On June 12, 1794 was born John Gibson Lockhart, a Scottish writer whose Life of Walter Scott [his father-in-law] (1837-38) is described as “one of the great English biographies” (Britannica), “which divides with Boswell’s Life of Johnson the honor of leading all lives of English men of letters.” (per the editor) Chambers’s Cyclopaedia concurs, calling Life of Walter Scott “Lockhart’s masterpiece and one of the greatest biographies in our or any tongue.” (Volume I is here.)

Lockhart was by all accounts a prodigy, matriculating into college at 11 and showing an absurd mastery of the Greek and Latin classics. He was also, apparently, a giant smart-ass who wrecked people with his wit; as a literary critic (and takedown artist) for the Tory Quarterly Review, he was a natural. Notably, it was Lockhart who immortalized the name “The Cockney School” in a series of slashing reviews of the poetry of Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Shelley.

A taste of the dripping contempt:

If I may be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it may henceforth be referred to by the designation of THE COCKNEY SCHOOL. Its chief Doctor and Professor is Mr Leigh Hunt, a man certainly of some talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners in all respects. He is a man of little education. He knows absolutely nothing of Greek, almost nothing of Latin, and his knowledge of Italian literature is confined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch’s sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto, through the medium of Mr Hoole. As to the French poets, he dismisses them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural pretenders. The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. He has never read Zaire nor Phedre.” (it goes on like that)

Yet Lockhart performed other significant literary labors besides writing a classic biography and giving famous Romantics the what-for. He translated A.W. Schlegel’s classic Lectures on the History of Literature in 1817 and the (later gorgeously illustrated) Ancient Spanish Ballads in 1823.

He also wrote four novels, of which Chambers singles out Adam Blair (1822) as the only one of lasting importance, noting that this tale of a good man’s ”fall and repentance” was compared by Henry James to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

Chambers also points to a single poem of Lockhart’s (quite “unlike in temper” from the rest of his work) “which Carlyle used to quote with fervour, which Froude said no one who had read it could ever forget, and to whose consoling power for the distressed Mr. Andrew Lang [ed. note: who wrote a biography of Lockhart] gives personal testimony.”

Here is that poem: