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. 

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