Yet who could endure to read the life of Coleridge in six volumes?  De Quincey, in an essay first published the other day by Dr. Japp, calls the story of the Coleridges “a perfect romance ... a romance of beauty, of intellectual power, of misfortune suddenly illuminated from heaven, of prosperity suddenly overcast by the waywardness of the individual.”  But the “romance” has been written twice and thrice, and desperately dull reading it makes in each case.  Is it then an accident that Coleridge has been unhappy in his biographers, while Lockhart succeeded once for all, and succeeded so splendidly?

It is surely no accident.  Coleridge is an ill man to read about just as certainly as Scott is a good man to read about; and the secret is just that Scott had character and Coleridge had not.  In writing of the man of the “graspless hand,” the biographer’s own hand in time grows graspless on the pen; and in reading of him our hands too grow graspless on the page.  We pursue the man and come upon group after group of his friends; and each as we demand “What have you done with Coleridge?” answers “He was here just now, and we helped him forward a little way.”  Our best biographies are all of men and women of character—­and, it may be added, of beautiful character—­of Johnson, Scott, and Charlotte Bronte.

There are certain people whose biographies ought to be long.  Who could learn too much concerning Lamb?  And concerning Scott, who will not agree with Lockhart’s remark in the preface to his abridged edition of 1848:—­“I should have been more willing to produce an enlarged edition; for the interest of Sir Walter’s history lies, I think, peculiarly in its minute details”?  You may explore here, and explore there, and still you find pure gold; for the man was gold right through.

So in the present volume every line is of interest because we refer it to Scott’s known character and test it thereby.  The result is always the same; yet the employment does not weary.  In themselves the letters cannot stand, as mere writing, beside the letters of Cowper, or of Lamb.  They are just the common-sense epistles of a man who to his last day remained too modest to believe in the extent of his own genius.  The letters in this collection which show most acuteness on literary matters are not Scott’s, but Lady Louisa Stuart’s, who appreciated the Novels on their appearance (their faults as well as their merits) with a judiciousness quite wonderful in a contemporary.  Scott’s literary observations (with the exception of one passage where the attitude of an English gentleman towards literature is stated thus—­“he asks of it that it shall arouse him from his habitual contempt of what goes on about him”) are much less amusing; and his letters to Joanna Baillie the dullest in the volume, unless it be the answers which Joanna Baillie sent.  Best of all, perhaps, is the correspondence (scarcely used by Lockhart) between Scott and Lady Abercorn, with its fitful intervals of warmth and reserve.  This alone would justify Mr. Douglas’s volumes.  But, indeed, while nothing can be found now to alter men’s conception of Scott, any book about him is justified, even if it do no more than heap up superfluous testimony to the beauty of his character.