“No, I do not. He is almost the only literary man in London I have not met; and I must say, as the editor of the Quarterly, and the most unfair and unprincipled critic of the day, I have no wish to know him. I never heard him well spoken of. I probably have met a hundred of his acquaintances, but I have not seen one who pretended to be his friend.”
“Yet there is a great deal of good in Lockhart. I allow all you say of his unfairness and severity; but if he were sitting there, opposite you, you would find him the mildest and most unpresuming of men, and so he appears in private life always.”
“Not always. A celebrated foreigner, who had been very intimate with him, called one morning to deprecate his severity upon Baron D’Haussez’s book in a forthcoming review. He did his errand in a friendly way, and, on taking his leave, Lockhart, with much ceremony, accompanied him down to his carriage. ‘Pray don’t give yourself the trouble to come down,’ said the polite Frenchman. ‘I make a point of doing it, sir,’ said Lockhart, with a very offensive manner, ‘for I understand from your friend’s book, that we are not considered a polite nation in France.’ Nothing certainly could be more ill-bred and insulting.”
“Still it is not his nature. I do believe that it is merely an unhappy talent that he has for sarcasm, with which his heart has nothing to do. When he sits down to review a book, he never thinks of the author or his feelings. He cuts it up with pleasure, because he does it with skill in the way of his profession, as a surgeon dissects a dead body. He would be the first to show the man a real kindness if he stood before him. I have known Lockhart long. He was in Edinboro’ a great while, and when he was writing ‘Valerius,’ we were in the habit of walking out together every morning, and when we reached a quiet spot in the country, he read to me the chapters as he wrote them. He finished it in _three weeks_. I heard it all thus by piecemeal as it went on, and had much difficulty in persuading him that it was worth publishing. He wrote it very rapidly, and thought nothing of it. We used to sup together with Blackwood, and that was the real origin of the ‘Noctes.’”
“Oh, certainly. Anybody will show it to you. It is a small house, kept in an out-of-the-way corner of the town, by Ambrose, who is an excellent fellow in his way, and had a great influx of custom in consequence of his celebrity in the Noctes. We were there one night very late, and had all been remarkably gay and agreeable. ‘What a pity,’ said Lockhart, ‘that some short hand writer had not been here to take down the good things that have been said at this supper.’ The next day he produced a paper called ‘Noctes _Ambro_sianæ,’ and that was the first. I continued them afterward.”