t 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 fe