ART. I.-Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers. By WILLIAM EDMONSTOUNE AYTOUN, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the University of Edinburgh. 1849.
WE have delayed our notice of Mr. Aytoun's book in the hope that some of our contemporaries would have relieved us from a disagreeable duty. In this we have been disappointed; for although a number of them have published reviews of it, they have confined themselves to a slight skirmish with its general sentiment, leaving untouched the positive assertions as to matter of fact, which have startled the public with the intimation, that until this modern Daniel came to judgment we had never known some of the most important points in the history of the seventeenth century. There is thus no help for us. We are bound to examine a book of such lofty pretensions; and our readers will have at least one enjoyment, in seeing how a very clever man may, in his desire to say something very striking and paradoxical, say things very foolish, and write himself down as Dogberry wanted it. The task which he has undertaken is the hardest we have ever seen a literary man attempt. The labours of Hercules were as nothing to it. "Every man can say B to a battledore, and write in praise of virtue and the seven liberal sciences, thresh corn out of full sheaves, and fetch water out of the Thames. But out of dry stubble to make an after-harvest, and a plentiful crop without sowing, and wring juice out of a flint, that is Pierce a God's name, and the right trick of a workman." To prove that Charles was a "Royal Martyr," and that Argyle was an "archfiend," was perhaps not so difficult;