The Bon Gaultier Ballads

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Bon Gaultier Ballads, by William
Edmonstoune Aytoun, et al, Illustrated by Richard Doyle, et al
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Title: The Bon Gaultier Ballads
Author: William Edmonstoune Aytoun
Theodore Martin
Release Date: January 28, 2007 [eBook #20477]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
BON GAULTIER BALLADS***
This eBook transcribed by Les Bowler
THE BOOK OF BALLADS
EDITED BY
BON GAULTIER

_WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES_

ILLUSTRATED BY
DOYLE, LEECH, AND CROWQUILL

NEW EDITION

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MCMIV

_All Rights reserved_
PREFACE.
A further edition of this book--the sixteenth--having been called for, I
have been asked by the publishers to furnish a preface to it. For
prefaces I have no love. Books should speak for themselves. Prefaces
can scarcely be otherwise than egotistic, and one would not willingly
add to the too numerous illustrations of this tendency with which the
literature of the day abounds. I would much rather leave the volume
with the simple "Envoy" which I wrote for it when the Bon Gaultier
Ballads were first gathered into a volume. There the products of the
dual authorship of Aytoun and myself were ascribed to the Bon
Gaultier under whose editorial auspices they had for the most part seen
the light. But my publishers tell me that people want to know why, and
how, and by which of us these poems were written,--curiosity,
complimentary, no doubt, but which it is by no means easy for the
surviving bard to satisfy. It is sixty years since most of these verses
were written with the light heart and fluent pen of youth, and with no
thought of their surviving beyond the natural life of ephemeral
magazine pieces of humour. After a long and very crowded life, of
which literature has occupied the smallest part, it is difficult for me to
live back into the circumstances and conditions under which they were
written, or to mark, except to a very limited extent, how far to Aytoun,
and how far to myself, separately, the contents of the volume are to be
assigned. I found this difficult when I wrote Aytoun's Life in 1867, and
it is necessarily a matter of greater difficulty now in 1903.
I can but endeavour to show how Aytoun and I came together, and how
for two or three years we worked together in literature. Aytoun (born
21st June 1813) was three years older than myself, and he was known
already as a writer in 'Blackwood's Magazine' when I made his
acquaintance in 1841. For some years I had been writing in Tait's and
Fraser's Magazines, and elsewhere, articles and verses, chiefly
humorous, both in prose and verse, under the _nom de guerre_ of Bon

Gaultier. This name, which seemed a good one for the author of playful
and occasionally