popular, and to a degree we then little contemplated, as the ’Bon Gaultier Ballads.’  Some of the best of these were exclusively Aytoun’s, such as ‘The Massacre of the McPherson,’ ’The Rhyme of Sir Launcelot Bogle,’ ‘The Broken Pitcher,’ ’The Red Friar and Little John,’ ‘The Lay of Mr. Colt,’ and that best of all imitations of the Scottish ballad, ‘The Queen in France.’  Some were wholly mine, and the rest were produced by us jointly.  Fortunately for our purpose, there were then living not a few poets whose style and manner of thought were sufficiently marked to make imitation easy, and sufficiently popular for a parody of their characteristics to be readily recognized.  Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Rome’ and his two other fine ballads were still in the freshness of their fame.  Lockhart’s ‘Spanish Ballads’ were as familiar in the drawing-room as in the study.  Tennyson and Mrs. Browning were opening up new veins of poetry.  These, with Wordsworth, Moore, Uhland, and others of minor note, lay ready to our hands,—­as Scott, Byron, Crabbe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey had done to James and Horace Smith in 1812, when writing the ’Rejected Addresses.’  Never, probably, were verses thrown off with a keener sense of enjoyment.”

With Theodore Martin he published also ‘Poems and Ballads of Goethe’ (London, 1858).  Mr. Aytoun’s fame as a poet rests on his ’Lays of the Cavaliers,’ the themes of which are selected from stirring incidents of Scottish history, ranging from Flodden Field to the Battle of Culloden.  The favorites in popular memory are ‘The Execution of Montrose’ and ’The Burial March of Dundee.’  This book, published in London and Edinburgh in 1849, has gone through twenty-nine editions.

His dramatic poem, ‘Firmilian:  a Spasmodic Tragedy,’ written to ridicule the style of Bailey, Dobell, and Alexander Smith, and published in 1854, had so many excellent qualities that it was received as a serious production instead of a caricature.  Aytoun introduced this in Blackwood’s Magazine as a pretended review of an unpublished tragedy (as with the ‘Rolliad,’ and as Lockhart had done in the case of “Peter’s Letters,” so successfully that he had to write the book itself as a “second edition” to answer the demand for it).  This review was so cleverly done that “most of the newspaper critics took the part of the poet against the reviewer, never suspecting the identity of both, and maintained the poetry to be fine poetry and the critic a dunce.”  The sarcasm of ‘Firmilian’ is so delicate that only those familiar with the school it is intended to satirize can fairly appreciate its qualities.  The drama opens showing Firmilian in his study, planning the composition of ‘Cain:  a Tragedy’; and being infused with the spirit of the hero, he starts on a career of crime.  Among his deeds is the destruction of the cathedral of Badajoz, which first appears in his mental vision thus:—­

     “Methought I saw the solid vaults give way,
     And the entire cathedral rise in air,
     As if it leaped from Pandemonium’s jaws.”