United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At that very moment the spirit returned, and found its uninsured tenement of clay reduced to ashes. The sequel may be found in a poem of the late Professor Aytoun's, and in the same volume occurs the wondrous tale of Colonel Townsend, who could suspend his animation at pleasure. There is certainly a good deal of risk, as well as of convenience, in suspended animation.
Cheyne, of a gentleman, Colonel Townsend, who could voluntarily produce a state of "dwawm" which was not then to be distinguished from death? 'I have read it in the notes to Aytoun's Scottish Cavaliers, said the doctor. Logan his heir? Is that hypothesis absolutely out of keeping with his curious character? 'No.
Your description of the drunken habits of Shayton are excellent, and not a bit overdone. It reminds me of a joke of Aytoun's when there was a report of an earthquake at a village in Scotland notorious for its convivial habits. He remarked, 'Nonsense; the whole inhabitants are in a chronic state of D. T. that would have shaken down the walls of Jericho.
In Aytoun's hands the flats are too frequent, though they are relieved and broken at times by really splendid bursts, the best of which perhaps are "The Island of the Scots" and "The Heart of the Bruce."
Sir Walter, following tradition, has mounted Claverhouse on a coal-black charger without a single white hair in its body, a present, according to the legends of the time, from the Devil to his favourite servant. See also Aytoun's fine ballad "The Burial March of Dundee": "Then our leader rode among us On his war-horse black as night; Well the Cameronian rebels Knew that charger in the fight."
If it had been true, as is commonly said, that the before-mentioned Firmilian killed the so-called Spasmodic School, Aytoun's failure to attain the upper regions of poetry would have been a just judgment; for the persons whom he satirised, though less clever and humorous, were undoubtedly more poetical than himself.
Go into the loneliest places of experience and passion, and you discover that you are walking in human footprints. If you should happen to lift the first volume of Professor Aytoun's "Ballads of Scotland," the book of its own accord will open at "Clerk Saunders," and by that token you will guess that the ballad has been read and re-read a thousand times. And what a ballad it is!
If you have the book I am writing about, turn up "David Swan," "The Great Carbuncle," "The Fancy Show-box," and after you have read these, you will understand what I mean. The next two books on my shelf books at this moment leaning on the "Twice-Told Tales" are Professor Aytoun's "Ballads of Scotland," and the "Lyra Germanica." These books I keep side by side with a purpose.
The forms of existence with which they deal seem widely separated; but a strong kinship exists between them, for all that. I open Professor Aytoun's book, and all this modern life with its railways, its newspapers, its crowded cities, its Lancashire distresses, its debates in Parliament fades into nothingness and silence.
Maud was threatened with a broadside from "that pompholygous, broad-blown Apollodorus, the gifted X." People who have read Aytoun's diverting Firmilian, where Apollodorus plays his part, and who remember "gifted Gilfillan" in Waverley, know who the gifted X. was. But X. was no great authority south of Tay.
Word Of The Day