Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 2.djvu/595

 MARTIN, THEODORE (1810–1909), man of letters, born at Edinburgh on 16 Sept. 1816, was only son in a family of ten children of a well-to-do Edinburgh solicitor, James Martin, who was for some years private secretary to Andrew, Lord Rutherfurd [q. v.]. His grandfather, also Theodore Martin, was ground officer on the estate of Cairnbulg, near Fraserburgh. His mother was Mary, daughter of James Reid, shipowner of Fraserburgh. From Edinburgh high school under Dr. Adam he passed to Edinburgh University (1830–3), of which he was created hon. LL.D. in 1875. At the university a love of literature was awakened in him by the lectures of James Pillans [q. v.], professor of humanity, and there he first caught sight of William Edmonstoune Aytoun [q. v.], a student three years his senior, with whom he was to form ten years later a close friendship and a literary partnership. As a young man he studied German and interested himself in music and the stage.

Martin was bred to the law, and practised as a solicitor in Edinburgh until June 1846. In that year he migrated to London in order to pursue the career of a parliamentary solicitor or agent. In 1847 he joined in that capacity, at Westminster, Hugh Innes Cameron, and his business was carried on under the style of Cameron & Martin until 1854. Then Cameron left the firm, and Martin conducted it single-handed for eight years. In 1862 Martin took a partner, William Leslie of the Edinburgh firm of Inglis & Leslie, for whom he had acted as London agent. Leslie died in 1897, when Martin was joined by two other partners, but the firm was known as Martin & Leslie until 1907, when the style was changed to Martin & Co. Martin's parliamentary business in London was extensive, profitable, and important. Among the earliest private bills which he prepared and piloted through parliamentary committees were those dealing with the Shrewsbury and Chester railway and the river Dee navigation. He was thus brought into close relations with North Wales, which he subsequently made a chief place of residence. He also carried the bill for the extension to London of the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire (now the Great Central) railway. During 1879 he was closely engaged in negotiating, for Lord Beaconsfield's government, the purchase of the undertakings of all the London water companies, and in preparing a bill for vesting them in a public trust; but the measure was dropped during the last days of Lord Beaconsfield's ministry, and was not revived on Gladstone's return to office in 1880. Martin's parliamentary work was in main occupation through life, and he conducted it with unsparing energy and much ability.

Before leaving Edinburgh he contributed to 'Tait's' and 'Fraser's' magazines and to other periodicals humorous pieces in prone and verse. The poems he ascribed to Hon Gaultier, a 'bon compagnon' whose name had caught his fancy in Rabelais (Prol. livre i.). In 1841 Aytoun was attracted by one of these papers, 'Flowers of Hemp; or The Newgate Garland. By One of the Family,' a satire on the fashionable novel in the style of Harrison Ainsworth's 'Dick Turpin' and 'Jack Sheppard.' At Aytoun's request the naturalist Edward Forbes [q. v.] brought the young men together, and 'a kind of Beaumont and Fletcher partnership,' as Martin called it, was the result. From 1842 to 1844 they wrote together a series of humorous pieces for 'Tait's' and 'Fraser's' magazines. Besides comic poems there were parodied in prose, including a set of prize novels, prior in date to Thackeray's, and a series of humorous colloquies in the fashion of 'Noctes Ambrosiana),' called 'Bon Gaultier and his Friends.' Most of the verse was collected in 1845 in 'Bon Gaultier's Ballads,' a volume which achieved immediate popularity and reached a sixteenth edition in 1903. The attractions of the volume were enhanced by the illustrations — in the first edition by 'Alfred Crowquill' (A. H. Forrester [q. v.]), to whose drawings Richard Doyle and John Leech added others in later editions.

The Bon Gaultier verse mainly parodied the leading poetry of the day, especially the 'new poetry' of Tennyson. A few of the mock poems pretended to be competition exercises for the poet-laureateship vacated by Southey's death. 'The Lay of the Lovelorn,' a parody of 'Locksley Hall,' which was elaborated by Martin out of ten or a dozen lines by Aytoun, was perhaps the most popular piece. Lookhart (in Spanish Ballads), Maoaulay, Mrs. Browning, Moore, Leigh 'Hunt, Uhland, and even Aytoun himself were all among the victims of Martin or his partner's ridicule, together with the German student and the American patriot. Martin was the larger contributor, but Aytoun's work is the better. If the 'Ballads' are more on the surface than the 'Rejected Addresses' with which they invite comparison, they are hardly less amusing. The fun, whatever shape it takes, is always healthy, and 