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 Aytoun introduced this in Blackwood's Magazine as a pretended review of an unpublished tragedy (as with the 'Rolliad,' and as Lockhart had done in the case of "Peter's Letters," so successfully that he had to write the book itself as a "second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 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:--