John Gibson Lockhart
John Gibson Lockhart- A Famous Scottish Writer
John Gibson Lockhart (1794 - 1854) Educated in Glasgow and London, he was called to the Scottish bar. He became one of the chief contributors to the staunchly Tory Blackwood's Magazine when it started publication in 1817, and the aggressive style of criticism earned him the nickname of 'The Scorpion' . He was one of those who attacked John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others of the 'Cockney school' of poets. An effective satirist, he was one of the authors of Chaldee MS. He also wrote Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819), satirical glimpses of Scottish society, Ancient Spanish Ballads, of 1823, were successful verse translations and adaptations.
In 1825 Lockhart became editor of the Quaterly Review, another of the magazines in which the Scottish reviewers flayed the English poets. In 1828 he published his life of Burns. He had long been the friend (and since 1820 the son-in-law) of Walter Scott, who became the subject of his masterpiece, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837 - 1838), which is indeed one of the great English Biographies.
Back to