Arthur John Lockhart

Arthur John Lockhart, born in Lockhartville, Kings County, N.S., was the eldest son of Capt. Nathan Albert Lockhart and Elizabeth Ann (nee Bezanson). Lockhart explained to A.W.H. Eaton that he grew up surrounded by and reading literature. At the age of seventeen, he moved to Wolfville and lived with Mr. Major Theakston, then the editor of the Wolfville Acadian. Not long after he moved to Cambridge, Mass., and worked in the University Press on the publication Every Saturday. Lockhart entered religious life in 1868. By 1871, he was assisting the pastor in St. Andrews, N.B. In 1872, he entered the Methodist Episcopal Conference of Eastern Maine. Lockhart married Adelaide Beckerton of St. Andrews in 1873. For the rest of his life, Rev. Lockhart was the pastor for several communities throughout Maine. (A.W.H. Eaton, The History Of Kings County, 1910)
Lockhart wrote under his own name as well as the pseudenoym of Pastor Felix. Many of his books are in the Library’s Special Collections. A.W.H. Eaton indicates,
Rev. Arthur John Lockhart (“Pastor Felix”), in 1877 published “The Masque of Ministrels”, which contained his own earlier poems and those of his brother, Rev. Burton Wellesley Lockhart, D.D. In 1895 he published a smaller collection of verse entitled, “Beside the Narraguagus, and Other Poems” ; and in 1910, “The Birds of the Cross, and Other Poems”. He is also the author of a volume of miscellanies in prose and verse, entitled “The Papers of Pastor Felix”, issued in 1903. (A History of Kings County, 1910, 401)