ing 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Blackwood's Magazine as a pretended review of an unpublished tragedy (as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."

To effect this he employs--

"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 a