ch 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 'Blackwo