animated crimson—her full voluptuous lip is more compressed and firm—the deep passion

     of the huntress flashing in her lustrous eyes! Widdicomb becomes excited—he moves with quicker step around the periphery of his central circle—incessant is the smacking of his whip—not this time directed against Mr Merriman, who at his ease is enjoying a swim upon the sawdust—and lo! the grooms rush in, six bars are elevated in a trice, and over them all bounds the volatile Signora like a panther, nor pauses until with airy somersets she has passed twice through the purgatory of the blazing hoop, and then, drooping and exhausted, sinks like a Sabine into the arms of the Herculean master, who—a second Romulus—bears away his lovely burden to the stables, amid such a whirlwind of applause as Kemble might have been proud to earn.”

   Astley’s has long been levelled with the dust; it is many years since Widdicomb, Gomersal, Ducrow, and the Woolford passed into the Silent Land. May their memory be preserved for yet a few years to come in the mirthful strains of two of their most ardent and grateful admirers!

   Of the longer poems in this volume the following were exclusively Aytoun’s: “The Broken Pitcher,” “The Massacre of the Macpherson,” “The Rhyme of Sir Launcelot Bogle,” “Little John and the Red Friar,” “A Midnight Meditation,” and that admirable imitation

   of the Scottish ballad, “The Queen in France.” Some of the shorter poems were also his—“The Lay of the Levite,” “Tarquin and the Augur,” “La Mort d’Arthur,” “The Husband’s Petition,” and the “Sonnet to Britain.” The rest were either wholly mine or produced by us jointly.

   After 1844 the Bon Gaultier co-operation ceased. My profession and removal from Edinburgh to London left no leisure or opportunity for work of that kind, and Aytoun became busy with the Professorship of Belles Lettres in the University and with his work at the Bar and on ‘Blackwood’s Magazine.’ We had also during the Bon Gaultier period worked together in a series of translations of Goethe’s Poems and Ballads for ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ which, like the Bon Gaultier Ballads, were collected, added to, and published in a volume a year or two afterwards. In 1845 I left Edinburgh for London, and only met Aytoun at intervals there or at Homburg in the future years; but our friendship was kept alive by active correspondence. Literature was naturally his vocation, and he wrote much and well, with exemplary industry, enlivening his papers in

   ‘Blackwood,’ till his 

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