Rainy Days in a Library

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896. Excerpt: ... IV. FIRMILIAN. IV. FIRMILIAN. A GENERATION has passed away since the accomplishment of one of the most elaborate, yet harmless, hoaxes ever perpetrated in literature. In May, 1854, there appeared in Blackwood's Magazine what purported to be a review of the work of a new writer of a new school--' Firmilian; or, The Student of Badajos: A Tragedy. By T. Percy Jones. Printed for private circulation.' Such was the title of the supposed dramatic poem, and the reviewer let it be understood that its author submitted it for criticism upon its claim to be the type of the poetry of the future, marking the genesis of the Spasmodic School. It is easy now, with late-born sagacity, to read between the lines of the review and detect the scarcely veiled merriment of the writer at his own fun; but most of the newspaper critics at the time reviewed it in sober earnest. Some took up the cudgels for the author against the reviewer, and it is on record that one country editor walked boldly into the pitfall, declared that he had seen the whole poem, and protested that it was 'another specimen of the injustice of Blackwood to poets of that school.' The piquancy of the joke lay in the fact that no such poem as 'Firmilian ' existed when the review was written. The copious extracts quoted therein were the work of the reviewer himself, William Edmonstoune Aytoun; nor was it until his treatment of Mr. T. Percy Jones had been condemned or approved by the critic's critics that he set to work to finish a drama which is, indeed, infinitely more readable than most works of more pretension. Farce as it really is--Aytoun's biographer, Mr. (now Sir) Theodore Martin, rightly terms it 'a masterpiece of burlesque '--it abounds in passages of really fine poetry. The plot is sufficiently exciting...