Another school which sprang up about the middle of the century, taking its rise in the longing for something deeper and more satisfying than had been recently in vogue, was that nicknamed 'the Spasmodic.' The name was fixed upon the school by the extremely clever satirist of it, William Edmondstoune Aytoun, himself a poet of a very different family, that of Scott. Aytoun is best known from his _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_ (1848), narratives of martial exploit and tragic sorrow written in animated but excessively rhetorical verse. He was also, in conjunction with Mr. (afterwards Sir) Theodore Martin, the author of the _Bon Gaultier Ballads_ (1845), one of the most amusing collections of comic verse of this century. His satire of the Spasmodic School is contained in _Firmilian_ (1854), a mock-serious piece purporting to be by a member of the school. It was at the time customary to say that Aytoun had killed the Spasmodic School. If he had done so he would hardly have deserved well of literature. But though it is true that the Spasmodic Poets shot up like a rocket only to come down like the spent stick, both the rise and the fall were due partly to whims of popular taste, while the main cause of the fall lay in defects of the writers which satire did not make and could do little to remedy. On the whole, _Firmilian_ was more likely to have helped the school than to have hurt it if it had contained in itself the seeds of long life. But the name 'spasmodic' was only too accurately descriptive of more than its style,--unfortunately so, for both the chief members, Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith, possessed talents for poetry in some respects very high. [Sidenote: Sydney Dobell (1824-1874).] Sydney Dobell had the misfortune to be born a member of a narrow and intense religious sect, in which his talents caused him to be regarded as the destined instrument for some grand design of providence. He outgrew the sect, but never quite outgrew the education it had given him and the ideas it had instilled. From about 1850 he devoted himself chiefly to literature. His writings are _The Roman_ (1850), _Balder_ (1853), _Sonnets on the War_ (1855), in which he collaborated with Alexander Smith, and _England in Time of War_ (1856). But his health failed, and though he lived eighteen years longer he wrote little more of consequence. 'He never weeded his garden,' wrote Dr. John Brown of him, 'and will, I fear, be therefore strangled in his waste fertility.' This is the central truth about Dobell. Few poets are so uneven, perhaps hardly any poet capable of rising so high has ever sunk so low. Many passages are mere fustian, some are outrages against all taste; but others have a sublimity not often surpassed.