Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

182 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
independence of the man. He was, we may premise,
ten years younger than Wilson, whom we class with
him as if they were of the same age : but Wilson was
always a boy, which was not Lockhart's case. He
was the son of a much-respected Scotch minister holding
at that time a charge in Glasgow. His father was
of the class called squarson in England—half laird,
half minister—though he did not succeed to the laird-
ship till the end of his life,—a class not so much repre-
sented in the Church of Scotland nowadays as at that
time : and the son was thus a Lockhart of a well-known
family, " come of kent folk,"—an advantage always of
the greatest importance both to a man's character and
his fortune. He was educated at Glasgow University,
and went thereafter, as so many of the best scholars
of Glasgow do, by means of the Snell Scholarship, to
Balliol, Oxford, which was not then, perhaps, so dis-
tinguished a college as it is now. But the Snell
scholar has almost always been distinguished, and
every generation of them has produced notable mem-
bers, to the embellishment of their second home of
learning, and the great honour and glory of the first.
There is a curious story told in this beginning of his
career, which is highly characteristic of him and of his
after-ways. On some occasion, unidentified, he sent
in to his tutor an exercise, apparently in Hebrew, to
the confusion but great admiration of the tutor, who
carried this learned production to the Master, who
presumably possessed some knowledge of that language.
After some examination, and no doubt much
puzzling, this recondite study turned out to be a piece
of satire aimed at the unsuspecting tutor himself, in
good English, written in Hebrew characters—Hebrew