Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

LOCKHART AND THE 'QUARTERLY.' 237
event, augmented perhaps by a sense of the less warm
atmosphere of understanding and sympathy which
was around him in his new sphere :
J. G. Lockhart to W. Blackwood.
I called on Cadell when the
25 Pall Mall, %ih February 1826.
alarm was at its height, and was
rejoiced to be set at ease as to you. Thank God you have
escaped being dragged into the whirlpool with your Leviathan
neighbours.
I have lost much money by him and others, and have been
wounded to the very soul with the far greater distresses of Sir
Walter Scott. I am sure you will excuse long letters at such
a time from your always most truly, J. G. Lockhart.
I expect to have in my first No. a review of Mr Bell's book
on Italy, and also of the ' Subaltern.' Pray forward me early
copies of anything you have, and remember me most affection-
ately to all the Divan. God bless you !
Lockhart's heart was full, with the chill of novelty
and separation from his friends just when he wanted
sympathy most, and this burst of home-sickness and
unusual utterance touches the reader all the more
from so self-contained a man. Did he miss, one
wonders, the periodical hazards of the Magazine, the
exciting reign of the irregular, the panics as to
whether the Professor would be ready, prolonged almost
to the eve of the publishing day ? One cannot
but feel that the respectable business-like level of the
' Quarterly ' must have palled upon him now and then,
and that he felt the sudden cutting off of the fun and
frolic, even if, to a man sobered by early experience,
those too had previously begun to pall. Notwithstanding
all the sins of which these companions had
been guilty, and all their devious ways, we are con-
scious of a sympathetic enlivenment when we find the
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