817, forming the well-known “Lockhart Papers,” which are a valuable authority for the history of the Jacobites.
Lockhart married Eupheme Montgomerie, daughter of Alexander, 9th earl of Eglinton, by whom he had a large family. His grandson James, who assumed his mother’s name of Wishart in addition to that of Lockhart, was in the Austrian service during the Seven Years’ War, and was created a baron and count of the Holy Roman Empire. He succeeded to the estates of Lee as well as of Carnwath, both of which properties passed, on the death of his son Charles without issue in 1802, to his nephew Alexander, who was created a baronet in 1806.
See The Lockhart Papers (2 vols., London, 1817); Andrew Lang, History of Scotland (4 vols., London, 1900). For the story of Sir Simon Lockhart’s adventures with the heart of the Bruce, see Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman. (R. J. M.)
LOCKHART, JOHN GIBSON (1794–1854), Scottish writer and
editor, was born on the 14th of July 1794 in the manse of Cambusnethan
in Lanarkshire, where his father, Dr John Lockhart,
transferred in 1796 to Glasgow, was minister. His mother,
who was the daughter of the Rev. John Gibson, of Edinburgh,
was a woman of considerable intellectual gifts. He was sent
to the Glasgow high school, where he showed himself clever
rather than industrious. He fell into ill-health, and had to be
removed from school before he was twelve; but on his recovery
he was sent at this early age to Glasgow University, and displayed
so much precocious learning, especially in Greek, that he was
offered a Snell exhibition at Oxford. He was not fourteen when
he entered Balliol College, where he acquired a great store of
knowledge outside the regular curriculum. He read French,
Italian, German and Spanish, was interested in classical and
British antiquities, and became versed in heraldic and genealogical
lore. In 1813 he took a first class in classics in the final
schools. For two years after leaving Oxford he lived chiefly in
Glasgow before settling to the study of Scottish law in Edinburgh,
where he was called to the bar in 1816. A tour on the continent
in 1817, when he visited Goethe at Weimar, was made possible
by the kindness of the publisher Blackwood, who advanced
money for a promised translation of Schlegel’s Lectures on the
History of Literature, which was not published until 1838.
Edinburgh was then the stronghold of the Whig party, whose
organ was the Edinburgh Review, and it was not till 1817 that
the Scottish Tories found a means of expression in Blackwood’s
Magazine. After a somewhat hum-drum opening, Blackwood
suddenly electrified the Edinburgh world by an outburst of
brilliant criticism. John Wilson (Christopher North) and
Lockhart had joined its staff in 1817. Lockhart no doubt took
his share in the caustic and aggressive articles which marked the
early years of Blackwood; but his biographer, Mr Andrew Lang,
brings evidence to show that he was not responsible for the
virulent articles on Coleridge and on “The Cockney School of
Poetry,” that is on Leigh Hunt, Keats and their friends. He
has been persistently accused of the later Blackwood article
(August 1818) on Keats, but he showed at any rate a real appreciation
of Coleridge and Wordsworth. He contributed to Blackwood
many spirited translations of Spanish ballads, which in
1823 were published separately. In 1818 the brilliant and
handsome young man attracted the notice of Sir Walter Scott,
and the acquaintance soon ripened into an intimacy which
resulted in a marriage between Lockhart and Scott’s eldest
daughter Sophia, in April 1820. Five years of domestic happiness
followed, with winters spent in Edinburgh and summers at a
cottage at Chiefswood, near Abbotsford, where Lockhart’s two
eldest children, John Hugh and Charlotte, were born; a second
son, Walter, was born later at Brighton. In 1820 John Scott,
the editor of the London Magazine, wrote a series of articles
attacking the conduct of Blackwood’s Magazine, and making
Lockhart chiefly responsible for its extravagances. A correspondence
followed, in which a meeting between Lockhart and
John Scott was proposed, with Jonathan Henry Christie and
Horace Smith as seconds. A series of delays and complicated
negotiations resulted early in 1821 in a duel between Christie
and John Scott, in which Scott was killed. This unhappy affair,
which has been the subject of much misrepresentation, is fully
discussed in Mr Lang’s book on Lockhart.
Between 1818 and 1825 Lockhart worked indefatigably. In 1819 Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk appeared, and in 1822 he edited Peter Motteux’s edition of Don Quixote, to which he prefixed a life of Cervantes. Four novels followed: Valerius in 1821, Some Passages in the Life of Adam Blair, Minister of Gospel at Cross Meikle in 1822, Reginald Dalton in 1823 and Matthew Wald in 1824. But his strength did not lie in novel writing, although the vigorous quality of Adam Blair has been recognized by modern critics. In 1825 Lockhart accepted the editorship of the Quarterly Review, which had been in the hands of Sir John Taylor Coleridge since Gifford’s resignation in 1824. He had now established his literary position, and, as the next heir to his unmarried half-brother’s property in Scotland, Milton Lockhart, he was sufficiently independent, though he had abandoned the legal profession. In London he had great social success, and was recognized as a brilliant editor. He contributed largely to the Quarterly Review himself, his biographical articles being especially admirable. He showed the old railing spirit in an amusing but violent article in the Quarterly on Tennyson’s Poems of 1833, in which he failed to discover the mark of genius. He continued to write for Blackwood; he produced for Constable’s Miscellany in 1828 what remains the most charming of the biographies of Burns; and he undertook the superintendence of the series called “Murray’s Family Library,” which he opened in 1829 with a History of Napoleon. But his chief work was the Life of Sir Walter Scott (7 vols., 1837–1838; 2nd ed., 10 vols., 1839). There were not wanting those in Scotland who taxed Lockhart with ungenerous exposure of his subject, but to most healthy minds the impression conveyed by the biography was, and is, quite the opposite. Carlyle did justice to many of its excellencies in a criticism contributed to the London and Westminster Review (1837). Lockhart’s account of the transactions between Scott and the Ballantynes and Constable caused great outcry; and in the discussion that followed he showed unfortunate bitterness by his pamphlet, “The Ballantyne Humbug handled.” The Life of Scott has been called, after Boswell’s Johnson, the most admirable biography in the English language. The proceeds, which were considerable, Lockhart resigned for the benefit of Scott’s creditors.
The close of Lockhart’s life was saddened by family bereavement, resulting in his own breakdown in health and spirits. His eldest boy (the suffering “Hugh Littlejohn” of Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather) died in 1831; Scott himself in 1832; Mrs Lockhart in 1837; and the surviving son, Walter Lockhart, in 1852. Resigning the editorship of the Quarterly Review in 1853, he spent the next winter in Rome, but returned to England without recovering his health; and being taken to Abbotsford by his daughter Charlotte, who had become Mrs James Robert Hope-Scott, he died there on the 25th of November 1854. He was buried in Dryburgh Abbey, near Sir Walter Scott.
Lockhart’s Life (2 vols., London and New York, 1897) was written by Andrew Lang. A. W. Pollard’s edition of the Life of Scott (1900) is the best.
