William Edmondstoune Aytoun

Who was William Edmondstoune Aytoun?

William Edmondstoune Aytoun FRSE was a Scottish lawyer and poet.

Born in Edinburgh, he was the only son of Joan Keith and Roger Aytoun, a writer to the signet, and was related to Sir Robert Aytoun. To his mother, a woman of culture, he owed his early fondness for literature, his political sympathies, and his admiration for the House of Stuart. At the age of eleven years he was sent to the Edinburgh Academy, and from there to the University of Edinburgh.

During 1833 he spent a few months in London studying law, but in September of that year he went to study German at Aschaffenburg, where he remained until April 1834. He then resumed his legal studies in his father's chambers, was admitted a writer to the signet in 1835, and five years later was certified a Scottish lawyer. By his own confession, though he followed the law, he never could overtake it. His first publication, a volume entitled Poland, Homer, and other Poems, in which he expressed his eager interest in the state of Poland, had been published in 1832.

While in Germany he made a translation in blank verse of the first part of Faust; but, forestalled by other translations, it was never published.