A further edition of this book—the sixteenth—having been called for, I have been asked by the publishers to furnish a preface to it. For prefaces I have no love. Books should speak for themselves. Prefaces can scarcely be otherwise than egotistic, and one would not willingly add to the too numerous illustrations of this tendency with which the literature of the day abounds. I would much rather leave the volume with the simple “Envoy” which I wrote for it when the Bon Gaultier Ballads were first gathered into a volume. There the products of the dual authorship of Aytoun and myself were ascribed to the Bon Gaultier under whose editorial auspices they had for the most part seen the light. But my publishers tell me that people want to know why, and how, and by which of us these poems were written,—curiosity, complimentary, no doubt, but which it is by no means easy for the surviving bard to satisfy. It is sixty years since most of these verses were written with the light heart and fluent pen of youth, and with no thought of their surviving beyond the natural life of ephemeral magazine pieces of humour. After a long and very crowded life, of which literature has occupied the smallest part, it is difficult for me to live back into the circumstances and conditions under which they were written, or to mark, except to a very limited extent, how far to Aytoun, and how far to myself, separately, the contents of the volume are to be assigned. I found this difficult when I wrote Aytoun’s Life in 1867, and it is necessarily a matter of greater difficulty now in 1903.

I can but endeavour to show how Aytoun and I came together, and how for two or three years we worked together in literature. Aytoun (born 21st June 1813) was three years older than myself, and he was known already as a writer in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’ when I made his acquaintance in 1841. For some years I had been writing in Tait’s and Fraser’s Magazines, and elsewhere, articles and verses, chiefly humorous, both in prose and verse, under the nom de guerre of Bon Gaultier. This name, which seemed a good one for the author of playful and occasionally satirical papers, had caught my fancy in Rabelais, [vii] where he says of himself, “A moy n’est que honneur et gloire d’estre diet et reputÉ Bon Gaultier et bon Compaignon; en ce nom, suis bien venue en toutes bonnes compaignees de Pantagruelistes.”

It was to one of these papers that I owed my introduction to Aytoun. What its nature was may be inferred from its title—“Flowers of Hemp; or, The Newgate Garland. By One of the Family.” Like most of the papers on which we subsequently worked together, the object was not merely to amuse, but also to strike at some prevailing literary craze or vitiation of taste. I have lived to see many such crazes since. Every decade seems to produce one. But the particular craze against which this paper was directed was the popularity of novels and songs, of which the ruffians of the Newgate Calendar were the accepted heroes. If my memory does not deceive me, it began with Harrison Ainsworth’s ‘Rookwood,’ in which the gallantries of Dick Turpin, and the brilliant description of his famous Ride to York, caught the public fancy. Encouraged by the success of this book, Ainsworth next wooed the sympathies of the public for Jack Sheppard and his associates in his novel of that name. The novel was turned into a melodrama, in which Mrs Keeley’s clever embodiment of that “marvellous boy” made for months and months the fortunes of the Adelphi Theatre; while the sonorous musical voice of Paul Bedford as Blueskin in the same play brought into vogue a song with the refrain,

“Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!”

which travelled everywhere, and made the patter of thieves and burglars “familiar in our mouths as household words.” It deafened us in the streets, where it was as popular with the organ-grinders and German bands as Sullivan’s brightest melodies ever were in a later day. It clanged at midday from the steeple of St Giles, the Edinburgh cathedral; [ix] it was whistled by every dirty “gutter-snipe,” and chanted in drawing-rooms by fair lips, that, little knowing the meaning of the words they sang, proclaimed to their admiring friends—

“In a box of the stone jug I was born,
Of a hempen widow the kid forlorn;
My noble father, as I’ve heard say,
Was a famous marchant of capers gay;”

ending with the inevitable and insufferable chorus,

“Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!”

Soon after the Newgate Calendar was appealed to for a hero by the author of ‘Pelham,’ who had already won no small distinction, and who in his ‘Paul Clifford’ did his best to throw a halo of romance around the highwayman’s career. Not satisfied with this, Bulwer next claimed the sympathies of his readers for Eugene Aram, and exalted a very common type of murderer into a nobly minded and highly sentimental scholar. Crime and criminals became the favourite theme of a multitude of novelists of a lower class. They even formed the central interest of the ‘Oliver Twist’ of Charles Dickens, whose Fagin and his pupil “the Artful Dodger,” Bill Sykes and Nancy, were simultaneously presented to us in their habits as they lived by the genius of George Cruikshank, with a power that gave a double interest to Dickens’s masterly delineation of these worthies.

The time seemed—in 1841—to have come to open people’s eyes to the dangerous and degrading taste of the hour, and it struck me that this might be done by pushing to still further extravagance the praises which had been lavishly bestowed upon the gentlemen whose career generally terminated in Newgate or on the Tyburn Tree, and by giving “the accomplishment of verse” to the sentiments and the language which formed the staple of the popular thieves’ literature of the circulating libraries. The medium chosen was the review of a manuscript, supposed to be sent to the writer by a man who had lived so fully up to his own convictions as to the noble vocation of those who set law at defiance, and lived by picking pockets, burglary, and highway robbery, diversified by an occasional murder, that, with the finisher of the law’s assistance, he had ended his exploits in what the slang of his class called “a breakfast of hartichoke with caper sauce.” How hateful the phrase! But it was one of many such popularly current in those days.

The author of my “Thieves’ Anthology” was described in my paper as a well-born man of good education, who, having ruined himself by his bad habits, had fallen into the criminal ranks, but had not forgotten the literÆ humaniores which he had learned at the Heidelberg University. Of the purpose with which he had written he spoke thus in what I described as the fragments of a preface to his Miscellany:—

“To rescue from oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to clothe the gibbet and the hulks ‘in golden exhalations of the dawn,’ and secure for the boozing-ken and the gin-palace that hold upon the general sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, has been the aim and the achievement of many recent authors of distinction. How they have succeeded, let the populous state of the public jails attest. The office of ‘dubsman’ [hangman] has ceased to be a sinecure, and the public and Mr Joseph Hume have the satisfaction of knowing that these useful functionaries have now got something to do for their salaries. The number of their pupils has increased, is increasing, and is not likely to be diminished. But much remains to be done. Many an untenanted cell still echoes only to the sighs of its own loneliness. New jails are rising around us, which require to be filled. The Penitentiary presently erecting at Perth is of the most commodious description.

“In this state of things I have bethought myself of throwing, in the words of Goethe, ‘my corn into the great seed-field of time,’ in the hope that it may blossom to purposes of great public utility. The aid of poetry has hitherto been but partially employed in the spread of a taste for Conveyancing, especially in its higher branches. Or where the Muse has shown herself, it has been but in the evanescent glimpses of a song. She has plumed her wings for no sustained flight. . . .

“The power of poetry over the heart and impulses of man has been recognised by all writers from Aristotle down to Serjeant Talfourd. In dexterous hands it has been known to subvert a severe chastity by the insinuations of a holy flame, to clothe impurity in vestments ‘bright with something of an angel light,’ to exalt spleen into elevation of soul, and selfishness into a noble scorn of the world, and, with the ringing cadences of an enthusiastic style, to ennoble the vulgar and to sanctify the low. How much may be done, with an engine of such power, in increasing the numbers of ‘The Family’ may be conceived. The Muse of Faking, fair daughter of the herald Mercury, claims her place among ‘The Mystic Nine.’ Her language, erewhile slumbering in the pages of the Flash Dictionary, now lives upon the lips of all, even in the most fashionable circles. Ladies accost crossing-sweepers as ‘dubsmen’; whist-players are generally spoken of in gambling families as ‘dummy-hunters’; children in their nursery sports are accustomed to ‘nix their dolls’; and the all but universal summons to exertion of every description is ‘Fake away!’

“‘Words are things,’ says Apollonius of Tyana. We cannot be long familiar with a symbol without becoming intimate with that which it expresses. Let the public mind, then, be in the habit of associating these and similar expressions with passages of poetical power, let the ideas they import be imbedded in their hearts and glorified in their imaginations, and the fairest results may with confidence be anticipated.”

In song and sonnet and ballad these views were illustrated and enforced. They served the purpose of the ridicule which it was hoped might operate to cure people of the prevailing toleration for the romance of the slums and the thieves’ kitchen. Naturally parody was freely used. Wordsworth did not escape. His

“Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour,”

found its echo in

“Turpin, thou shouldst be living at this hour,
England hath need of thee,” &c.

And his “Great men have been among us,” &c., was perverted into

“Great men have been among us,—Names that lend
A lustre to our calling; better none;
Maclaine, Duval, Dick Turpin, Barrington,
Blueskin and others, who called Sheppard friend.
. . . .
. . . Now, ’tis strange,
We never see such souls as we had then;
Perpetual larcenies and such small change!
No single cracksman paramount, no code,
No master spirit, that will take the road,
But equal dearth of pluck and highwaymen!”

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 at the time by no means widely known, but was enthusiastically admired by both Aytoun and myself. What these lines were I cannot now be sure, but certainly they were some of the best in the poem. They were too good to appear as a fragment in the paper I was engaged upon, and I set to work to mould them into the form of a complete poem, in which it is now known. It was introduced in the paper thus:—

“There is a peculiar atrocity in the circumstances which gave rise to the following poem, that stirs even the Dead Sea of our sensibilities. The lady appears to have carried on a furious flirtation with the bard—a cousin of her own—which she, naturally perhaps, but certainly cruelly, terminated by marrying an old East Indian nabob, with a complexion like curry powder, innumerable lacs of rupees, and a woful lack of liver. A refusal by one’s cousin is a domestic treason of the most ruthless kind; and, assuming the author’s statement to be substantially correct, we must say that the lady’s conduct was disgraceful. What her sensations must be on reading the following passionate appeal we cannot of course divine; but if one spark of feeling lingers in her bosom, she must, for four-and-twenty hours at least, have little appetite for mulligatawny.”

The reviewer then quotes the poem down to the general commination, ending with

“Cursed be the clerk and parson,—cursed be the whole concern!”

He then resumes his commentary:—

“This sweeping system of anathema may be consonant to what the philosophers call a high and imaginative mood of passion, but it is surely as unjust as any fulminations that ever emanated from the Papal Chair. No doubt Cousin Amy behaved shockingly; but why, on that account, should the Bank of England, incorporated by Royal Charter, or the most respectable practitioner who prepared the settlements, along with his innocent clerk, be handed over to the uncovenanted mercies of the foul fiend? No, no, Smifzer, this will never do! In a more manly strain is what follows.”

The remainder of the poem is then given, ending with,

“Rest thee with thy yellow nabob, spider-hearted Cousin Amy!”

and the critic resumes:—

“Bravo, Smifzer! This is the right sort of thing—no wishy-washy snivelling about a wounded heart and all that kind of stuff, but savage sarcasm, the lava of a volcanic spirit. In a fine prophetic strain is that vision of Amy’s feelings as the inebriated nawab stumbles hazily into the drawing-room, steaming fulsomely of chilma! And that picture of the African jungle, with Smifzer in puris mounted on a high-trotting giraffe, with his twelve dusky brides around him,—Cruikshank alone could do it justice. But the triumph of the poem is in the high-toned sentiment of civilisation and moral duty, which, esteeming ‘the grey barbarian’ lower than the ‘Christian cad,’—and that is low enough in all conscience,—tears the captivating delusions of freedom and polygamy from the poet’s eyes, even when his pulse is throbbing at the wildest, and sends him from the shades of the palm and the orange tree to the advertising columns of the ‘Morning Post.’ This is indeed a great poem, and we need only add that the reader will find something like it in Mr Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall.’ There has been pilfering somewhere; but Messieurs Smifzer and Tennyson must settle it between them.”

How little did I dream, when writing this, that I should hear the parody quoted through the years up till now almost as often as the original poem! Smifzer was wiser than Tennyson, for he never spoiled the effect of his poem by admitting, like Tennyson in his “Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After,” that it was a good thing that “spider-hearted” Amy threw him over as she did.

Luckily for us, not a few poets were then living whose style and manner of thought were sufficiently marked to make imitation easy, and sufficiently popular for a parody of their characteristics to be readily recognised. Lockhart’s “Spanish Ballads” were as familiar in the drawing-room as in the study. Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome,” and his two other fine ballads, were still in the freshness of their fame. Tennyson and Mrs Browning were opening up new veins. These, with Moore, Leigh Hunt, Uhland, and others of minor note, lay ready to our hands, as Scott, Byron, Crabbe, Coleridge, Moore, Wordsworth, and Southey had done to James and Horace Smith in 1812, when writing the “Rejected Addresses.” Never, probably, were verses thrown off with a keener sense of enjoyment, and assuredly the poets parodied had no warmer admirers than ourselves. Very pleasant were the hours when we met, and now Aytoun and now myself would suggest the subjects for each successive article, and the verses with which they were to be illustrated. Most commonly this was done in our rambles to favourite spots in the suburbs of “our own romantic town,” on Arthur Seat, or by the shores of the Forth, and at other times as we sat together of an evening, when the duties of the day were over, and joined in putting line after line together until the poem was completed. In writing thus for our own amusement we never dreamed that these “nugÆ literariÆ” would live beyond the hour. It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise when we found to what an extent they became popular, not only in England, but also in America, which had come in for no small share of severe though well-meant ridicule. In those days who could say what fate might have awaited us had we visited the States, and Aytoun been known to be the author of “The Lay of Mr Colt” and “The Fight with the Snapping Turtle,” or myself as the chronicler of “The Death of Jabez Dollar” and “The Alabama Duel”? As it was, our transatlantic friends took a liberal revenge by instantly pirating the volume, and selling it by thousands with a contemptuous disregard of author’s copyright.

For Aytoun the extravagances of melodrama and the feats and eccentricities of the arena at Astley’s amphitheatre had always a peculiar charm. “The terrible Fitzball,” the English Dumas, in quantity, not quality, of melodrama, Gomersal, one of the chief equestrians, and Widdicomb, the master of the ring at Astley’s, were three of his favourite heroes. Ducrow, manager of Astley’s, the most daring and graceful of equestrians, and the fair Miss Woolford, the star of his troupe, had charms irresistible for all lovers of the circus. In Aytoun’s enthusiasm I fully shared. Mine found expression in “The Courtship of our Cid,” Aytoun’s in “Don Fernando Gomersalez,” in which I recognise many of my own lines, but of which the conception and the best part of the verses were his. Years afterwards his delight in the glories of the ring broke out in the following passage in a too-good-to-be-forgotten article in ‘Blackwood,’ which, to those who may never hope to see in any circus anything so inspiring, so full of an imaginative glamour, may give some idea of the nightly scenes in the halcyon days of Astley’s:—

“We delight to see, at never-failing Astley’s, the revived glories of British prowess—Wellington in the midst of his staff, smiling benignantly on the facetious pleasantries of a Fitzroy Somerset—Sergeant M’Craw of the Forty-Second delighting the Élite of Brussels by the performance of the reel of Tullochgorum at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball—the charge of the Scots Greys—the single-handed combat of Marshal Ney and the infuriated Life-Guardsman Shaw—and the final retreat of Napoleon amidst a volley of Roman candles and the flames of an arsenicated Hougomont. Nor is our gratification less to discern, after the subsiding of the showers of sawdust so gracefully scattered by that groom in the doeskin integuments, the stately form of Widdicomb, cased in martial apparel, advancing towards the centre of the ring, and commanding—with imperious gesture, and some slight flagellation in return for dubious compliment—the double-jointed clown to assist the Signora Cavalcanti to her seat upon the celebrated Arabian. How lovely looks the lady, as she vaults to her feet upon the breadth of the yielding saddle! With what inimitable grace does she whirl these tiny banners around her head, as winningly as a Titania performing the sword exercise! How coyly does she dispose her garments and floating drapery to hide the too-maddening symmetry of her limbs! Gods! She is transformed all at once into an Amazon—the fawn-like timidity of her first demeanour is gone. Bold and beautiful flushes her cheek with 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 death in August 1865, with the same manly sense, the same playfulness of fancy and flow of spontaneous humour, which made his society and his letters always delightful to his friends.

“Multis ille bonis flebilis occidit,
Nulli flebilior quam mihi!”

The first edition of this book, now very rare, appeared in 1845. It was illustrated by Alfred Henry Forrester (Alfred Crowquill). In the subsequent editions drawings by Richard Doyle and John Leech, in a kindred spirit of fanciful extravagance, were added, and helped materially towards the attractions of the volume. Its popularity surpassed the utmost expectations of the authors. To them not the least pleasant feature of its success was that it was widely read both in the Navy and the Army, and was nowhere more in demand than in the trenches before Sebastopol in 1854.

THEODORE MARTIN.

31 Onslow Square,
October 1903.