Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/157

Rh critiques of an intensely sui generis description in the pages of the Critic and the dissenting magazines. We had for some time anticipated that this magnus Apollodorus would be sooner or later taken notice of, in no complimentary way, by the author of "Firmilian"—so sedulous appears to be his "bilious attacks," acute as well as chronic, on Professor Aytoun—their bitterness savouring of that personal ill-will which makes one suspect that Apollodorus may have been a rejected contributor to Maga, or in some such experience have contracted the plethora of spleen he takes little pains to subdue or to disguise. To give one example out of many: speaking of Aytoun's Lays of the Cavaliers, Mr. George Gilfillan says, they "are but Scott's cast-off clothes. Of Scott's sincerity there can be no doubt—of Aytoun's there may be much. … Aytoun's is the small spite of a schoolboy who confounds impudence with cleverness, and thinks that, because connected with Christopher North, he may indulge in similar freaks of fancy, and present the distaff without the Hercules—the contortions without the inspiration—the buffooneries or profanities of Falstaff without his wit, his bonhommie, or his rich originality." Now for the retort courteous:the poems at whose nativity Apollodorus has played Lucina, being those specifically assailed in this satire on the Spasmodic School,—as the Life Drama of Alexander Smith, Bigg's Night and the Soul, &c. To Apollodorus on the qui vive for a new discovery, there enters one Sancho, a Costermonger, singing as how