"Some twenty barrels of the dusky grain
The secret of whose framing in an hour
Of diabolic jollity and mirth
Old Roger Bacon wormed from Beelzebub."
When the horror is accomplished, at a moment when the inhabitants of
Badajoz are at prayer, Firmilian rather enjoys the scene:--
"Pillars and altar, organ loft and screen,
With a singed swarm of mortals intermixed,
Whirling in anguish to the shuddering stars."
"'Firmilian,'" to quote from Aytoun's biographer again, "deserves to
keep its place in literature, if only as showing how easy it is for a
man of real poetic power to throw off, in sport, pages of sonorous and
sparkling verse, simply by ignoring the fetters of nature and
common-sense and dashing headlong on Pegasus through the wilderness of
fancy." Its extravagances of rhetoric can be imagined from the following
brief extract, somewhat reminiscent of Marlowe:--
"And shall I then take Celsus for my guide,
Confound my brain with dull Justinian tomes,
Or stir the dust that lies o'er Augustine?
Not I, in faith! I've leaped into the air,
And clove my way through ether like a bird
That flits beneath the glimpses of the moon,
Right eastward, till I lighted at the foot
Of holy Helicon, and drank my fill
At the clear spout of Aganippe's stream;
I've rolled my limbs in ecstasy along
The selfsame turf on which old Homer lay
That night he dreamed of Helen and of Troy:
And I have heard, at midnight, the sweet strains
Come quiring from the hilltop, where, enshrined
In the rich foldings of a silver cloud,
The Muses sang Apollo into sleep."
In 1856 was printed 'Bothwell,' a poetic monologue on Mary Stuart's
lover. Of Aytoun's humorous sketches, the most humorous are 'My First
Spec in the Biggleswades,' and 'How We Got Up the Glen Mutchkin
Railway'; tales written during the railway mania of 1845, which treat of
the folly and dishonesty of its promoters, and show many typical
Scottish characters. His 'Ballads of Scotland' was issued in 1858; it is
an edition of the best ancient minstrelsy, with preface and notes. In
1861 appeared 'Norman Sinclair,' a novel published first in Blackwood's,
and giving interesting pictures of society in Scotland and personal
experiences.
After Professor Wilson's death, Aytoun was considered the leading man of
letters in Scotland; a rank which he modestly accepted by writing in
1838 to a friend:--"I am getting a kind of fame as the literary man of
Scotland. Thirty years ago, in the North countries, a fellow achieved an
immense reputation as 'The Tollman,' being the solitary individual
entitled by law to levy blackmail at a ferry." In 1860 he was made
Honorary President of the Associated Societies of the University of
Edinburgh, his competitor being Thackeray. This was the place held
afterward by Lord Lytton, Sir David Brewster, Carlyle, and Gladstone.
Aytoun wrote the 'The Life and Times of Richard the First' (London,
1840), and in 1863 a 'Nuptial Ode on the Marriage of the Prince
of Wales.'
Aytoun was a man of great charm and geniality in society; even to
Americans, though he detested America with the energy of fear--the fear
of all who see its prosperity sapping the foundations of their class
society. He died in 1865; and in 1867 his biography was published by Sir
Theodore Martin, his collaborator. Martin's definition of Aytoun's place
in literature is felicitous:--
* * * * *
"Fashions in poetry may alter, but so long as the themes with which they
deal have an interest for his countrymen, his 'Lays' will find, as they
do now, a wide circle of admirers. His powers as a humorist were perhaps
greater than as a poet. They have certainly been more widely
appreciated. His immediate contemporaries owe him much, for he has
contributed largely to that kindly mirth without which the strain and
struggle of modern life would be intolerable. Much that is excellent in
his humorous writings may very possibly cease to retain a place in
literature from the circumstance that he deals with characters and
peculiarities which are in some measure local, and phases of life and
feeling and literature which are more or less ephemeral. But much will
certainly continue to be read and enjoyed by the sons and grandsons of
those for whom it was originally written; and his name will be coupled
with those of Wilson, Lockhart, Sydney Smith, Peacock, Jerrold, Mahony,
and Hood, as that of a man gifted with humor as genuine and original as
theirs, however opinions may vary as to the order of their
relative merits."
'The Modern Endymion,' from which an extract is given, is a parody on
Disraeli's earlier manner.