d, as winningly as a Titania performing the sword exercise!
How coyly does she dispose her garments and floating drapery to hide
the too-maddening symmetry of her limbs! Gods! She is transformed
all at once into an Amazon--the fawn-like timidity of her first
demeanour is gone. Bold and beautiful flushes her cheek with
animated crimson--her full voluptuous lip is more compressed and
firm--the deep passion of the huntress flashing in her lustrous eyes!
Widdicomb becomes excited--he moves with quicker step around the
periphery of his central circle--incessant is the smacking of his
whip--not this time directed against Mr Merriman, who at his ease is
enjoying a swim upon the sawdust--and lo! the grooms rush in, six
bars are elevated in a trice, and over them all bounds the volatile
Signora like a panther, nor pauses until with airy somersets she has
passed twice through the purgatory of the blazing hoop, and then,
drooping and exhausted, sinks like a Sabine into the arms of the
Herculean master, who--a second Romulus--bears away his lovely burden
to the stables, amid such a whirlwind of applause as Kemble might
have been proud to earn."

Astley's has long been levelled with the dust; it is many years since
Widdicomb, Gomersal, Ducrow, and the Woolford passed into the Silent
Land. May their memory be preserved for yet a few years to come in the
mirthful strains of two of their most ardent and grateful admirers!

Of the longer poems in this volume the following were exclusively
Aytoun's: "The Broken Pitcher," "The Massacre of the Macpherson," "The
Rhyme of Sir Launcelot Bogle," "Little John and the Red Friar," "A
Midnight Meditation," and that admirable imitation of the Scottish
ballad, "The Queen in France." Some of the shorter poems were also
his--"The Lay of the Levite," "Tarquin and the Augur," "La Mort
d'Arthur," "The Husband's Petition," and the "Sonnet to Britain." The
rest were either wholly mine or produced by us jointly.

After 1844 the Bon Gaultier co-operation ceased. My profession and
removal from Edinburgh to London left no leisure or opportunity for work
of that kind, and Aytoun became busy with the Professorship of Belles
Lettres in the University and with his work at the Bar and on
'Blackwood's Magazine.' We had also during the Bon Gaultier period
worked together in a series of translations of Goethe's Poems and Ballads
for 'Blackwo