"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:--
"And shall I then take Celsus for my guide,
Confound my brain with dull Justinian tomes,
Or stir the dust that lies o'er Augustine?
Not I, in faith! I've leaped into the air,
And clove my way through ether like a bird
That flits beneath the glimpses of the moon,
Right eastward, till I lighted at the foot
Of holy Helicon, and drank my fill
At the clear spout of Aganippe's stream;
I've rolled my limbs in ecstasy along
The selfsame turf on which old Homer lay
That night he dreamed of Helen and of Troy:
And I have heard, at midnight, the sweet strains
Come quiring from the hilltop, where, enshrined
In the rich foldings of a silver cloud,
The Muses sang Apollo into sleep."
In 1856 was printed 'Bothwell,' a poetic monologue on Mary Stuart's lover. Of Aytoun's humorous sketches, the most humorous are 'My First Spec in the Biggleswades,' and 'How We Got Up the Glen Mutchkin Railway'; tales written during the railway mania of 1845, which treat of the folly and dishonesty of its promoters, and show many typical Scottish characters. His 'Ballads of Scotland' was issued in 1858; it is an edition of the best ancient minstrelsy, with preface and notes. In 1861 appeared 'Norman Sinclair,' a novel published first in Blackwood's, and giving interesting pictures of society in Scotland and personal experiences.
After Professor Wilson's death, Aytoun was considered the leading man of letters in Scotland; a rank which he modestly accepted by writing in 1838 to a friend:--"I am getting a kind of fame as the literary man of Scotland. Thirty years ago, in the North countries, a fellow achieved an immense reputation as 'The Tollman,' being the solitary individual entitled by law to levy blackmail at a ferry." In 1860 he was made Honorary President of the Associated Societies of the University of Edinburgh, his competitor being Thackeray. This was the place held afterward by Lord Lytton, Sir David Brewster, Carlyle, and Gladstone. Aytoun wrote the 'The Life and Times of Richard the First' (London, 1840), and in 1863 a 'Nuptial Ode on the Marriage of the Prince of Wales.'
Aytoun was a man of great charm and geniality in society; even to Americans, though he detested America with the energy of fear--the fear of all who see its prosperity sapping the foundations of their class society. He died in 1865; and in 1867 his biography was published by Sir Theodore Martin, his collaborator. Martin's definition of Aytoun's place in literature is felicitous:--