The Croker Papers[87]--two ponderous volumes of letters and diary which have been published in these latter years--have good bits in them; but they are rare bits, to be dredged for out from quagmires of rubbish. The papers are interesting, furthermore, as showing how a cleverish man, with considerable gifts of presence and of brain, with his re-actionary Toryism dominant, and made a fetich of, can still keep a good digestion and go in a respectable fashion through a long life--backwards, instead of “face to the front.” In this connection it is difficult to keep out of mind that other Toryish administrator of the _Quarterly_ bombardments of reform and of Liberalists--I mean Lockhart (to whom reference has already been made in the present volume), and who, with all of Croker’s personal gifts, added to these a still larger scorn than that of his elder associate in the Quarterly conclaves, for those whose social disabilities disqualified them for breathing the rarefied air which circulated about Albemarle Street and the courts of Mr. Murray. Even Mr. Lang in his apologetic but very interesting story of Lockhart’s life,[88] cannot forbear quiet reprehensive allusions to that critic’s odious way of making caustic allusion to “the social rank” of political opponents; although much of this he avers “is said in wrath.” Yet it is an unworthy wrath, always and everywhere, which runs in those directions. Lockhart, though an acute critic, and a very clever translator, was a supreme worshipper of “conditions,” rather than of qualities. He never forgave Americans for being Americans, and never preter-mitted his wrathy exposition of their ‘low-lived antecedents’ socially. The baronetcy of his father-in-law, Sir Walter Scott, was I think, a perpetual and beneficent regalement to him. _Two Gone-by Story Tellers._ Must it be said that the jolly story-teller of the sea and of the sea-ports, who wrote for our uncles and aunts, and elder brothers, the brisk, rollicking tales about _Midshipman Easy_, and _Japhet in Search of a Father_, is indeed gone by?