46. Moreover, thine adversary also is of my familiars.
47. The land is before thee, draw thou up thy hosts for the battle in the place of Princes, over against thine adversary, which hath his station near the mount of the Proclamation; quit ye as men, and let favour be shewn unto him which is most valiant.
48. Yet be thou silent, peradventure will I help thee some little.
More shrewdly still, Blackwood bethought himself of the one and only way of practically enlisting Scott, and that was by promising permanent work on the magazine for his friend, tenant, and dependent, William Laidlaw, whom he could never do enough to help. So it was arranged that Laidlaw should regularly contribute a chronicle on agricultural and antiquarian topics, and that Scott should touch it up and perhaps occasionally add a paragraph or short article of his own. In point of fact the peccant first number contains such an article, an entertaining enough little skit ‘On the alarming Increase of Depravity among Animals.’ After the number had appeared Scott wrote to Blackwood in tempered approval, but saying that he must withdraw his support if satire like that of the Chaldee Manuscript was to continue. He had been pleased and tickled with the prophetic picture of his own neutrality, but strongly disapproved the sting and malice of much of the rest.
One cannot but wish he had put his foot down in like manner about the ‘Cockney school’ and other excesses: but home—that is Edinburgh—affairs and personages interested him much more than those of London. Lockhart he did not yet personally know. They first met eight months later, in June 1818: the acquaintance ripened rapidly into firm devotion on Lockhart’s part—for this young satirist could love as staunchly as he could stab unmercifully—a devotion requited with an answering warmth of affection on the part of Scott. At an early stage of their relations Scott, recognizing with regret that his young friend was ‘as mischievous as a monkey,’ got an offer for him of official work which would have freed him of his ties to Blackwood. In like manner two years later Scott threw himself heart and soul into the contest on behalf of Wilson for the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy, not merely as the Tory candidate, but in the hope—never fully realized—that the office would tame his combative extravagances as well as give scope for his serious talents. And when the battle was won and Lockhart, now Scott’s son-in-law, crowed over it in a set of verses which Scott thought too vindictive, he remonstrated in a strain of admirable grave and affectionate wisdom:—
I have hitherto avoided saying anything on this subject, though some little turn towards personal satire is, I think, the only drawback to your great and powerful talents, and I think I may have hinted as much to you. But I wished to see how this matter of Wilson’s would turn, before making a clean breast upon this subject.... Now that he has triumphed I think it would be bad taste to cry out—‘Strike up our drums—pursue the scattered stray.’ Besides, the natural consequence of his situation must be his relinquishing his share in these compositions—at least, he will injure himself in the opinion of many friends, and expose himself to a continuation of galling and vexatious disputes to the embittering of his life, should he do otherwise. In that case I really hope you will pause before you undertake to be the Boaz of the Maga; I mean in the personal and satirical department, when the Jachin has seceded.
Besides all other objections of personal enemies, personal quarrels, constant obloquy, and all uncharitableness, such an occupation will fritter away your talents, hurt your reputation both as a lawyer and a literary man, and waste away your time in what at best will be but a monthly wonder. What has been done in this department will be very well as a frolic of young men, but let it suffice.... Remember it is to the personal satire I object, and to the horse-play of your raillery.... Revere yourself, my dear boy, and think you were born to do your country better service than in this species of warfare. I make no apology (I am sure you will require none) for speaking plainly what my anxious affection dictates.... I wish you to have the benefit of my experience without purchasing it; and be assured, that the consciousness of attaining complete superiority over your calumniators and enemies by the force of your general character, is worth a dozen of triumphs over them by the force of wit and raillery.
It took a longer time and harder lessons to cure Lockhart of the scorpion habit and wean him from the seductions of the ‘Mother of Mischief,’ as Scott in another place calls Blackwood’s Magazine. Meantime he had in the case of Keats done as much harm as he could. He had not the excuse of entire ignorance. His intimate friend Christie (afterwards principal in the John Scott duel) was working at the bar in London and wrote to Lockhart in January 1818 that he had met Keats and been favourably impressed by him. In reply Lockhart writes: ‘What you say of Keates (sic) is pleasing, and if you like to write a little review of him, in admonition to leave his ways, etc., and in praise of his natural genius, I shall be greatly obliged to you.’ Later Benjamin Bailey had the opportunity of speaking with Lockhart in Keats’s behalf. Bailey had by this time taken orders, and after publishing a friendly notice of Endymion in the Oxford Herald for June, had left the University and gone to settle in a curacy in Cumberland. In the course of the summer he staid at Stirling, at the house of Bishop Gleig; whose son, afterwards the well-known writer and chaplain-general to the forces, was his friend, and whose daughter he soon afterwards married. Here Bailey met Lockhart, and anxious to save Keats from the sort of treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took the opportunity of telling him in a friendly way Keats’s circumstances and history, explaining at the same time that his attachment to Leigh Hunt was personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an object of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly it should not be so used by him. Within three weeks the article appeared, making use to all appearance, and to Bailey’s great indignation, of the very facts he had thus confidentially communicated.[1]
‘That amiable but infatuated bardling, Mister John Keats,’ had received a certain amount of attention from ‘Z’ already, both in the quotation from Cornelius Webb prefixed to the Cockney school articles, and in allusion to Hunt’s pair of sonnets on the intercoronation scene which he had printed in his volume, Foliage, since the ‘Z’ series began. When now Keats’s own turn came, in the fourth article of the series, his treatment was almost mild in comparison with that of his supposed leader. ‘This young man appears to have received from nature talents of an excellent, perhaps even of a superior, order—talents which, devoted to the purposes of any useful profession, must have rendered him a respectable, if not an eminent citizen.’ But, says the critic, he has unfortunately fallen a victim to the metromania of the hour; the wavering apprentice has been confirmed in his desire to quit the gallipots by his admiration for ‘the most worthless and affected of all the versifiers of our time.’ ‘Mr Hunt is a small poet, but he is a clever man, Mr Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities which he has done everything in his power to spoil.’ And so on; and so on; not of course omitting to put a finger on real weaknesses, as lack of scholarship, the use of Cockney rimes like higher, Thalia; ear, Cytherea; thorn, fawn; deriding the Boileau passage in Sleep and Poetry, and perceiving nothing but laxity and nervelessness in the treatment of the metre. In the conceit of academic talent and training, the critic shows himself open-eyed to all the faults and stone-blind to all the beauty and genius and promise, and ends with a vulgarity of supercilious patronage beside which all the silly venial faults of taste in Leigh Hunt seem like good breeding itself.
And now, good-morrow to ‘the Muses’ son of Promise;’ as for ‘the feats he yet may do,’ as we do not pretend to say like himself, ‘Muse of my native land am I inspired,’ we shall adhere to the safe old rule of pauca verba. We venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture £50 upon any thing he can write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,’ etc. But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.