{162} Edward Fitzball, besides being the prolific author of the most
sulphurous and sanguinary melodramas, flirted also with the Muses. His
triumph in this line was the ballad, "My Jane, my Jane, my pretty Jane,"
who was for many long years implored in the delightful tenor notes of
Sims Reeves "never to look so shy, and to meet him, meet him in the
evening when the bloom was on the rye." Fitzball, I have heard, was the
meekest and least bellicose of men, and this was probably the reason why
he was dubbed by Bon Gaultier "the terrible Fitzball."

{168} Two less poetically-disposed men than Goulburn and Knatchbull
could not well be imagined.

{177} The most highly reputed oysters of the day.

{200} Lord John Russell's vehement letter on Papal Aggression in
November 1850 to the Bishop of Durham, provoked by the Papal Bull
creating Catholic bishops in England, and the angry controversy to which
it led, were followed by the passing of the Ecclesiastic Titles Bill in
1857. Aytoun was not alone in thinking that Cardinal Wiseman, the first
to act upon the mandate from Rome, was more than a match for Lord John,
and that the Bill would become a dead letter, as it did. The controversy
was at its hottest when Aytoun expressed his view of the probable result
of the conflict in the preceding ballad.

{269} This poem appeared in a review by Bon Gaultier of an imaginary
volume, 'The Poets of the Day,' and was in ridicule of the numerous
verses of the time, to which the use of Turkish words was supposed to
impart a poetical flavour. His reviewer's comment upon it was as
follows:--

"Had Byron been alive, or Moore not ceased to write, we should have
bidden them look to their laurels. 'Nonsense,' says Dryden, 'shall
be eloquent in love,' and here we find the axiom aptly illustrated,
for in this Eastern Serenade are comprised nonsense and eloquence in
perfection. But, apart from its erotic and poetical merits, it is a
great curiosity, as exhibiting in a very marked manner the singular
changes which the stride of civilisation and the bow-string of the
Sultan Mahmoud have made in the Turkish language and customs within a
very few years. Thus we learn from the writer that a 'musnud,' which
in Byron's day was a sofa, now signifies a nightingale. A 'tophaik,'
which once fired away in Moore's octosyllabics as a musket, is
metamorphosed into a bank of flowers. 'Zemzem,' the sacre