XX.

PORTRAIT OF LOCKHART, BY GRANT. (No. 83.)

THE Committee, as an exception to their rule regarding Illustrations, of the three Portraits of Mr. Lockhart exhibited as Nos. 87, 88, and 89, selected that by Sir Francis Grant. It is a very pleasing likeness, painted about the year 1833.

JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART, son-in-law and biographer of Sir Walter Scott, was born in the Manse of Cambusnethan, July 14, 1794. His father, who was Minister of that parish, in the Presbytery of Hamilton (1786-1796), was translated to one of the City Churches of Glasgow in 1796; and obtained the title of D.D. from Edinburgh in 1803. He died December 6, 1842, in the eighty-second year of his age. His son John was educated at the University of Glasgow, and obtained one of the Snell Exhibition Bursaries in Baliol College, Oxford, in 1809. He graduated B.C.L. in 1817, and was created D.C.L. in 1834. He had previously come to Edinburgh to complete his Law studies, and passed Advocate in 1816. His marriage with Sophia, eldest daughter of Sir Walter Scott, was in April 1820.

Along with his friend Professor Wilson, Lockhart became one of the chief contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in October 1817. In this periodical first appeared his much admired Translations of Spanish Ballads. He also attained celebrity by his Novels, Valerius, Adam Blair, Reginald Dalton, etc.; and was the chief writer of a work known as Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk, under the assumed name of Dr. Peter Morris, as having taken his degree of M.D. at the University of Edinburgh, in 1819. It consists of a series of letters, containing lively spirited sketches of the most noted Edinburgh characters of that time. His Lives of Burns in Constable's Miscellany, and of Napoleon, and NO. XX.]

other volumes in Murray's Family Library, display no ordinary skill as a biographer; but his great work undoubtedly was his Life of Sir Walter Scott.

Mr. Lockhart, on his appointment, in 1825, to be Editor of the Quarterly Review, removed to London. He occasionally revisited his friends in Scotland; and at length, with broken health and spirits, he was removed to Abbotsford, where he breathed his last, November 25, 1854. He was interred in Dryburgh Abbey.