1856.]

which paralyses the fierce soldier into vacillation, almost into cowardice. Ormiston, so long his unreasoning follower, cannot rouse him, and finally deserts his fortunes with the touching reproach:

'God help thee, then,

I'll see thy face no more!
Like water spilt upon the plain,
Not to be gathered up again
Is the old love I bore.

Best I forget thee, Bothwell! Yet
"Tis not so easy to forget;
For, at the latest hour, I see
I've lost a life in following thee.'

Betrayed by his army and deserted by his wife, he hastens, a hopeless fugitive, from the fatal hill: no place of refuge is found, save the dungeon of the Dane, where madness awaits him,-the fearful yet fitting close to that uncontrolled

career.

It is obvious from this sketch that the readers of Bothwell must anticipate nothing of the interest which is afforded by the development of a plot. No little current of true affection smoothly running, or greatly crossed, gratifies that love of story-telling which lies deep in the heart of every one. Nothing

relieves Bothwell's enumeration of events already perfectly known. There is no invention-nothing but a series of panoramic sketches. Mr. Aytoun may have estimated his own powers rightly in denying himself this source of attraction. Still, the work is hurt by this denial. It is impossible to avoid the contrast with the picturesque metrical tales of Scott. In default of this, it was open to Mr. Aytoun to have made his poem the development, not of a plot, but of a character. Had Bothwell stood out from the canvas a living and consistent creation, we should have forgiven the galvanic movements of the other automata, whom it were absurd to call characters. As to them, we know nothing, save that Maitland was a subtle statesman, Ormiston a willing ruffian, Queen Mary a graceful phantom, whose beauty forms the motive of the action. All this would have been little. The dramatis persona in Richard III., though of course real and life-like, are yet entirely subservient to him. But Mr. Aytoun has given us no cha

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racter at all. We can hardly tell whether or not he ever set before him such an object; but, at all events, he has not achieved it. The poem is the drama of a life: but unfortunately presented to us without the slightest dramatic power. Bothwell has no distinct features. He is a Proteus of moral emotion, passing through all its stages, from the purest affection to the deepest and most deliberate villany; but none of them being a part of his nature. They do not come out of his mind, but pass fitfully across it, as the breath dims the mirror for a moment, and then fades from its surface. He is a mere kaleidoscope of feeling; a mouthpiece for the utterance of sentiments ingeniously contrived so as to be at once perfectly commonplace and absolutely inconsistent.

The

We find, then, neither plot nor character, which can vindicate for these sometimes spirited verses the name of a poem. We have further hinted that, even as they are, they very frequently become tiresome; and this arises from the necessity which Mr. Aytoun has imposed upon himself of working out the details of Bothwell's life, in order to support certain historical opinions. To show forth minutely all the springs of human action, is to run a great risk of tediousness. danger may be avoided by detached scenes so brilliant in colouring that the reader without difficulty supplies the link. The poetical critic of Blackwood would hardly take example by Maud. But Mr. Aytoun might have learned a lesson from the Giaour. He has preferred to face the difficulty, and give us in full all the working of the puppetshow. To face difficulties is the prerogative of a man of genius; to overcome them is his duty. Mr. Aytoun has only succeeded in asserting his prerogative.

In a poem so obviously formed upon the model of Scott, we had anticipated some good description of nature. And, to our mind, in the present age of earnestness,' and subjectivity,' and 'passion,' when descriptive poetry is too commonly under-rated, any fresh glimpses of the external world would have been very welcome.

The following are, we regret to say, the only attempts at this in the whole poem:

The sun is bright, the day is warm,

The breeze is blowing freeCome, I will rouse me from my lair,

And look upon the sea:

'Tis clear and blue, with here and there A little fleck of foam; And yonder glides a stately ship,

Bound on her voyage home. The fishers, on the scanty sward, Spread out their nets to dry, And whistle o'er their lazy task

In happy vacancy.

Swift by the window skims the tern,
On light and glancing wing,
And every sound that rises up
Gives token of the spring.
Fair is the sight, yet strange to me;
No memories I recall,
While gazing on the headland cliffs,
And waves that leap and fall;
No visions of my boyish days
Or manhood's sterner prime

Arise from yonder watery waste
To cheer me for a time.

For I was reared among the hills,
Within a Border home,
Where sweeping from their narrow
glens,

The mountain torrents come;
And well I know the bonny braes

Where the first primrose blows, And shrinking tufts of violets

Rise from the melting snows, Ere yet the hazel leaf is out,

Or birches grow their green, Or, on the sad and sullen ash, A kindling bud is seen.

And again:

Methinks I can recall the scene,
That bright and sunny day;
The Pentlands in their early green
Like giant warders lay.
Upon the bursting woods below
The pleasant sunbeams fell;

Far off, one streak of lazy snow
Yet lingered in a dell.

The westlin' winds blew soft and sweet,

The meads were fair to see;
Yet went I not the spring to greet

Beneath the trysting-tree.

Descriptive poetry is of two kinds. It may be the representation of nature, taking no colours from the mind of the beholder-amere enumeration of rocks and trees, and streams and flowers, apart from all feeling which the wonders of creation are calculated to excite-a sort of Dutch school of poetry, in which outward objects are, as it were, mechanically calotyped, not thoughtfully delineated. But it is a higher range of

art when we have not the book only, but the interpretation, when the mind of the poet, open to all the genial ministrations of the majesty of the hill, and the richness of the valley, and the 'melodies of winds and woods and waters,' is impelled to show these forth again to others, by a love which cannot rest in beholding, nor be satisfied with describing; when we have, in short, that deep feeling of nature's influences which intensifies every line of Wordsworth, and which glows, different, yet the same, throughout the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold:

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part

Of me, and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion?

This last style of description has been carried to perfection by modern bards. Poetry, when thus interpreting nature, attains perhaps her loftiest sphere. But of this Mr. Aytoun has shown no conception. He lacks altogether the devotion with which the true poet contemplates the external world; he has not reached even to the healthy and unspeculative love of Scott, far less any such depth as we have a right to demand from a true poet; he never rises beyond the calotyping. In fact, the want felt in this one particular, as, indeed, throughout the whole work, is a want of thought.

Our extracts have been already numerous; yet we must, in justice, spare room for some of Mr. Aytoun's more meritorious efforts. Various passages are scattered up and down, marked by considerable vigour or beauty. We must quote a few specimens of both kinds of excellence:He said no more,

For at the instant flashed the glare,
And with a hoarse infernal roar
A blaze went up and filled the air!
Rafters, and stones, and bodies rose
In one quick gush of blinding flame,
And down, and down, amidst the dark,
Hurtling on every side they came.
Surely the devil tarried near,

To make the blast more fierce and fell,
For never pealed on human ear
So dreadful and so dire a knell.
The heavens took up the earth's dismay,
The thunder bellowed overhead;
Steep called to steep. Away, away!-
Then fear fell on me, and I fled.

tion, which otherwise might have been good. The whole production bears evident marks of haste; in the conclusion particularly, where the madness of the hero is foreshadowed, and the weariness of the reader consummated, a want of the labor lime is sadly traceable.

We have already hinted that Mr. Aytoun's inspiration seems at times to spring from strange fountains. We altogether acquit him of intentional plagiarism; for we suspect that his imitations are unavoidable, that his genius, like the moon, is essentially a reflector. As yet, he has in no instance shown any originality of conception: he has always been following a lead. The idea of his Lays was borrowed from Mr. Macaulay. Bothwell is evidently built upon the model of Scott. We venture to prophesy that Mr. Aytoun's future literary efforts will, in like manner, be adaptations to his own purposes of some notion which has already proved successful in other hands. If, therefore, the true poet is indeed a maker, and if it be his work to bring into the world a new creation, we need hesitate little in denying Mr. Aytoun's claim to that title. In the case before us-unlike the Lays-perfection of treatment does not redeem poverty of invention. Mr. Aytoun's imagination-capable of a vigorous ballad-is all unequal to the conduct of a sustained poem. In fact, Bothwell is marked throughout by fatal deficiencies. There is a want of story, a want of character, a want of poetic treatment-above all, a want of anything like intellectual strength. There is not one thought in the whole book beyond the capacity of a forward child.

Yet, with all this, there is a sufficient amount of excellence to please readers a little below the average. The tone is, in the main, healthy: we have no false views of life, no deifying passion' as an excuse for selfish crime, no morbid feeling-in a word, no spasm. This is slight praise, but unhappily, in our day, these negative excellences acquire

an undue importance from the prevalence of the opposite evils. Above all, in Bothwell and in the Lays alike, Mr. Aytoun has been very wise after his kind. He has appealed, in both, to a sort of modernized Jacobitism, which yet lingers, very safe, very harmless, and very absurd, in some romantic Scottish bosoms. We fancy him an enthusiastic Scottish grievance-monger. Hence, all the unicorn-nationality of the north will extend its shield over him. Excitable Celts will extol him as second only to Ossian; but our calmer Saxon temperaments, and our more unbiassed judgments, will gladly accept Mr. Aytoun's contributions to literature as conferring a considerable amount of pleasure upon a large class of readers will recognise in him a very clear second-rate ability, but will regard the question as to whether he is a man of genius and a true poet as too far removed from the world of reality to claim any serious discussion, save, perhaps, from some ghostly group of the shadows of departed schoolmen.

A well-known story tells us of an ingenious mechanist who once called many men together to behold how, upon wings of his own construction, he could fly away, and be at rest. He sprang, accordingly, from the summit of a hill into the circumambient ether, and-fell headlong into the lake below. But the pinions which had failed him in midair sufficed now to keep him on the surface. Mr. Aytoun has reversed this process. He prudently tried the water first. There the wings of politics and parodies have been found à reliable support. Emboldened by successful experience, he has essayed a flight into the upper regions-has aspired to become a dweller with the birds of song. We applaud the bold endeavour, but are constrained to add, with regret, that it has proved a vain one. Let Mr. Aytoun content himself with the water. There he floats secure, sometimes not ungracefully-but let him not affect the purer element.