LITERARY AND DOMESTIC LIFE. 



407 



What right has such a question to be put ? Is literature worked 

 as if on a tread-mill, under the hand of a task-master ; or is the 

 public voice never to cease from the weary cry of " give, give ?" 



The contents of the following letter to Dr. Moir will show that 

 he was not absolutely idle : — 



"ith Oct., 1842. 



" My dear Sir : — I have lost several days in looking over till I 

 am sick, all Blackwood, for a description of Christopher's house in 

 Moray Place. It is somewhere pictured as the House of Indolence, 

 and with some elaboration, as I once heard Horatio Macculloch, the 

 painter, talk of it with rapture. I wish you would cast over in 

 your mind where the description may be, as I would fain put it 

 into a chapter in vol. iii. of ' Recreations' now printing. Sometimes 

 a reader remembers what a writer forgets. It is not in a ' Noctes.' 

 I read it with my own eyes not long ago ; but I am ashamed of 

 myself to think how many hours (days) I have wasted in wearily 

 trying to recover it. Perhaps it may recur to you without much 

 effort of recollection. Yours affectionately, 



"John Wilson." 



CHAPTER XVI. 



LITERARY AND DOMESTIC LIFE. 



1844-'48. 



We now come to February, 1844, where an old correspondent re- 

 appears, whose letters, if not written in the sunny spirit of bonho- 

 mie, have a peculiar excellence of their own. Never did graver's 

 tool give more unmistakable sharpness to his lines, than the pen of 

 John Gibson Lockhart gave to his words. The three following let- 

 ters are as characteristic of his satirical power as any of those off- 

 hand caricatures that shred his best friends to pieces, leaving the 

 most poetical of them as bereft of that beautifying property, as if 

 they had been born utterly without it. I have seen various portraits 

 of my father from that pencil, each bearing the grotesque image of the 



