AYTOUN, or AYTON,

See also:

• SIR

SIR

See also:

• ROBERT
• ROBERT (1275—1343)
• ROBERT, HUBERT (1753-1808)
• ROBERT, LOUIS LEOPOLD (1794-1835)

ROBERT (1570-1638)  , Scottish poet, son of Andrew Aytoun of Kinaldie, Fifeshire, was born in 1570 . He was educated at the university of St Andrews, where he was incorporated as a student of St Leonard's College in 1584 and graduated M.A. in 1588 . He lived for some years in France, and on the accession of James VI. to the English throne he wrote in Paris a Latin panegyric, which brought him into immediate favour at court . He was knighted in 1612 . He held various lucrative offices, and was private secretary to the queens of James I. and Charles I . He died in London and was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 28th of February 1638 . His reputation with his contemporaries was high, both personally and as a writer, though he had no ambition to be known as the latter . Aytoun's remains are in Latin and English . In respect of the latter he is one of the earliest Scots to use the southern standard as a literary medium . The Latin poems include the panegyric already referred to, an Epicedium in ohitum Thoma Rhodi; Basics, sive Strena ad Jacobum Hayum; Lessus in funere Raphaelis Therei; Carina Caro; and minor pieces, occasional and epitaphic . His first English poem was Diophantus and Charidora (to which he refers in his Latin panegyric to James) . He has left a number of pieces on amatory subjects, including songs and sonnets .

Aytoun's Latin poems are printed in Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (

Amsterdam, 16,39 i. pp . 40-75 . His English poems are preserved in a MS. in the: British Museum (Add . MSS . 10,308), which was pre-pared by his nephew, Sir John Aytoun . Both were collected by Charles Rogers in The Poems of Sir Robert Aytoun (London, privately printed, 1871) . This edition is unsatisfactory, though it is better than the first issue by the same editor in 1844 . Additional poems are included which cannot be ascribed to Aytoun, and which in some cases have been identified as the work of others . The poem I do confess thou'rt smooth and fair " may be suspected, and the old version of " Auld Lang Syne " and " Sweet Empress " are certainly not Aytoun's . Some of the English poems are printed in Watson's Collection (1706–1711) and in the Bannatyne Miscellany, i. p . 299 (1827) . There is a memoir of Aytoun in Rogers's edition, and another by Grosart in the Dict. of Nat .

Biog . Particulars of his public career will be found in the printed Calendars of

State Papers and Register of the Privy Council of the period .