Locke was born in the county of Somerset, on the 29th of August 1632, six years after the death of Bacon, and three months before the birth of Spinoza. His father was a small landowner and attorney at Pensford, near the northern boundary of the county, to which neighbourhood the family had migrated from Dorsetshire early in the century. The elder Locke, a strict but genial Puritan, by whom the son was carefully educated at home, was engaged in the military service of the popular party when the son was a boy, Bristol being one of the centres of the war. “From the time that I knew anything,” Locke wrote in 1660, “I found myself in a storm which has continued to this time.” For fourteen years his education was going on at home, in the Puritan family. The house at Beluton, on his father’s little estate, in which these years were spent, may still be seen on the side of one of the orchard-clad vales of Somerset, half a mile from the markettown of Pensford, and 6 miles from Bristol. The actual place of Locke’s birth was at Wrington, 10 miles westward, in a house which still exists, where his mother chanced to be on a visit.

In 1646 he entered Westminster School, then of course under Puritan control, and at the headquarters of the parliamentary movement. The six following years were mostly spent there. He does not seem to have liked Westminster, and its memories perhaps produced the bias against public schools which afterwards almost disturbed his philosophic impartiality in his Thoughts on Education.

In 1652 Locke passed from Westminster to Oxford. He there found himself at Christ Church, in charge of John Owen, the newly appointed Puritan dean, and vice-chancellor of the university. Christ Church was more or less Locke’s home for thirty years. For eight years after he entered Oxford was ruled by the Independents, who, through Owen and Goodwin, unlike the Presbyterians, were among the first in England to promulgate the principles of genuine religious liberty. Locke’s hereditary sympathy with the Puritans was gradually lessened by what he saw of the intolerance of the Presbyterians and the fanaticism of the Independents. He found, he says characteristically, that “what was called general freedom was general bondage, and that the popular assertors of liberty were the greatest engrossers of it too, and not unfitly called its keepers.” The influence of the liberal divines of the Church of England became apparent afterwards in the progress of his mental history.

Oxford had suffered as a seat of learning during the civil war. Under Owen the scholastic studies and disputations were maintained with a formality unsuited to Locke’s free inquisitive temper. The reaction against them which he expressed showed thus early a strong disposition to rebel against empty verbal reasonings. He was not, according to his own account of himself to Lady Masham, a very hard student at first. He sought the company of pleasant and witty men, with whom he likewise took great delight in corresponding by letter; and in conversation and in these correspondences he spent much of his time. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1656, and that of master in 1658, the latter on the same day with Joseph Glanvill, the author of Scepsis Sdentifica. In December 1660 he was made tutor of Christ Church, and lectured in Greek, rhetoric, and philosophy in the following year.

At Oxford Locke was within reach of distinctive intellectual influences, then of great strength, and particularly fitted to promote self-education in a strong character. The metaphysical works of Descartes had appeared a few years before he entered Christ Church, and the Human Nattire and Leviathan of Hobbes during his undergraduate years. It does not seem that Locke read extensively, but he was soon drawn to Descartes. The first books, he told Lady Masham, which gave him a relish for philosophical things were those of Descartes. He was delighted in reading them, though he very often differed in opinion from the writer, for he found that what he said was very intelligible. After the Restoration he lived amidst the influences which were then drawing Oxford and England into experimental research. Experiments in physics became the fashion after 1660. The Royal Society was that year founded at Oxford. Wallis and Wilkins, and afterwards Boyle and Wren, at Oxford, and Barrow and Newton at Cambridge, helped to make chemistry, meteor- ol °gy, ^nd mechanics take the place of verbal disputes. We find him, accordingly, at work in chemistry about 1663, and also in the meteorological observations which always interested him.

The restraints of professional life were not well suited to Locke. There is a surmise that he once contemplated taking orders in the Church of England. His religious disposition attracted him to theological studies. His revulsion from the severe dogmatism of Presbyterians and the unreasoning fanaticism of Independents favoured that connexion with liberal Anglican churchmen which he maintained in later life. Whichcote was his favourite preacher, and latterly his closest intimacy was with the Cudworth family. But, though he has a place among the lay theologians of England, his dislike to ecclesiastical impediments to free research, as well as his taste for experimental investigations, led him in the end to turn to medicine when he had to think about a profession. This was soon after the Restoration, and before 1666 he seems to have been practising medicine in Oxford. But, though afterwards known among his friends as “Doctor Locke,” he never graduated as a physician. His health was uncertain, for he suffered all his life from chronic consumption and asthma, and besides that an event soon occurred which withdrew him from medical practice. To the end, however, he was fond of the science, and also ready on occasion to give friendly advice.

Locke had early shown an inclination to politics as well as to theology and to medicine. In 1665 he diverged from medical study at Oxford to diplomacy, and was engaged for a few months in this sort of business, as secretary to Sir Walter Vane on his embassy to Cleves. It was soon after his return from Germany in the following year that the incident occurred which determined his career in the direction of politics. Lord Ashley, afterwards first earl of Shaftesbury, the most truly historical figure among the statesmen of Charles H.’s reign, had come to Oxford for health. There Locke was accidentally introduced to him. This meeting was the beginning of a lasting friendship, sustained by a common sympathy with liberty—civil, religious, and philosophical. In 1667 Locke removed from Christ Church to Exeter House, Lord Ashley’s London residence, to become his private secretary, and in 1673 secretary of the Board of Trade. Although he retained his studentship at Christ Church, and occasionally visited Oxford, and also his patrimony at Beluton, lately inherited from his father, he found a home and shared fortune with the great statesman during the fifteen years which followed his removal to Exeter House.

The manuscripts of Locke which belong to this Oxford period throw welcome light on the growth of his mind in early life. Among them is an essay on the “Roman Commonwealth,” which expresses convictions as to religious liberty and the relations of religion to the state which were only strengthened and deepened in the progress of his life. Objections to the sacerdotal conception of Christianity are strongly stated in another paper; short work is made of human claims to infallibility in the interpretation of Scripture in a third; a scheme of utilitarian ethics, wider in its conception than that of Hobbes, is offered in a fourth. But the most significant of those early revelations is an “Essay concerning Toleration,” dated in 1666, which anticipates many of the positions maintained nearly thirty years later in his famous Letters on that subject.

The Shaftesbury connexion helped to save Locke from those idols of the den to which professional life in every form is exposed. It brought him much in contact with public men, with the springs of political action, and with the details of office. The place he held as confidential adviser of the greatest statesman of his age is indeed the most remarkable feature in his middle life. Exeter House afforded every opportunity for society, and of this Locke, according to his disposition, availed himself. He became one of the intimates among others of the illustrious Sydenham. But though he joined the Royal Society he seldom went to its meetings, for his custom all his life was to encourage small reunions of intimate friends. One of these at Exeter House was the occasion of the enterprise which has made his name memorable in history; for it was there that “five or six friends” met one evening in his rooms, about 1671, and discussed “principles of morality and religion” which seemed remote from questions about “human understanding.” They “found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that arose on every side.” Locke suggested a careful examination of the exact limits of man’s power to know the universe as the proper way out of their difficulties. The results of the reflexion to which these difficulties thus gave rise, he thought, when he set to work, might be contained on “one sheet of paper.” But what was thus “begun by chance was continued by entreaty, written by incoherent parcels, and after long intervals of neglect resumed again as humour and occasions permitted,” till at last, at the end of nearly twenty years, it was given to the world as the Essay on Human Understanding. This work gave intellectual unity and a purpose to his life as a man of letters and philosophy.

The fall of Shaftesbury in 1675 enabled Locke to escape for four years from the centre of English politics to a retreat in France, where he could unite the study of “human understanding” with attention to health. He spent three years partly at Montpellier and partly in Paris. His journals and commonplace books of this period show the Essay in process of construction. The visits to Paris were times of meeting with men of letters and science, among others Guenellon, the well - known Amsterdam physician; Römer, the Danish astronomer; Thoynard, the critic; Thevenot, the traveller; Justel, the jurist; and Bernier, the expositor of Gassendi. There is no mention of Malebranche, whose Recherche de la Vérité had appeared three years before, and who was then at the Oratoire, nor of Arnauld, his illustrious rival at the Sorbonne.

Locke returned to London in 1679. A reaction against the court party had for a time restored Shaftesbury to power. Locke resumed his old confidential relations. A period of much-interrupted leisure followed. It was a time of plots and counterplots, when England seemed on the brink of another civil war. In the end Shaftesbury was committed to the Tower, tried, and acquitted. More insurrectionary plots followed in the summer of 1682, after which, isolated at home, he escaped to Holland, and died at Amsterdam in January 1683. In these two years Locke was much at Oxford or at Beluton. The last movements of Shaftesbury did not recommend themselves to the sage caution of his secretary. Yet the officials of Government kept their eyes on him. “John Locke lives a very cunning unintelligible life here,” Prideaux reported from Oxford in 1682. “I may confidently affirm,” the dean of Christ Church afterwards wrote to Lord Sunderland, “there is not any one in the college who has heard him speak a word against, or so much as censuring, the Government; and, although very frequently, both in public and private, discourses have been purposely introduced to the disparagement of his master, the earl of Shaftesbury, he could never be provoked to take any notice, or discover in word or look the least concern; so that I believe there is not in the world such a master of taciturnity and passion.” Some unpublished correspondence with his Somerset friend, Edward Clarke of Chipley, describes his daily life in these troubled years, and refers to intercourse with the Cudworth family, who were intimate with the Clarkes. The commonplace books and letters about the same time allude to toleration in the state and comprehension in the church, and show an indifference to questions on which theological disputera lay stress, hardly consistent with a strict connexion with any organized body of Christians, notwithstanding his gravitation towards the Church of England as the most liberal community.

In his fifty-second year, in the gloomy autumn of 1683, Locke retired to Holland in voluntary exile. It was then the asylum of eminent persons who were elsewhere denied civil and religious liberty. Descartes and Spinoza had meditated there; it had been the home of Erasmus and Grotius; it was now the refuge of Bayle. Holland was Locke’s sanctuary for more than five years; but it was hardly a voluntary retreat. His (unpublished) letters from thence represent a man of tender feelings, on whom exile sat heavily. Amsterdam was his first Dutch home. For a time he was in danger of arrest at the instance of the English Government. After anxious months of concealment in the houses of friends, he escaped; he was, however, deprived of his studentship at Christ Church, and Oxford was finally closed against him by order of the king. But Holland introduced him to new friends. One of these, ever after an intimate correspondent, was Philip van Limborch, the successor of Episcopius as Remonstrant professor of theology, lucid, learned, and tolerant, the friend of Cudworth, Whichcote, and More. Limborch attached him to Le Clerc, then the youthful representative of letters and philosophy in Limborch’s college, who had escaped from Geneva and Calvinism to the milder atmosphere of Holland. The Bibliothèque Universelle of Le Clerc, commenced in 1686, soon became the chief organ in Europe of men of letters. Locke was at once united with him in the work, and contributed several articles. It was his first appearance as an author, although he was now more than fifty-four years of age, and afterwards produced so many volumes. This tardiness in authorship is a significant fact in Locke’s mental history, in harmony with the tempered wisdom and massive common sense which reign throughout his works. The next fourteen years were those in which the world received the thoughts which observation of affairs and reflexion had so long been forming in his mind. They were taking shape for publication while he was in Holland. The Essay was finished there, and a French epitome of it appeared in 1688, in Le Clerc’s journal. Locke was then at Rotterdam, where he lived for more than a year in the house of a Quaker friend, Benjamin Furley, a wealthy merchant and collector of books. The course of affairs in England at last opened a way for his return to his native country. At Rotterdam he was the confidant of the political exiles, including Burnet and Mordaunt, afterwards the famous earl of Peterborough, as well as of the prince of Orange. William landed in England in November 1688; Locke followed in February 1689, in the same ship with the princess of Orange and Lady Mordaunt.

It was after his return to England that through authorship Locke emerged into European fame. Within a month he had declined the embassy to Brandenburg, and taken instead the modest office of commissioner of appeals with its almost nominal duties. The two years, 1689 and 1690, during which he lived at Dorset Court, in London, were memorable for the publication of his two chief works in social polity, and also of the most popular and widely influential book in modern philosophy, which expresses in a generalized form the principles that lie at the root of all his political and other writings. The first of the three to appear was the defence of religious liberty in the state, in the Epistola de Tolerantia, addressed to Limborch. It was published at Gouda in the spring of 1689, and translated into English in autumn by William Popple, a Unitarian merchant in London. The Two Treatises on Government, in defence of the sovereignty of the people, followed a month or two after. The Essay concerning Human Understanding saw the light in the spring of 1690. He received £30 for the copyright, which was nearly the same as Kant afterwards got for the first edition of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft. He had carried the manuscript from Holland, ready for the press except a few last touches. It was the first book in which his name appeared, for the other two were published anonymously.

Locke’s asthma and other ailments had increased in the latter part of 1690. The air of London always aggravated them. The course of public affairs also disappointed him, for the settlement at the Revolution in many ways fell short of his ideal. It was then that the home of his old age, the brightest of all his homes, opened to receive him. This was the manor house of Oates in Essex, pleasantly situated midway between Ongar and Harlow, the country seat of Sir Francis Masham. Lady Masham was the accomplished daughter of Cudworth, and Locke had known her before he went to Holland. In the course of the two years after his return, she told Le Clerc, “by some considerably long visits Mr Locke made trial of the air of this place, which is some 20 miles from London, and he thought that none would be so suitable for him. His company could not but be very desirable for us, and he had all the assurances we could give him of being always welcome; but, to make him easy in living with us, it was necessary he should do so on his own terms, which Sir Francis at last assenting to, he then believed himself at home with us, and resolved, if it pleased God, here to end his days—as he did.” It was in the spring of 1691 that this idyllic life at Oates began. There, among the green lanes of rural England, he enjoyed for fourteen years as much domestic peace and literary leisure as was consistent with broken health and sometimes anxious visits to London on public affairs. Oates was in every way his home. In his letters and otherwise we have charming pictures of its inmates and its internal economy, as well as of occasional visits of friends who went there to see him, among others Lord Peterborough and the Lord Shaftesbury who wrote the Characteristics, Isaac Newton, William Molyneux, and Anthony Collins.

At Oates he was always busy with his pen. The Letter on Toleration had already involved him in controversy. The Answer of a certain Jonas Proast of Queen’s College, Oxford, had drawn forth in 1690 his Second Letter on Toleration. A rejoinder in 1691 was followed by Locke’s Third Letter in the summer of the following year. And other questions divided his interest with this one. In 1691 those of currency and finance were much in his thoughts; in the year after he addressed a letter to Sir John Somers on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money. It happened too that when he was in Holland he had written letters to his friend Clarke of Chipley about the education of his children. These letters formed the substance of the little volume that appeared in 1693, entitled Thoughts on Education, which still holds its place among the classics in that department. Nor were the “principles of revealed religion” forgotten, which a quarter of a century before were partly the occasion of the Essay. The circumstances of the time now made him desire to show how few and simple all the essential points held in common by the religious community of England were, and to bring men if possible to agree to differ as individuals regarding all beyond. The issue was an anonymous essay on the Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures, which appeared in 1695, in which...

Lockhart was not turned fourteen when he was entered at Balliol. College, but he soon asserted his character and his powers. His fun and satire made him at once popular and formidable, while beyond the regular studies of the place he acquired a great store of extra knowledge. He read French, Italian, German, and Spanish, was curious in classical and British antiquities, and well versed in heraldic and genealogical lore. Lockhart went up to the schools in the Easter term of 1813—not nineteen years of age—and, notwithstanding the most audacious employment of part of his time in caricaturing the examiners, he came out first in classics. The name of Henry Hart Milman, a subsequent friend through life, stood next his. For mathematics he never had the least inclination.

He now quitted Oxford, and before settling to the study of Scottish law, for which his father had designed him, he indulged a long cherished wish to visit Germany. His knowledge of German had introduced him to the great band of poets and scholars who had suddenly exalted the fame of German literature. Lockhart had no means to undertake the journey; but here his reputation came to his aid. A proposal to translate Frederick Schlegel’s Lectures on the Study of History was accepted by Mr Blackwood, and the price of the labour paid before a liue was written. Lockhart always spoke of this as a most generous act on “Ebony’s” part, and his friendship with the liberal publisher lasted through life. He meanwhile paid his visit to Germany, was introduced to Goethe at Weimar, traversed France and the Netherlands, made careful observations on pictures and architecture, and returned to Edinburgh to study law by the time he was twenty-one. In 1816 he was called to the bar. But he had no friends among writers and attorneys, his brilliant powers of conversation did not comprise that of public speaking, and few, if any, briefs came in. His habits of observation, however, turned the time to a use afterwards exemplified in Peter's Letters.

Edinburgh was then the stronghold of the Whig party. The Edinburgh Review was their organ, and it was not till 1817 that the Scotch Tories found a national channel of assertion and defence—namely, in Blackwood's Magazine. This periodical held its way dully enough with its first numbers, when suddenly an outburst of wit and ridicule directed against the hitherto unchallenged writers of the Whig party, surpassing them in cleverness and equalling them in personalities, electrified the Edinburgh world. Wilson (Christopher North), Hogg (the Ettrick Shepherd), and Lockhart had joined the staff, and retaliation for long pent-up wrongs began. Lockhart’s pen contributed scholarly papers on various subjects, including hearty criticism and eulogium on Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other victims of a Review which could find only scant praise even for Walter Scott. His translations also of the Spanish ballads appeared for the greater part in Blackwood. But his pen was more often dipped in caustic, dealing out attacks and recriminations which led to regrettable consequences. Meanwhile the gifted and handsome young man, for Lockhart’s head was cast in the highest type of brilliant manly beauty, had attracted the notice of Walter Scott. They met first in 1818. The acquaintance soon ripened into friendship, and that friendship led to the union between Lockhart and Scott’s eldest daughter, Sophia, in April 1820. For more than five years after his marriage Lockhart tasted the best form of domestic happiness. Winters spent in Edinburgh and summers at a cottage fitted up for them at pretty Chiefswood, near Abbotsford, gave the young couple the constant enjoyment of friendship, society, and even worldly distinction, added to the blessing of a perfect home. At Chiefswood Lockhart’s two eldest children, John Hugh and Charlotte, were born; Walter, later, at Brighton.

Between 1818, when he joined the Blackwood staff, and 1825 Lockhart’s pen was indefatigably at work. As early as 1819 Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk appeared. Like Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World, these profess to give the impressions of a stranger in a new country. Dr Peter Morris, a Welsh physician, passes some time in Scotland, especially in Edinburgh, and describes the men and manners very freely to his relations at home. His descriptions of the chief notabilities of the day have a certain historical, almost antiquarian interest, though now the least interesting part of the work. What we enjoy most is the reflexion of a young and ardent mind dealing out opinions and estimates far beyond its years, the correctness of which time has singularly verified. The amount of reading too which crops out in every page is amazing; a perpetual play of allusions, quotations, and happy nicknames—for which Lockhart to his last days was famous—is given with a raciness of tone of which the reader might tire, but for the simple, vigorous English in which it is clad. A chapter on dandies is a chef d'oeuvre in its way. That a work describing the appearance and idiosyncrasies of many living individuals should give offence was a matter of course. His description of the northern universities was not likely to please; while for the unsparing ridicule and ruthless quizzing heaped on the General Assembly—“men,” he is supposed to have said, “of like passions with ourselves, but worse manners” —it would be strange indeed if the author had escaped with impunity.

Valerius, a Roman Story, followed next (1821). As Valerius was intended to illustrate the manners and customs of Rome in the time of Trajan, so Reginald Dalton, published in 1823, aimed at exhibiting the life of an undergraduate at Oxford as he had known it. Lockhart’s strength did not lie in novel writing, and, to those who read Reginald Dalton now, the digressions of the author are far more interesting than the adventures of the hero. But a plot of simpler construction and intenser passion showed Lockhart’s strength to greater advantage. Adam Blair (1822) is a tale of temptation, fall, and repentance, each fearful in its way, told with tremendous power, and as far removed from all that is morbid and false in sentiment as the author was himself. It gave great offence to the Scottish Church, for the erring man is a minister, and the scene is laid in a Scottish manse.

In 1826, on the death of Mr Gifford, the editorship of the Quarterly Review was offered to Lockhart, and accepted. He was singularly free in position, however far from idle. He was next heir to Milton Lockhart, the property of his unmarried half-brother, who eventually survived him; the legal profession to which he had been destined was virtually abandoned; and time had shown him that the party strife which prevailed in Edinburgh was demoralizing to both sides. This last conviction did the most to reconcile him to the separation from all Scottish surroundings. His friends gave him a farewell dinner, when, labouring with strong feelings, and with his habitual dislike or incapacity to express them, he said, on returning thanks, “You all know that I am no speaker; had I been, there would have been no occasion for this parting.”

The conduct of a great periodical like the Quarterly Review is the touchstone of a man’s capacity, knowledge, and temper. Looking back to an editorship which lasted twenty-eight years, it must be admitted that Lockhart maintained a high position in all these respects. He contributed largely to the Review himself, his biographical articles being especially admirable. He also found time, being a very glutton in work, for many a paper in Blackwood ; he wrote what remains the most charming of the biographies of Burns; and he undertook the superintendence of the series called Murray’s Family Library, which he opened in 1829 with a Life of Napoleon. But his chief work was the Life of Walter Scott, a task at once of love and duty. Lockhart knew the great and good man as no one else did, and felt that, whatever the mistakes in judgment, no life from first to last could better afford complete revelation. There have not been wanting those in Scotland who have taxed him with ungenerous exposure of his subject, but to most healthy minds the impression conveyed by the biography was, and is, one of the most opposite kind—namely, that Lockhart has almost deified Scott. The labour incurred was in so far one of love, inasmuch as the writer reaped no part of its considerable proceeds, but resigned them absolutely for the benefit of Scott’s creditors.

Lockhart’s life in London was a long succession of constant work, of dignified social success, and of heavy bereavements. His eldest boy, the suffering “Hugh Littlejohn” of the Tales of a, Grandfather, died in 1831. Sir Walter died in 1832; Anne Scott, the second daughter, who had come to live with the Lockharts in London, in 1833; Mrs Lockhart in 1837. The love for his children was for long the one bright element in his life. But the death in 1852, and, sadder still, the previous life, of his surviving son Walter, a fine youth, who had entered the army under unfortunate auspices, broke down all that remained of health and spirit in the father.

Failing health compelled Lockhart to resign the editorship of the Quarterly Review in 1853. He spent the next winter in Rome, but returned to England with no restoration of vital power. He was conveyed to Abbotsford, where, under the tender care of his daughter Mrs Hope Scott, and cheered by the prattle of his granddaughter, now the possessor of Abbotsford, he lingered till his death, November 25, 1854. He was buried in Dryburgh Abbey, at the feet of Walter Scott. (e. e.)