Nor did even Shelley’s magnificent sonnet “Ozymandias” escape the profane hand of the burglar poet. He wrote,—
“I met a cracksman coming down the Strand,
Who said, ‘A huge Cathedral, piled of stone,
Stands in a churchyard, near St Martin’s Le Grand,
Where keeps Saint Paul his sacerdotal throne.
A street runs by it to the northward. There
For cab and bus is writ ‘No Thoroughfare,’
The Mayor and Councilmen do so command.
And in that street a shop, with many a box,
Upon whose sign these fateful words I scanned:
‘My name is Chubb, who makes the Patent Locks;
Look on my works, ye burglars, and despair!’
Here made he pause, like one that sees a blight
Mar all his hopes, and sighed with drooping air,
‘Our game is up, my covies, blow me tight!’”
The versatile genius of the poet was equally at home in the simpler lyric region of the Haynes Bayley school. Taking for his model the favourite drawing-room ballad of the period, “She wore a wreath of roses the night that first we met,” he made a parody of its rhythmical cadence the medium for presenting some leading incidents in the career of a Circe of “the boozing ken,” as thus,—
“She wore a rouge like roses the night that first we met;
Her lovely mug was smiling o’er mugs of heavy wet;
Her red lips had the fulness, her voice the husky tone,
That told her drink was of a kind where water was unknown.”
Then after a few more glimpses of this charming creature in her downward progress, the bard wound up with this characteristic close to her public life,—
“I saw her but a moment, but methinks I see her now,
As she dropped the judge a curtsey, and he made her a bow.”
But it would be out of place to dwell longer upon those reckless imitations. The only poem which ultimately found a place in the Bon Gaultier volume was “The Death of Duval.”
The paper was a success. Aytoun was taken by it, and sought an introduction to me by our common friend Edward Forbes the eminent Naturalist, then a leading spirit among the students of the Edinburgh University, beloved and honoured by all who knew him. Aytoun’s name was familiar to me from his contributions to ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ and I was well pleased to make his acquaintance, which rapidly grew into intimate friendship, as it could not fail to do with a man of a nature so manly and genial, and so full of spontaneous humour, as well as of marked literary ability.
His fancy had been caught by some of the things I had written in this and other papers under the name of Bon Gaultier, and when I proposed to go on with articles in a similar vein, he fell readily into the plan and agreed to assist in it. Thus a kind of Beaumont and Fletcher partnership was formed, which commenced in a series of humorous papers that were published in Tait’s and Fraser’s Magazines during the years 1842, 1843, and 1844. In these papers appeared, with a few exceptions, the verses which form the present volume. They were only a portion, but no doubt the best portion, of a great number of poems and parodies which made the chief attraction of papers under such headings as “Puffs and Poetry,” “My Wife’s Album,” “The Poets of the Day,” and “Cracknels for Christmas.”
In the last of these the parody appeared under the name of “The Jilted Gent, by Theodore Smifzer,” which, as “The Lay of the Lovelorn,” has become perhaps the most popular of the series. I remember well Aytoun bringing to me some ten or a dozen lines of admirable parody of “Locksley Hall.” That poem had been published about two years before, and was