{123} Sir Peter Laurie, Lord Mayor; afterwards Alderman, and notable for his sagacity and severity as a magistrate in dealing with evil-doers. {157} Sir James Graham was then, and had been for some years, Secretary Of State under Sir Robert Peel. {160} Moxon was Tennyson's publisher. {162} Edward Fitzball, besides being the prolific author of the most sulphurous and sanguinary melodramas, flirted also with the Muses. His triumph in this line was the ballad, "My Jane, my Jane, my pretty Jane," who was for many long years implored in the delightful tenor notes of Sims Reeves "never to look so shy, and to meet him, meet him in the evening when the bloom was on the rye." Fitzball, I have heard, was the meekest and least bellicose of men, and this was probably the reason why he was dubbed by Bon Gaultier "the terrible Fitzball." {168} Two less poetically-disposed men than Goulburn and Knatchbull could not well be imagined. {177} The most highly reputed oysters of the day. {200} Lord John Russell's vehement letter on Papal Aggression in November 1850 to the Bishop of Durham, provoked by the Papal Bull creating Catholic bishops in England, and the angry controversy to which it led, were followed by the passing of the Ecclesiastic Titles Bill in 1857. Aytoun was not alone in thinking that Cardinal Wiseman, the first to act upon the mandate from Rome, was more than a match for Lord John, and that the Bill would become a dead letter, as it did. The controversy was at its hottest when Aytoun expressed his view of the probable result of the conflict in the preceding ballad. {269} This poem appeared in a review by Bon Gaultier of an imaginary volume, 'The Poets of the Day,' and was in ridicule of the numerous verses of the time, to which the use of Turkish words was supposed to impart a poetical flavour. His reviewer's comment upon it was as follows:--