Among the younger men who gathered about Mr Blackwood — first on the South Bridge, and afterwards in his more aristocratic quarters in Princes Street—there was none more remarkable than John Gibson Lockhart, of whom and of whose doings the reader already knows so much. There are many of his letters in the Blackwood collection, but amid all the packets of them which are before me scarcely one has a date. They are written on “Friday morning,” or on the 20th, say, of some month, sometimes named “October,” “January,” sometimes not; the year never. The subjects of them are almost invariably articles in the Magazine, but even these indicated with such a flying hand, things already half talked over by word of mouth, that it would require the minutest research to identify exactly what they are about. This produces a wealth, yet at the same time a poverty—or rather, a sense of wealth in the midst of actual poverty—which is exceedingly tantalising to the biographer. He seems to be told so much, yet knows so little; learning a great deal of the man, but very little about him; a glimpse at his inner self, but nothing at all of the outside.