But all that delightful life amidst the woods of Elleray--with its game-cocks, and boats, and mountain rambles, and shouted chorus of Prometheus--comes to a sharp end. The inherited fortune of the poet, by some criminal carelessness or knavery of a relative, goes in a day; and our fine stalwart wrestler must go to Edinboro’ to wrestle with the fates. There he coquets for a time with law; but presently falls into pleasant affiliation with old Mr. Blackwood (who was a remarkable man in his way) in the conduct of his magazine. And then came the trumpet blasts of mingled wit, bravado, and tenderness, which broke into those pages, and which made young college men in England or Scotland or America, fling up their hats for Christopher North. Not altogether a safe guide, I think, as a rhetorician; too much bounce in him; too little self-restraint; too much of glitter and iridescence; but, on the other hand--bating some blackguardism--he is brimful of life and heartiness and merriment--lighted up with scholarly hues of color. There was associated with Wilson in those days, in work upon _Blackwood_, a young man--whom we may possibly not have occasion to speak of again, and yet who is worthy of mention. I mean J. G. Lockhart,[15] who afterwards became son-in-law and the biographer of Walter Scott--a slight young fellow in that day, very erect and prim; wearing his hat well forward on his heavy brows, and so shading a face that was thin, clean cut, handsome, and which had almost the darkness of a Spaniard’s. He put his rapier-like thrusts into a good many papers which the two wrought at together. All his life he loved literary digs with his stiletto--which was very sharp--and when he left Edinboro’ to edit the _Quarterly Review_ in London (as he did in after days) he took his stiletto with him. There are scenes in that unevenly written Lockhart story of _Adam Blair_--hardly known now--which for thrilling passion, blazing out of clear sufficiencies of occasion, would compare well with kindred scenes of Scott’s own, and which score deeper colorings of human woe and loves and remorse than belong to most modern stories; not lighted, indeed, with humor; not entertaining with anecdote; not embroidered with archæologic knowledge; not rattling with coruscating social fireworks, but--subtle, psychologic, touching the very marrow of our common manhood with a pen both sharp and fine. We remember him, however, most gratefully as the charming biographer of Scott, and as the accomplished translator of certain Spanish ballads into which he has put--under flowing English verse--all the clashing of Cordovan castanets, and all the jingle of the war stirrups of the Moors.