William Edmondstoune Aytoun "seemed born for" humor, recalled his friend and collaborator Theodore Martin. Even at the height of a busy career as a poet, lawyer, professor of rhetoric and belles lettres, and active staff member of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Aytoun remained good tempered, marked by a dry wit and a vivid sense of fun and of the ludicrous. His stories, essays, and ballads, as well as the full-length burlesque Firmilian; or, The Student of Badajoz (1854), poke fun at smug pretensions in politics, literature, social relations, and finance. In his works one glimpses, suggests Eric Partridge, "something of Aytoun, who possessing a magnificent head, had ample brains inside it; whose heart was warm, speech vivid, and touch satirical as well as poetical." He was, W. L. Renwick says, at his best when he was least serious.

Writing mostly between the Reform Bill of 1832 and the Crimean War of...