The Bon Gaultier Ballads | Page 4

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