WILLIAM EDMONSTOUNE AYTOUN

(1813-1865)

Aytoun the second, balladist, humorist, and Tory, in proportions of about equal importance,—­one of the group of wits and devotees of the status quo who made Blackwood’s Magazine so famous in its early days,—­was born in Edinburgh, June 21st, 1813.  He was the son of Roger Aytoun, “writer to the Signet”; and a descendant of Sir Robert Aytoun (1570-1638), the poet and friend of Ben Jonson, who followed James VI. from Scotland and who is buried in Westminster Abbey.  Both Aytoun’s parents were literary.  His mother, who knew Sir Walter Scott, and who gave Lockhart many details for his biography, helped the lad in his poems.  She seemed to him to know all the ballads ever sung.  His earliest verses were praised by Professor John Wilson ("Christopher North"), the first editor of Blackwood’s, whose daughter he married in 1849.  At the age of nineteen he published his ‘Poland, Homer, and Other Poems’ (Edinburgh, 1832).  After leaving the University of Edinburgh, he studied law in London, visited Germany, and returning to Scotland, was called to the bar in 1840.  He disliked the profession, and used to say that though he followed the law he never could overtake it.

While in Germany he translated the first part of ‘Faust’ in blank verse, which was never published.  Many of his translations from Uhland and Homer appeared in Blackwood’s from 1836 to 1840, and many of his early writings were signed “Augustus Dunshunner.”  In 1844 he joined the editorial staff of Blackwood’s, to which for many years he contributed political articles, verse, translations of Goethe, and humorous sketches.  In 1845 he became Professor of Rhetoric and Literature in the University of Edinburgh, a place which he held until 1864.  About 1841 he became acquainted with Theodore Martin, and in association with him wrote a series of light papers interspersed with burlesque verses, which, reprinted from Blackwood’s, became popular as the ’Bon Gaultier Ballads.’  Published in London in 1855, they reached their thirteenth edition in 1877.

“Some papers of a humorous kind, which I had published under the nom de plume of Bon Gaultier,” says Theodore Martin in his ‘Memoir of Aytoun,’ “had hit Aytoun’s fancy; and when I proposed to go on with others in a similar vein, he fell readily into the plan, and agreed to assist in it.  In this way a kind of a Beaumont-and-Fletcher partnership commenced in a series of humorous papers, which appeared in Tait’s and Fraser’s magazines from 1842 to 1844.  In these papers, in which we ran a-tilt, with all the recklessness of youthful spirits, against such of the tastes or follies of the day as presented an opening for ridicule or mirth,—­at the same time that we did not altogether lose sight of a purpose higher than mere amusement,—­appeared the verses, with a few exceptions, which subsequently became