Macaulay had certainly provoked his retaliation, and we may notice here the same eager partisanship of Church and State, pervading even his personal malice.
JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART
(1794-1854)
It is to be regretted that Lockhart, who is so honourably remembered by his great Life of Scott, his "fine and animated translation" of Spanish Ballads, and his neglected—but powerful—Adam Blair, should be so intimately associated with the black record of the Quarterly. He was also a contributor to Blackwood from October, 1817, succeeding Gifford in the editorial chair of Mr. Murray's Review in 1825 until 1853.
But Lockhart was "more than a satirist and a snarler." His polished jibes were more mischievous than brutal. "This reticent, sensitive, attractive, yet dangerous youth … slew his victims mostly by the midnight oil, not by any blaze of gaiety, or in the accumulative fervour of social sarcasm. From him came most of those sharp things which the victims could not forget…. Lockhart put in his sting in a moment, inveterate, instantaneous, with the effect of a barbed dart, yet almost, as it seemed, with the mere intention of giving point to his sentences, and no particular feeling at all."
Carlyle describes him as "a precise, brief, active person of considerable faculty, which however, had shaped itself gigmanically only. Fond of quizzing, yet not very maliciously. Has a broad, black brow, indicating force and penetration, but the lower half of the face diminishing into the character at best of distinctness, almost of triviality."
* * * * *
There is certainly a good deal of perversity about the abuse of Vathek, so startlingly combined with almost immoderate eulogy: to which the discriminating enthusiasm of his Coleridge affords a pleasing contrast.
It should be noticed that Lockhart has also been credited with the bitter critical part of the Jane Eyre review, printed below—of which any man ought to have been ashamed—as Miss Rigby (afterwards Lady Eastlake) is believed to have written "the part about the governess." He probably had a hand in the Blackwood series on "The Cockney School of Poetry" (see below); and, in some ways, those reviews are more characteristic.