From the North British Review.

1. The Book of Ballads. Edited by BON
GAULTIER. Seventh Edition. Edin-
burgh, 1861.

2. Firmilian. Edinburgh, 1854.
3. Tales from Blackwood. Edinburgh.
4. Headlong Hall, etc. Bentley's Stand-
ard Novels, 1837.

5. Gryll Grange. By the Author of Head-
long Hall. London, 1861.

6. Reliques of Father. Prout. A New Edition, 1866.

It

Every generation has writers of this peculiar type-writers often of higher powers and attainments than many who are better known, but who, somehow, never pass the line which divides those who are distinguished from those who are famous. is curious to reflect that De Quincey never had a tithe as many readers as Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and that Mr. Tupper is some fifty times as well known as Henry Taylor. But this is one of the eternal phenomena of literature which never discourages real men of letters, while it ought SINCE the days of the prince of bi- to teach critics that perhaps their most imographers, the wise and warm-hearted Plu- portant duty is to help to make known tarch of Charonea, very little has been those whom the world has not learned to done in literature for that parallelism know for itself. If we propose to glance which was so essential a part of his bio- now at what was done by the three gentlegraphical theory. To take men of eminence, men just mentioned, for their generation, and place them in juxtaposition; to observe our object is partly to induce readers to betheir points of similarity, and of dissimilarity come better acquainted with them at firstin similarity, so that each should be sepa- hand. Professor Aytoun's works are, inrately more intelligible from the comparison deed, well known in Scotland, but might be of him with the other; - this, the Plu- better known in the South and in Ireland. tarchian idea, has been less fruitful than Peacock, in spite of the admirable wit and might have been expected, considering the cleverness of his tales, is, we suspect, little just popularity of Plutarch from the days appreciated out of London. Father Prout of Montaigne downwards. Bishop Hurd is loved and honoured by his own countrydeserves the praise of having advocated its men, and in the literary world of the mestudy, and of having suggested some mate- tropolis his name is a household word; but, rial for the purpose; and Coleridge, in elsewhere, few know how much enjoyment what he called the landing-places' of his may be got from his pages. We should like Friend, so far followed it up, that he made to see the reputations of these brilliant men most ingenious and suggestive comparisons counter-changed, as the heralds say- the between Luther and Rousseau, and between Scotch and Irish reputations crossing into Erasmus and Voltaire. We are not going each other and the English intermingling to deal just now with men of such magni- with both. We are no friends to excessive tude; but we must be allowed to congratu- centralization. Indeed, we cherish national late ourselves on having a good opportunity individualism as one of the conditions of of applying the doctrine in the case of a literary variety, raciness, and colour. But group of distinguished contemporaries re- nationality without intercommunion has a cently taken away. Within about a twelve- constant tendency to degenerate into promonth three humorists have been blotted vincialism; and provincialism preserves from the roll of living British men of let- national traits not as living things, but as ters: Professor Aytoun, Mr. Thomas Love petrifactions. The intellectual life of every Peacock, and the Reverend Frank Mahony country ought to blow over into other lands better known as Father Prout. Each of like a wind. The north wind is necessary these men represented one of the three king- to keep the south cool, and the south wind doms: Aytoun, our own bonnie Northern necessary to keep the north from freezing. land; Peacock, England; and Mahony, Ire- Now, it so happens, as has been already briefly land. They were all humorists. They hinted, that each of our three humorists had a were all lyrists. They were all more or less strong flavour of his own country about Bohemian and eccentric in the exercise of him. In an age when so many Scotchmen their gifts. They were all men of classical emigrate, Aytoun devoted his life to Scoteducation. They were all men of strongly land. He formed himself on native models, marked national type. Finally, they had and attached himself to a native school of this, too, in common, that they never be- literature. His humour-and it is his hucame exactly popular, that is, universally popular in the sense in which Thackeray or Jerrold were so, but enjoyed their chief reputation among the cultivated classes.

mour with which we have to do in this paper was essentially Scotch; that is to say, hearty or even vehement in expression sometimes, but dry to the taste; shrewd

'Ille te mecum locus et beatæ
Postulant arces; ibi tu calentum
Debitâ sparges lacrimâ favillam
Vatis amici.'

and thoughtful at bottom; and based on odes of their common literary ancestor, the character rather than light and brilliant. beloved Venusian lyrist: He did not shine in epigram. His prose style wanted clearness, terseness, grace. His strong point both as writer and talker was humour proper, fun, a perception of the ludicrous; but a perception of the ludicrous from a Scot's point of view, in which the intellectual rather than the moral pleasure to be derived from it is the predominant object sought. Peacock, again, was eminently English in his clear good sense, his quick penetrating sarcasm, embodied with classic neatness of expression, and his fine practical contempt for all extravagances of taste and speculation. When we come to Prout, we find his genius not less characteristic of his nation. His fun is full of all kinds of playfulness, and fancy, and paradox, real larky fun, to use a familiar expression, such as the English kind rarely is, and the Scotch almost never. In pure epigram, the Englishman has the best of it. The Irishman's epigram is most fanciful; his pre

cious stones are coloured. The Scot does not excel in epigram at all; nor much in that drollery, the drollery of abandon, of which downright noisy laughter is the natural result. The Englishman's joke is like a smile -a smile in which his intellectual eyes take a part; the Irishman's is a poke in your ribs, accompanied with a laugh, shrill rather than hearty; the Scot's is a deep chuckle, an inward laugh, which does not disturb the lines of a mouth full of a sagacious knowingness, and a conscious sense of the pregnant meaning of which the best Scotch pleasantry is full. While thus distinctly gifted according to their distinctive races, our three celebrated specially each his píŋ атрida yaiav. The author of the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers' wrote with obvious delight of the Thundering Spey. The author of Headlong Hall' not only devoted a special poem to the Genius of the Thames,' but loved the noble river, and haunted it all his life. His favourite amusement in old age was to take his family out on it for a row, and his bones lie in the churchyard of Shepperton, not far from its wave. The author of the Reliques of Father Prout' devoted perhaps his best lyric to the Bells of Shandon, that sound so grand on the pleasant waters of the river Lee;' and he, too, lies near the Lee, as Peacock does near the Thames, and Aytoun near the Forth-each amidst the scenery first loved and last forgotten of his ancestral land. Any one of them might have addressed a friend in the tenderest of all the

Having thus indicated in a broad rapid way the general elements of comparison between our writers, we shall follow the Plutarchian plan by giving a sketch of each of them separately, before attempting to make the comparison complete. The order in which they died happens also to be the alphabetical order, so that it is not our Scottish patriotism only which has made us give Professor Aytoun the first place. Aytoun came of a good old Scottish family, now represented by Mr. Roger Sinclair Aytoun of Inchdairnie, the respected Member for the Kirkcaldy Burghs. The family took its name at a very remote period from the lands of Ayton in Berwickshire, and was

first established in Fife in the sixteenth century by a gentleman who was Governor of Stirling Castle. Their arms were an engrailed cross with roses; and the founders of the Fife branch adopted a beautiful motto by way of difference on settling in their new home. Et decerpta dabunt odorem,' they said, and the transplanted roses justified the modest boast. Sir Robert Aytoun, the poet, on whose tomb in Westminster Abbey the motto may still be read, was one of the Fife stock of the house of Kinneden. The branches in the East Neuk' of Fife seem to have dwindled away; but Inchdairnie, settled some seven miles to the North of Kirkcaldy, held on, and has survived to our time, in spite of an interest in politics during great historical crises, which has been fatal to many a landed line. They produced Covenanters in the seventeenth century, and Jacobites in the eighteenth; and one of the Jacobites, who seems from the books which he left behind him to have been a man of science and letters, passed some time in exile in Holland. Of this family, and sprung, we believe, from their marriage with the daughter of a once well-known judge, Lord Harcarse, William Edmondstoune Aytoun was a cadet; a fact which helps to explain his tinge of feudal sentiment and romance, that old Scottish quality found in Scotsmen unlike each other in everything else—in Knox and Sir Walter, in Smollett and in Hume. He was born in Abercromby Place, Edinburgh, on the 21st June 1813, and was

-

the son of Mr. Roger Aytoun, Writer to need only turn to the Noctes Ambrosianæ the Signet. He went to the Edinburgh to see with what license of savage, yet Academy at eleven years of age, and in somehow not essentially bitter jocosity, the 1827 or 1828 to the College, where he re- great Christopher thought himself entitled mained till 1832. The head-master of the to treat opponents; and with what a daring Academy at that time was Archdeacon hand he claimed for himself and his friends Williams, a man of learning and wit, and the fiercest pleasures of the social board. author of several remarkable books, espe- An enemy was a gander,' a 'stot,' a 'mean cially of a Life of Cæsar, which is far too eunuch;' while a friend, besides the poslittle known. The classical professors of session of every serious virtue, enjoyed a the College were Pillans and Dunbar, the stomach to which no amount of supper and first a Latin scholar of some elegance, the no long succession of tumblers could do the second a good teacher, as far as his range least mischief. There was something in all of teaching went. Aytoun benefited at this fun which tickled the fancy of youngleast as much as his best fellow-students by sters; and the effect of it is very visible in this classical training; but the ancient lite- Aytoun's contributions to the Bon Gaultier rature had no special attractions for him, Ballads, the chief effusions of his humour in and he never knew it so well as either Pea- verse. Mr. Theodore Martin had been cock or Father Prout. On the other hand, writing for sometime under the nom de plume he learned German in Germany, and we of Bon Gaultier before he became acquainthave heard contemporaries of his describe ed with Aytoun, and the title was retained his youthful enthusiasm for Macaulay's as a common designation when they began to 'Ivry' and' Armada,' which, together with work together in Tait's Magazine and Frasthe influence of Scott, then the first intellec- er. Most of the ballads were joint handitual influence felt by every young Scotsman, work, but a few of the best are known to prepared him for the Lays of the Scottish have been exclusively Aytoun's, among Cavaliers' by and bye. Nature had formed which we may mention The Massacre of Aytoun for the Tory school of Scottish the Macpherson,' The Queen in France,' literature, but his father, who had been The Rhyme of Sir Launcelot Bogle,' and agent to the Duke of Hamilton, was a 'Little John.' We quote the first of these, Whig, and the future Jacobite of Blackwood in spite of its being so well known on this was for some time devoted to the Bill, side Tweed, because there is a dryness of the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill.' sarcasm about it, which we have already The natural development of Aytoun's declared to be essentially Scotch, as distinct mind, however, brought him gradually from the satire either of England or Ireinto more congenial associations, and he land: became a Tory of the special Scottish type then in fashion, and now extinct. We have nothing to do with politics on this occasion, but nobody, we think, will quarrel with us if we say as a mere matter of history, that this extinct type of Scottish Toryism — the Toryism of Scott and John Wilson - appealed not unnaturally to the hearts and imagination of the young. It was a picturesque and patriotic Toryism for one thing, basing itself on the past, and especially on the past of Scotland. It was a jolly Toryism, in the next place, glorying in convivial riot, and delighting to express itself with unbounded freedom of humour and sarcasm. There is a fearful legend in Edinburgh that a song was sung at the Tory suppers of that day, the chorus of which

was:

'Curse the people,
Blast the people,

D-n the lower orders!'

This was probably a Whig joke, but we

THE MASSACRE OF THE MACPHERSON. (From the Gaelic.)

I.

Fhairshon swore a feud

Against the clan M'Tavish;
Marched into their land
To murder and to rafish;
For he did resolve

To extirpate the vipers,
With four-and-twenty men
And five-and-thirty pipers.

II.

But when he had gone

Half-way down Strath Canaan,
Of his fighting tail

Just three were remainin'.
They were all he had,

To back him in ta battle;

All the rest had gone

Off, to drive ta cattle.

Calmly, calmly let him slumber, and, as by the | short, all we ever read or saw of Aytoun

bar we pass,

We shall bid that thoughtful waiter place be-
side him, near and handy,
Large supplies of soda-water, tumblers bottomed
well with brandy,

So, when waking, he shall drain them, with that
deathless thirst of his, -
Clinging to the hand that smote him, like a
good 'un as he is!'

induces us to think of him as a shrewd, able Scot, with a strong vein of the national humour, but whose poetry was mere cleverness exercised on the traditionary material of his political school. His white rose was we do not say that.

not waxen

But we

do say that it had a very faint smell; that though his poetic Jacobite romanticism was real as far as it went, it did not go very far. The complete failure of his more ambitious attempts, his Lectures on Poetry in London, his

These pieces, and the Queen in France,' are on the whole the best things in the Bon Gaultier Ballads. The parody of Mrs." Browning, too, is good; but most of the parodies are ordinary enough, not to be compared for a moment to the Rejected Addresses,' or to the Prize Novelists' of Thackeray.

Bothwell,' and his Norman Sinclair,' seems to us strongly to corroborate this view. And his mind, though of good quality, was not fertile. It produced a few fruits of very pleasant flavor, and much that was insipid and commonplace; whereas Peacock was as fresh in Gryll Grange' as he had been half-a-century before; and Father Prout continued to write daily with sense and wit, to be always readable, never weak, till his death, at more than sixty years of age.

While Aytoun was thus amusing himself and the public, he did not neglect to place his interests in life on a solider basis than comic ballads can supply. He became a Writer to the Signet in 1838, and an Advocate in 1840. Afterwards he was appointed The latest of Aytoun's jeux d'esprit which to the Sheriffship of the Orkneys, and to made any considerable hit was perhaps the the Professorship of Rhetoric and Belles- best of them all, 'Firmilian; or the Student Lettres in the University of Edinburgh. of Badajoz. A spasmodic tragedy. By T. He was successful in both occupations, Percy Jones.' About a dozen years ago, there especially in the latter. But he owed his existed an absurd school of poetry, encourchief distinction all along to what he did in aged by a bad school of criticism, and owliterature; and popular as his Bon Gaul- ing its origin ultimately to the Festus of Mr. tier Ballads,' and his Lays of the Scottish Bailey. No doubt there were men among Cavaliers' were, they were neither of them them whose natural poetic power was greater more relished than some of his prose articles than Aytoun's own. But the power was abin Blackwood, such as 'How we got up the surdly used; was employed on extravagant Glenmutchkin Railway,' and 'How I stood conceptions clothed in extravagant expresfor the Dreepdailie Burghs.' These are sion; and the result was something offensive fair representatives of his comic talent, and to all who had formed their taste on the comic talent, we repeat, was his forte. It great models whether of antiquity or of was a talent quite inferior to Thackeray's England. Aytoun's sympathies in these in insight, delicay, and edge; and to Wil- matters were sound; indeed, if they erred son's in general power and swing. But it at all, they erred from a certain narrowness was a genuine gift of his own, depending on the sound side. So he did what his talfor its effect, not on style, in which he was ents exactly suited him for-wrote an never strong, but on its intrinsic force of elaborate squib on the juvenile offenders. humorous character. His humour was broad, Firmilian is a poetaster with a taste for senwe may add, and required plenty of elbow-suality, and a morbid hankering after crime, room. What is further worth notice, it was almost never poetic humour, a strong sign that his poetry was not very real or deep, but much more artificial than either. In Hood, for example, the poetry and humour blend with each other; it is not easy to say where one ends and the other begins. But Aytoun's humour and poetry stand quite apart. Between the broad fun of How I became a Yeoman'- another of his best Blackwood papers-and the fife and kettledrum liveliness of the Lays,' there is no moral connexion visible. In

and his rant, in verses like the following, is an admirable imitation of the kind of stuff that was produced in all seriousness by our younger poets in 1853-4 :

'Let the hoarse thunder rend the vault of heaven,
Yea, shake the stars by myriads from their
boughs,

As Autumn tempest shakes the fruitage down ;-
Let the red lightning shoot athwart the sky,
Entangling comets by their spooming hair,
Piercing the zodiac belt, and carrying dread
To old Orion, and his whimpering hound:
But let the glory of this deed be mine!'