[vii] Prologue de premiere livre.[ix] A fact. That such a subject for cathedral chimes, and in Scotland, too, could ever have been chosen, will scarcely be believed. But my astonished ears often heard it.[7] W. Gomersal, for many years a leading actor and rider at Astley’s Amphitheatre.[8] John Esdaile Widdicomb, from 1819 to 1852 riding-master and conductor of the ring at Astley’s Amphitheatre.[11] Stickney, a very dashing and graceful rider at Astley’s.[12] A not uncommon tribute from the gallery at Astley’s to the dash and daring of the heroes of the ring was half-eaten oranges or fragments of orange-peel. Either oranges are less in vogue, or manners are better in the galleries of theatres and circuses in the present day.[18] The allusion here is to one of Ducrow’s remarkable feats. Entering the ring with the reins in his hands of five horses abreast, and standing on the back of the centre horse, he worked them round the ring at high speed, changing now and then with marvellous dexterity their relative positions, and with his feet always on more than one of them, ending with a foot on each of the extreme two, so that, as described, “the outer and the inner felt the pressure of his toes.”[44] The value of these Bonds at the time this poem was written was precisely nil.[49] A fact.[64] The Yankee substitute for the chapeau de soie.[97] The Marquis of Waterford,[99] The fashionable abbreviation for a thousand pounds.[117] The reference here and in a subsequent verse is to a song very popular at the time:—

“All round my hat I vears a green villow,
All round my hat for a twelvemonth and a day,
And if any van should arsk you the reason vy I vears it,
Say, all for my true love that’s far, far away.
’Twas agoin of my rounds on the streets I first did meet her,
’Twas agoin of my rounds that first she met my heye,
And I never heard a voice more louder nor more sweeter,
As she cried, ‘Who’ll buy my cabbages, my cabbages who’ll buy?’”

There were several more verses, and being set to a very taking air, it was a reigning favourite with the “Social Chucksters” of the day. Even scholars thought it worth turning into Latin verse. I remember reading in some short-lived journal a very clever version of it, the first verse of which ran thus—

“Omne circa petusum sertum gero viridem
Per annum circa petasum et unum diem plus.
Si quis te rogaret, cur tale sertum gererem,
Dic, ‘Omne propter corculum qui est inpartibus.’”

Allusions to the willow, as an emblem of grief, are of a very old date. “Sing all, a green willow must be my garland,” is the refrain of the song which haunted Desdemona on the eve of her death (Othello, act iv. sc. 3). That exquisite scene, and the beautiful air to which some contemporary of Shakespeare wedded it, will make “The Willow Song” immortal.[119a] [119b] Madame Laffarge and Daniel Good were the two most talked about criminals of the time when these lines were written. Madame Laffarge was convicted of poisoning her husband under extenuating circumstances, and was imprisoned for life, but many believed in her protestations of innocence—this, of course, she being a woman and unhappily married. Daniel Good died on the scaffold on the 23rd of May 1842, protesting his innocence to the last, and asserting that his victim, Jane Sparks, had killed herself, an assertion which a judge and jury naturally could not reconcile with the fact that her head, arms, and legs had been cut off and hidden with her body in a stable. He, too, found people to maintain that his sentence was unjust.[121] The two papers here glanced at were ‘The Age’ and ‘The Satirist,’ long since dead.[122a] The colonnaded portion of Regent Street, immediately above the Regent Circus, was then called the Quadrant. Being sheltered from the weather, it was a favourite promenade, but became so favourite a resort of the “larking” population—male and female—that the Colonnade was removed in the interests of social order and decorum.[122b] The expression of contemptuous defiance, signified by the application of the thumb of one hand to the nose, spreading out the fingers, and attaching to the little finger the stretched-out fingers of the other hand, and working them in a circle. Among the graffiti in Pompeii are examples of the same subtle symbolism.[122c] Well known to readers of Thackeray’s ‘Newcomes’ as “The Cave of Harmony.”[123] Sir Peter Laurie, Lord Mayor; afterwards Alderman, and notable for his sagacity and severity as a magistrate in dealing with evil-doers.[157] Sir James Graham was then, and had been for some years, Secretary Of State under Sir Robert Peel.[160] Moxon was Tennyson’s publisher.[162] Edward Fitzball, besides being the prolific author of the most sulphurous and sanguinary melodramas, flirted also with the Muses. His triumph in this line was the ballad, “My Jane, my Jane, my pretty Jane,” who was for many long years implored in the delightful tenor notes of Sims Reeves “never to look so shy, and to meet him, meet him in the evening when the bloom was on the rye.” Fitzball, I have heard, was the meekest and least bellicose of men, and this was probably the reason why he was dubbed by Bon Gaultier “the terrible Fitzball.”[168] Two less poetically-disposed men than Goulburn and Knatchbull could not well be imagined.[177] The most highly reputed oysters of the day.[200] Lord John Russell’s vehement letter on Papal Aggression in November 1850 to the Bishop of Durham, provoked by the Papal Bull creating Catholic bishops in England, and the angry controversy to which it led, were followed by the passing of the Ecclesiastic Titles Bill in 1857. Aytoun was not alone in thinking that Cardinal Wiseman, the first to act upon the mandate from Rome, was more than a match for Lord John, and that the Bill would become a dead letter, as it did. The controversy was at its hottest when Aytoun expressed his view of the probable result of the conflict in the preceding ballad.[269] This poem appeared in a review by Bon Gaultier of an imaginary volume, ‘The Poets of the Day,’ and was in ridicule of the numerous verses of the time, to which the use of Turkish words was supposed to impart a poetical flavour. His reviewer’s comment upon it was as follows:—

“Had Byron been alive, or Moore not ceased to write, we should have bidden them look to their laurels. ‘Nonsense,’ says Dryden, ‘shall be eloquent in love,’ and here we find the axiom aptly illustrated, for in this Eastern Serenade are comprised nonsense and eloquence in perfection. But, apart from its erotic and poetical merits, it is a great curiosity, as exhibiting in a very marked manner the singular changes which the stride of civilisation and the bow-string of the Sultan Mahmoud have made in the Turkish language and customs within a very few years. Thus we learn from the writer that a ‘musnud,’ which in Byron’s day was a sofa, now signifies a nightingale. A ‘tophaik,’ which once fired away in Moore’s octosyllabics as a musket, is metamorphosed into a bank of flowers. ‘Zemzem,’ the sacred well, now makes shift as a chemise; while the rallying-cry of ‘Allah-hu’ closes in a stanza as a military cloak. Even ‘Gehenna,’ the place of torment, is mitigated into a valley, rich in unctuous spices. But the most singular of all these transmutations of the Turkish vocabulary is that of the word ‘Effendi,’ which used to be a respectful epithet applied to a Christian gentleman, but is now the denomination of a dog. Most of these changes are certainly highly poetical, and, while we admire their ingenuity, we do not impugn their correctness. But with all respect for the author, the Honourable Sinjin Muff, we think that, in one or two instances, he has sacrificed propriety at the shrine of imagination. We do not allude to such little incongruities as the waving of a minaret, or the watching of a mosque. These may be accounted for; but who—who, we ask with some earnestness, ever heard of cheroots growing ready-made among the grass, or of a young lady keeping an appointment in a scarf trimmed with mutton cutlets? We say nothing to the bold idea of a dragoman, who snaps Eblis in twain, as a gardener might snap a frosted carrot; but we will not give up our own interpretation of ‘kiebaubs,’ seeing that we dined upon them not two months ago at the best chop-house in Constantinople.”