"Lockhart ... is the second greatest ... of all British biographers," claimed Harold Nicolson in The Development of English Biography (1928). John Gibson Lockhart and his biography of Sir Walter Scott may not be so highly esteemed today. Nevertheless, his qualities of mind and characteristics of personality, combined with his unique literary talent, made him a biographer who was unequaled for more than a century.

Lockhart was born in Cambusnethan, Lanarkshire, on 12 July 1794, according to the parish register, or 14 July, according to the presbytery's record of births, to the Reverend Dr. John Lockhart and his second wife, Elizabeth Gibson Lockhart. Both families had long Scottish histories. The Lockhart name reached back to the eleventh century in the west of Scotland; Mrs. Lockhart, daughter of the Reverend John Gibson, minister of Saint Cuthbert's, Edinburgh, came from old Border families. At the time of Lockhart's birth Dr. Lockhart was incumbent at Cambusnethan--then predominantly...