He had himself an aptness to

Everybody liked Tom Cordery. like, which is certain to be repaid in kind-the very dogs knew him, and loved him, and would beat for him almost as soon as for their master. Even May, the most sagacious of greyhounds, appreciated his talents, and would as soon listen to Tom sohoing as to old Tray giving tongue.

Tom was not, however, without that strong sense of natural beauty which they who live amongst the wildnesses and fastnesses of nature so often exhibit. One spot, where the common trenches

I

on the civilised world, was scarcely less his admiration than mine. It is a high hill, half covered with furze and heath and broom, and sinking abruptly down to a large pond, almost a lake, covered with wild water-fowl. The ground, richly clothed with wood,— oak, and beech, and elm,-rises on the other side with equal abruptness, as if shutting in those glassy waters from all but the sky, which shines so brightly in their clear bosom; just in the bottom peeps a small sheltered farm, whose wreaths of light smoke and the white glancing wings of the wild-ducks, as they flit across the lake, are all that give token of motion or of life. have stood there in utter oblivion of greyhound or of hare, till moments have swelled to minutes, and minutes to hours, and so has Tom, conveying by his exclamations of delight at its "pleasantness,” exactly the same feeling which a poet or a painter (for it breathes the very spirit of calm and sunshiny beauty that a master painter loves) would express by different but not truer praise. He called his own home "pleasant" too; and there, though one loves to hear any home so called-there, I must confess, that favourite phrase, which I like almost as well as they who have no other, did seem rather misapplied. And yet it was finely placed, very finely. It stood in a sort of defile, where a road almost perpendicular wound from the top of a steep abrupt hill, crowned with a tuft of old Scottish firs, into a dingle of fern and wild brush-wood. A shallow, sullen stream oozed from the bank on one side, and, after forming a rude channel across the road, sank into a dark, deep pool, half hidden amongst the sallows. Behind these sallows, in a nook between them and the hill, rose the uncouth and shapeless cottage of Tom Cordery. It is a scene which hangs upon the eye and memory, striking, grand, almost sublime, and above all eminently foreign. No English painter would choose such a subject for an English landscape;

no one in a picture would take it for English. It might pass for one of those scenes which have furnished models to Salvator Rosa. Tom's cottage was, however, very thoroughly national and characteristic; a low, ruinous hovel, the door of which was fastened with a sedulous attention to security, that contrasted strangely with the tattered thatch of the roof, and the half-broken windows. No garden, no pigsty, no pens for geese, none of the usual signs of cottage habitation ;—yet the house was covered with nondescript dwellings, and the very walls were animate with their extraordinary tenants: pheasants, partridges, rabbits, tame wild-ducks, half-tame hares, and their enemies by nature and education, the ferrets, terriers, and mongrels of whom his retinue consisted. Great ingenuity had been evinced in keeping separate these jarring elements; and by dint of hutches, cages, fences, kennels, and half-a-dozen little hurdled enclosures, resembling the sort of courts which children are apt to build round their cardhouses, peace was in general tolerably well preserved. Frequent sounds, however, of fear or of anger, as their several instincts were aroused, gave tokens that it was but a forced and hollow truce, and at such times the clamour was prodigious. Tom had the remarkable tenderness for animals when domesticated which is so often found in those whose sole vocation seems to be their destruction in the field; and the one long, straggling, unceiled, barn-like room, which served for kitchen, bed-chamber, and hall, was cumbered with bipeds and quadrupeds of all kinds and descriptions, the sick, the delicate, the newly-caught, the lying-in. In the midst of this menagerie sat Tom's wife (for he was married, though without a family-married to a woman lame of a leg as he himself was minus an arm) now trying to quiet her noisy inmates, now to outscold them. How long his friend the keeper would have continued to wink at this den of live game, none can say the roof fairly fell in during the deep snow of last winter, killing, as poor Tom observed, two as fine litters of rabbits as ever were kittened. Remotely, I have no doubt that he himself fell a sacrifice to this misadventure. The overseer, to whom he applied to reinstate his beloved habitation, decided that the walls would never bear another roof, and removed him and his wife, as an especial favour, to a tidy, snug, comfortable room in the workhouse. The workhouse! From that hour poor Tom visibly altered. He lost his hilarity and independence. It was a change such as he had himself often inflicted, a complete

No

change of habits, a transition from the wild to the tame. labour was demanded of him; he went about as before, finding hares, killing rats, selling brooms, but the spirit of the man was departed. He talked of the quiet of his old abode, and the noise of the new; complained of children and other bad company; looked down on his neighbours with the sort of contempt with which a cock pheasant might regard a barn-door fowl. Most of all did he, braced into a gipsy-like defiance of wet and cold, grumble at the warmth and dryness of his apartment. to foretell that it would kill him, and assuredly it did so. could the typhus fever have found out that wild hill side, or have lurked under that broken roof. The free touch of the air would have chased the demon. Alas poor Tom! warmth, and snugness, and comfort, whole windows, and an entire ceiling, were the death of him. Alas, poor Tom! (From the Same.)

He used
Never

JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART

The

[John Gibson Lockhart was born at Cambusnethan, where his father was minister of the Established Church of Scotland, on 14th July 1794. He entered the University of Glasgow at twelve years old, and three years later went to Balliol with a Snell exhibition. Some accounts make him enter Glasgow at 11 and Oxford at 13. This precocious, but not then so very precocious, academical career was completed by a first-class in 1813, when Lockhart was about the age at which most men now matriculate. Perhaps if he had taken a little longer over it he would not have overlooked the celebrated false quantity of jănuam in the epitaph of Scott's "Maida"; but his scholarship was at least sufficient and far superior to that of most literary men of his time. He had another and for his day a still more unusual advantage in going to Germany after he left Oxford and acquiring a competent knowledge of the German tongue, which brought him a commission from Blackwood to translate Schlegel's Lectures on History. He was called to the Scotch bar in 1816; but was a bad speaker, and had, it seems little love for law. foundation or rather the second foundation of Blackwood's Magazine introduced him to his true vocation; and for some years he was, almost as much as Wilson, the leader in all its mirth and mischief, from the "Chaldee Manuscript" downwards. His first original book, Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk. appeared in 1819, and next year he married Sophia Scott, Sir Walter's eldest daughter, and took up his residence (when not in Edinburgh) at Chiefswood. There, mainly, he wrote in four successive years (1821-4) his four novelsValerius, Adam Blair, Reginald Dalton, and Matthew Wald. In the latest of these four years he also published his Spanish Ballads. In 1826 he moved to London, having been appointed editor of the Quarterly Review, a post which he held almost till his death, but which did not prevent him from having much to do with the early and more boisterous phase of Fraser's Magazine. His great Life of Scott was published between 1837 and 1839, and during its publication his wife died. In 1843 he was made Auditor of the Duchy of Cornwall. Ten years later his health broke down, and resigning the editorship, he went to Italy, but only came home to die at Abbotsford on the 25th November 1854. Besides the books above mentioned he wrote an admirable Life of Burns (1828), and an extremely well done abstract of his father inlaw's Napoleon (1829).]

LOCKHART, one of the most distinguished of that class of men of letters whose career has been determined by the spread of