Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

A LITERARY PROTEUS. 195
ately subjugated, and who 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 the most of those sharp things which the victims
could not forget. Wilson hacked about him, distribut-
ing blows right and left, delivered sometimes for fun,
though sometimes with the most extraordinary impulse
of perversity, in the impetus of his career. 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.
He was, like the others—like most of the notable
young men in Edinburgh in their several generations
—a briefless barrister, an advocate without clients. It
is said that, though he could write with such force,
he was incapable of public speaking, and therefore
could not have succeeded as a pleader before law
courts, under any circumstances. He was, as we
have noted, a linguist—an accomplishment much more
rare then than now, though even now it is not too
common. He was capable of incursions into that
dark German sphere, of which in those days the world
in general knew so little, had encountered and been
noticed by Goethe, and was sufliciently familiar with
local colour and phraseology to report the opinions
of apocryphal German professors, giving perhaps a
suggestion to Thomas Carlyle, whose Teufelsdrockh
was indeed of a very different order from Lockhart's
Dr Ulrich Sternstare or Baron von Lauerwinkel, but
who might have caught the idea from his predecessor.
Lockhart was also one of the first modern translators
and expositors of Spanish literature, which was a