Lockhart modestly speaks of this book in his _Life of Scott_ as one that "none but a very young and thoughtless person would have written." It may safely be said that no one but a very clever person, whether young or old, could have written it, though it is too long and has occasional faults of a specially youthful kind. But it made, coming as it did upon the heels of the _Chaldee Manuscript_, a terrible commotion in Edinburgh. The impartial observer of men and things may, indeed, have noticed in the records of the ages, that a libelled Liberal is the man in all the world who utters the loudest cries. The examples of the Reformers, and of the eighteenth-century _Philosophes_, are notorious and hackneyed; but I can supply (without, I trust, violating the sanctity of private life) a fresh and pleasing example. Once upon a time, a person whom we shall call A. paid a visit to a person whom we shall call B. "How sad," said A., "are those personal attacks of the ---- on Mr. Gladstone."--"Personality," said B., "is always disgusting; and I am very sorry to hear that the ---- has followed the bad example of the personal attacks on Lord Beaconsfield."--"Oh! but," quoth A., "that was _quite_ a different thing." Now B. went out to dinner that night, and sitting next to a distinguished Liberal member of Parliament, told him this tale, expecting that he would laugh. "Ah! yes," said he with much gravity, "it is _very_ different, you know." In the same way the good Whig folk of Edinburgh regarded it as very different that the _Edinburgh Review_ should scoff at Tories, and that _Blackwood_ and _Peter_ should scoff at Whigs. The scorpion which delighted to sting the faces of men, probably at this time founded a reputation which has stuck to him for more than seventy years after Dr. Peter Morris drove his shandrydan through Scotland. Sir Walter (then Mr.) Scott held wisely aloof from the extremely exuberant Toryism of _Blackwood_, and, indeed, had had some quarrels with its publisher and virtual editor. But he could not fail to be introduced to a man whose tastes and principles were so closely allied to his own. A year after the appearance of _Peter's Letters_, Lockhart married, on 29th April 1820 (a perilous approximation to the unlucky month of May), Sophia Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch's "Little Jacobite," the most like her father of all his children. Every reader of the _Life_ knows the delightful pictures, enough for interest and not enough for vulgar obtrusion, given by Lockhart of life at Chiefswood, the cottage near Abbotsford which he and his wife inhabited for nearly six years. They were very busy years for Lockhart. He was still active in contributing to _Blackwood_; he wrote all his four novels, and he published the _Spanish Ballads_. _Valerius_ and _Adam Blair_ appeared in 1821, _Reginald Dalton_ and the _Ballads_ in 1823, _Matthew Wald_ in 1824.