When Sir Walter Scott wrote that "Lockhart will blaze," he noted the unusual promise that John Gibson Lockhart, his son-in-law, brought to the Scottish literary scene. Entering Edinburgh literary society as one of the writers for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine who, with John Wilson and James Hogg, scandalized and titillated literary Scotland during the early years of William Blackwood's "Maga," Lockhart quickly established a reputation as a satirist, critic, translator, and magazine versifier. Although he never achieved the sustained literary brilliance that Scott predicted, Lockhart did lead a long and varied career as a man of letters, serving as editor of the Quarterly Review for twenty-eight years, helping to popularize German literary theory in England, and achieving a degree of immortality as Scott's biographer. Lockhart's four novels, written and published anonymously in as many years, are remarkably varied, including the first Oxford novel, the first classical novel written in...