Poetry Codex

Victorian

William Edmondstoune Aytoun

1813–1865

William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813–1865) was a Scottish lawyer, poet and critic, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh and a regular contributor to Blackwood's Magazine. He is best known for the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers (1849) and, with Theodore Martin, for the parodic Bon Gaultier ballads.

The pieces here are the comic verses that James Parton printed under his name in his anthology of English humorous poetry, several of them parodies of fashionable poets of the day.

Poems (33)

  1. Dame Fredegonde
  2. Idées Napoléoniennes
  3. The Lay of the Lover's Friend
  4. Comfort in Affliction
  5. The Husband's Petition
  6. The Biter Bit
  7. A Midnight Meditation
  8. The Dirge of the Drinker
  9. Francesca da Rimini
  10. Louis Napoleon's Address to His Army
  11. The Battle of the Boulevard
  12. Puffs Poetical: Paris and Helen
  13. Puffs Poetical: Tarquin and the Augur
  14. The Empty Bottle
  15. Edinburgh after Flodden
  16. The Execution of Montrose
  17. The Heart of the Bruce
  18. The Burial March of Dundee
  19. The Widow of Glencoe
  20. The Island of the Scots
  21. Charles Edward at Versailles
  22. The Old Scottish Cavalier
  23. Blind Old Milton
  24. Hermotimus
  25. Oenone
  26. The Buried Flower
  27. The Old Camp
  28. Danube and the Euxine
  29. The Scheik of Sinai in 1830
  30. Epitaph of Constantine Kanaris
  31. The Refusal of Charon
  32. The Lay of the Levite
  33. Massacre of the Macpherson

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