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Bothwell. A Poem, in, six Parts. By W. Ednicea-
stoune Aytoun, Blackwood and Sons.
A spirit-stirring, Scottish, historical ballad-poem
—that would have gladdened the eyes of old Sir
Walter Scott, and have moved the heart of yormag
Sir Philip Sidney as with the sound of a trumpet,
—Bothwell will sustain, without in any appreciable
degree enhancing Professor Aytoun's reputation.
As a whole, it is worthy of him—yet in no way be-
yond, even if it really equal what his master-hand
has already accomplished. And what that hand
has accomplished the lovers of pathos and frolic, of
impassioned eloquence and of satiric acrimony,
know full well, and knowing appreciate even to the
extent of a wide-spread and unaffected admiration.
Hence the popularity secured to his various pro-
ductions almost immediately upon their successive
appearance. Hence the gay triumph won for his
Book of Ballads, by that arch-wag of wags, Bon
Gaultier ! Hence the contagious peals of laughter
provoked (in that name of serio-comic particularity,
the name of T. Percy Jones) by the spasmodic
tragedy of Firmilian I Hence the rapid pas-
sage through nine large, and some of them
costly, editions of what still remains William
Edwonstoune Aytoun's most remarkable contribu-
tion—sinsultaneously to our poetical, and historical,
and imaginative literature—his fervid, earnest,
inspiriting national lyrics, the Lays of the Scottish
Cavaliers. Another, and more elaborated pa-
triotic ballad, coming within the same category, a
new Lay of one of the more fierce and daring, and
at the same time one of the more execrably base
and blood-stained Cavaliers of Scotland, is this
" Poem, in Six Parts"—commemorative of Both-
well—the infamous James, Earl of Bothwell, who,
as third husband of the beautiful and unfortunate
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (partner of her throne
by the brute force of a lawless conspiracy), was
(strange to tell) at once a Rebel and a Sovereign
Throughout the Poem, as the Author remarks in
the course of his brief but sufficient Preface, he has
not once deviated, ho tells us, from what he con-
siders to be the historical truth. In corroboration
of which fact a variety of valuable and interesting
Notes are (according to Professor Aytoun's wont)
appended. By one of the most succinct and
curious of which notes the reader is reminded very
vividly of the astonishingly rapid sequences of the
principal events iu the romantic history of Mary
Queen of Scots. Beginning with her marriage
with the Dauphin, on the 24th of April,
1558, and ending with her incarceration in Loch-
leven on the 15th of June, 1567. Nine years,
crowded with so many joys and sorrows, with
so much splendour and abjection, with
so many tragic events and pathetic vicissitudes !
Married, as wo have seen, on the 24th of April,
1553, to the Dauphin, Mary was espoused on the
27th of July, 1565, to Darnley, and on the 15th of
May, 1567, wedded in terror and anguish to the
remorseless Bothwell. Remaining in the first in-
terval a widow scarcely five years, her royal hus-
band, Francis 11., having expired prematurely on
the sth of December, 1560 ; and in the second in-
terval wearing the weeds little more than three
months, Henry Darnley having been barbarously
murdered on the 10th of February, 1567, by the
horrible Gunpowder Plot of Kirk-o'-Fields. In
reference to which deed of darkness it should never
be forgotten by those who cherish so much fana-
tical bigotry in connection with the grim remem-
brances associated with the sth of November—
that that conspiracy was a projected vengeance for
a crime not only projected but actually accom-
plished in the previous century ! Darnley, the
father of James I. of England and VI. of Scotland,
having really fallen the vi3tim of the Gunpowder
Plot of Protestant conspirat&S, as his son was after-
wards nearly falling a victim to the Gunpowder Plot
of RomaniCatholic conspirators. The one, a dark
deed absolutely accomplished; the other a dark deed
projected, but never accomplished. Remembering,
which it seems scarcely just that sectarian animosi-
ties should be still sedulously and rancorously kept
alive in regard to the co-religionists of intending
criminals—while the actual criminals of an earlier
generation are abandoned wholly to the damning
Nemesis of History alone, without being recalled
periodically to popular remembrance and execration
by the sour-flavoured prayers of an implacable and
scurrillous anniversary. There has often been a
talk of our sweeping away by legislative enactment
that portion of the Church-service relating to the
sth of November. Nevertheless, it still remains—
glorified by the squibs and crackers of our ingeni-
ous street urchins ; as much the idol of the zealot
as to the small London boy is the ragged old Guy
annually borne from house to house upon a rush-
bottomed chair. However, to return to Professor
Aytoun's Poem from this incidental episode of criti-
cism, in reference to what in that poem of his he has
se admirably described, namely, the real Gunpowder
Plot, the realised plot of James Bothwell, and not
the merely projected plot of Guido Fawkes—it is
especially worthy of notice by the readers of this
stirring ballad, that it portrays the third
husband of Mary as he really was, accord-
ing to the most creditable witnesses (Herries, for
example, and Throckmorton), with all his
crimes unglozed, with all his daring, his ambition,
and his remorse. Extending over "Six Parts"
though it does, the whole poem (220 pages 8vo.) is
nothing less than a Monologue ! Bothwell himself
loquitur throughout. The scene from first to last,
lying in his dungeons in the Castle of Malmoe, in
Denmark ! So that poring over these extended
verses, the reader of the "Six Parts" of this La-
mentation might be half-tempted to ask with the
voluble and bewailing Earl—
" Is it the dripping of the roof,
Or plunging of the sea,
That thus infects me with the weight
Of their monotony ?"
,(r. 21)—
might be half-tempted to ask, we say, but that the
nervous eloquence, the pathos, the passion, the
verve, we might almost add at times the (estrum,
or afflatus of the poet, carries us onward un-
weariedly and eagerly to the final couplet, upon
the strong current of his enthusiasm bearing up,
so to speak, the ample pinions of his imagination.
From the diingeon of Malmoe Castle, as from a
watch-tower, we look back with the imprisoned
and despairing Bothwell upon the salient points of
his fierce and desperate career. The incidents
beins, enacted all over again, so to say, under
the Arid glare of his remorseful memory. flow
distinctly, how vividly, how picturesquely—let the
poem itself declare, in accents (some of them)
" the world will not willingly let die." The recol-
lections of Bothwell coining, ever more and more
wildly to us, to the accompaniment of the dia-
pason of the ocean washing ever and ever around
the walls of his Danish dungeon. An accompani-
ment audible from the first when we hear—
" With, thundering hurl, the angry sea
Smite on the crags below."
Audible, as audible to the last as when the Cap-
tive Earl howls to the eagle flying over the storm-
tossed vessel—
" Down with thy pinion on the mast,
Scream louder in the air,
And stifle in the wallowing sea
The shrieks of their despair."
Admirable as the poem is as a work of art,
when examined piecemeal we cannot but regard
it, in its main design, as—a mistake. It is by an
error of judgment, we conceive, that the speaker
in Aytoun's Bothwell (as very recently in Tenny-
son's Maud) is a madman—a maniac with lucid
intet vats ! A rhetorical lunatic, no doubt of it—
but still, when all is said and done, a lunatic, whe-
ther rendered so by despair, or remorse, or an-
guish, or horror, it matters nothing. Perhaps for
this very reason our author may be held the less
responsible for plagiarisms resulting from a griev-
ous disorder of the memory—au error iu Both-
well's instance, howbeit, which magnifies a molehill
into a mountain : changing plagiarisms as such into
anachronisms of portentous magnitude. To say
nothing of the Scottish Earl's memento of his first
worship of the young and lovely Queen of Scots,
reminding one so vividly of Pope's celebration of
Belinda's cross, as one—
" That Jews might kiss and infidels adore."
What shall we say of that reminiscence from the
Poet-Laureate

With rapiers drawn and pist.)l3 bent,
They seize their wretched prey ;
They wrenched her garments from his grasp,
They stabbed him where ho lay."—Bothivd/.
" They should have stabbed me where I lay,
Oriana I
h ow could I rise and come away,
Oriana I
How could I look upon the day ?
They should have stabbed mu where I lay,
Oriana!
They should have trod me into c'ay,
Oriana I "—Oriana.
Again, passing by as, comparatively speaking, un-
worthy of particular notice that mention of Christ-
mas--

" Full many a hearth is decked to-night,
To hail the blessed morn,
On which, in ages long ago,
The Saviour child was horn."—Bothwell—
So " wondrous like" poor Gerald Griffin's lyric
upon the same sacred festival, beginning—
" The Christmas light is burning bright
. In many a village pane,

* A dungeon, by the way, in which, while Bothwell
bewails his eternal separation from his old castle•home,
"The Hermitage," ho can bad no solace in the thought
Sung so exquisitely in an after ago by the poet Lovelace
[will Professor Aytoun forgive the punning quotation ?]—
" Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage ;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That km au hernaitage,",

"If laggard laws delay redress
Fur insult, or for wrong,
There is no arbiter like steel
So ready and s, strong ;"
Or in the wild, imaginary anticipation of the dread
thunder-blast that blew old Kirk o'•Fields into
ruin he marvels to himself among the revels of
Holyrood on the night of Darnley's murder—
" What, if that Babel should be htiiled,
Struck dumb by one tremendous knell
What, if the air above were filled
With clanging from the clocks of hell ?
It is ever in accents resounding and energetic that
Aytoun breathes the whole fervour of his fancy
through the lips of Bothwell. Very seldom, indeed,
does it happen through the whole protracted length
of the Six Parts of this _extended Monologue that
the prevailing energy drops down into the bathos
of a puling anti-climax, as (Part v., s. xii.), whore
the rebel earl exclaims—.
" 0 wretch to fashion such a lie !
O slave to ruin one so fair ?
0 false to faith and chivalry !
0 villain, well may I despair 1"
..4s seldom as the lines halt through the casualty of
a careless scanning, as when (twice in the poem)
the rival Queen of England is spoken of with no
regard at all to the exigeneies of her polysyllabic
name-of-fame : ex.-gr. :
" And fiercely blazed Eli:ab th's wrath
Against the luckless pair, &c."
No !—verve and verse for the most part through-
out the whole poem are, with these rare
exceptions, entitled to all but unconditional
commendation. The noblest passages in the
production, to our thinking, being those de-
scriptive successively of the assassinations of
Riccio and Darnley,' of . the abduction of Mary
to Dunbar, and, above all, of the memorable duel
in the Billhope glen between the Warden of thes
Marches (Bothwell), and that sturdiest of all his
foes, John Elliot, of the Park. One after another
each of those foes of his, we are told, fell before
the Warden of the Marches—Whitehaugh and
Mangertou, Johnstone and Armstrong—
I had them all,Antt only one,
John Elliot, of the Park,
, As stalwart and as bold a man
As ever rode by dark.
I sought him far, I sought him near,
lie baffled all my men ' •
At last I met him face tofac3,
Within the Billhope glen.
Short parley passed between us twain—
" Thou art the Warden I" "Ay
Then, Elliot, of the Park ?" "I am."
" Wilt yield thee ?" "Come and try 1"
We lighted down from off our steeds,
We tied them to a tree ;
The sun was sinking in the west,
And all alone were we..
Out the steel ; and then began
A al:arp and desperate strafe,
For Elliot fought to 'scape the cord,
I fought for fame and life.
Ha, ha ! were he alive again
And on this dungeon floor,
What joy with such a man as that
To cross the sword once more !
The blows he fetched were stark and strong,
And so were mine, I we-n,
Until I cleft his headpiece through,
And stretched him on the green.
" Wilt yield thee now ?" " I will not yield
But an' ye promise grace."
"That must you ask upon your knee
Before your Sovereign's face."
Blinded with blood he struggled up—
" Lord Earl !" he said, " beware
No man shall take me living yet ;
Now follow, if you dare !"
I slipped upon the btoken moss ;
Amid in the shough we rolled,
Death-grappling, silent, heaving each
Within the other's hold.
Ile passed above me and I felt—
Oace—twiee—his dagger drive ;
But mine went deeper through his breast—
I rose but half alive !
All spun around me—trees and hills--
A mist appeared to rise ;
Yet one thing saw I clearly yet
Before my fading. eyes :
Not half a, rood beyond the burn,
A man lay stiff and stark ;
I knew it was my stubborn foe,
John Elliot of the Park.
I strove in vain to sound my horn,
No further strength had I ;
And reeling in that lonely glen
I fell—but not to die.
A descriptive passage, that, worthy of the harp,
he hand, the voice, whence came the glorious and
uspiritint, Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers. Verses,
1103 A, the
.true " ring" in them—full Qf.
heroic paesion, and of a charm strangely and wildly
picturesque. Bothwell, let it be observed, is briefly
but gracefully inscribed by the author, " To Sir
Edward Bulwer Lytton, Bart., 41Y—to the