Lockhart undoubtedly shared that excessive personality which was the blot of criticism, and especially of the _Blackwood_ school, in his generation. He has been charged with the _Blackwood_ article on Keats, and with the _Quarterly_ article on _Jane Eyre_, but he may now be acquitted of both these sins. It was however Lockhart who wrote the _Quarterly_ article on Tennyson's early poems; but this, though bad in tone and excessively severe, is to a large extent critically sound. So far as they can be traced, Lockhart's criticisms are such as might be expected from his mind,--clear, incisive and vigorous. They are however often unsympathetic and harsh, because criticism was then too apt to be interpreted as fault-finding, and Lockhart could not wholly free himself from the influence of a vicious tradition. But it is by his _Life of Scott_ (1836-1838) that Lockhart will live in literature. He had in an ample measure the first of all requirements in a biographer, personal acquaintance with the man whose life he wrote. Almost from the time of his introduction, and certainly from the date of his marriage, Lockhart's relations with Scott were of the closest; and though he was not personally familiar with the facts of Scott's earlier life, he knew quite enough to understand the springs of the man's character. Moreover, in the autobiographical fragment and in the endless stores of family and friendly anecdote open to him he had ample means of making good the deficiency. For among Lockhart's advantages is to be reckoned the fact that he had not merely married into the family, but had married, as it were, into the circle of friends. The _Life of Scott_ shows that the families of Abbotsford, of Chiefswood and of Huntley Burn (the last Scott's great friends the Fergusons) were for many purposes only one larger family.