Aytoun, WILLIAM EDMONDSTOUNE

Aytoun, WILLIAM EDMONDSTOUNE, born in Edinburgh, 21st June 1813, was educated at the Academy and the university, and for some months studied German at Aschaffenburg. In 1835 he became, like his father, a Writer to the Signet, and in 1840 was called to the Scottish bar. To his mother he owed his love of ballad-lore and Jacobitism, and, taking early to literary work, he entered in 1836 on his lifelong connection with Blackwood's; in 1845 was appointed professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres in Edinburgh University, and in five years increased the number of his hearers fivefold. In 1849 he married a daughter of Professor Wilson; in 1852 was made sheriff of Orkney; and next year received from Oxford the honorary degree of D.C.L. His first two published works—Poland, Homer, and Other Poems (1832), and The Life and Times of Richard I. (1840), were succeeded in 1848 by Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, which established his reputation as a poet of the school of Sir Walter Scott, and which has run through thirty editions. The Bon Gaultier Ballads, a series of capital parodies (1855), were produced conjointly with Theodore Martin, as also were Poems and Ballads of Goethe (1858). Other works by him were Firmilian, a Spasmodic Tragedy (1854), which is almost too good for a parody; Bothwell, a long narrative poem in the measure and manner of Scott; an edition of the Scottish Ballads (2 vols. 1858); and Norman Sinclair (1861), a semi-autobiographical novel. Aytoun was successful in quite opposite branches of literature—at once as a poet and humorist. His poems exhibit a ballad-like simplicity, and a fiery flow of narration; while his tales possess a certain robust humour and farcical abandonment. His poetical powers appear in their greatest perfection in the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers; the special merits of his humour in The Glenmutchkin Railway and How I became a Yeoman. As a critic, he took up the knout of 'Christopher North,' which he wielded with no little force and dexterity. He died at Blackhills, near Elgin, 4th August 1865. See his Life by Sir Theodore Martin (1867).