Apart from his career in journalism, Lockhart also wrote a fine novel, Adam Blair , which has a clear justified sinner story-line, though with a reasonably happy ending, a monumental biography of Scott and Peter's Letters to his Kinfolk . The narrative structure becomes a thin disguise under the cover of which Lockhart criticises his literati contemporaries. However, Peter refutes nationalist pride by suggesting that the Enlightenment legacy has left Scotland with an attitude towards culture in which questioning and disputation have been replaced by, or have evolved into, rejection of whatever is new.
Scepticism becomes a useful way of expressing one's feelings, especially hatred.
The most vulgar blockhead who takes up an reads an article in the Edinburgh Review, imagines for the time that he himself is quizzing the man of genius, whose labours are there sported with. His opaque features are illuminated with triumph, and, holding the Journal fast in his hand, he pursued his fantastic victory to the last extremities. Month after month, or quarter after quarter, this most airy species of gratification is renewed, till, by long habit, our blockhead at last becomes bon fide satisfied and convinced, that he is quite superior to anything the age can produce. Particularly revealing, and of great interest to readers of Romantic literature, is the account of the reception of Wordsworth and Coleridge. This combination of magazine-reading and scepticism results in the dismissal of one of the major Romantic poets.