AYTOUN or AYTON, SIR ROBERT Scottish poet, son of Andrew Aytoun of Kinaldie, Fifeshire, was born in 157o. He was educated at the university of St. Andrews. 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 Feb. 28 1638. Aytoun was one of the earliest Scots to use the southern standard as a literary medium.
Aytoun's Latin poems are printed in Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (Amsterdam, 1637), i. pp. 40-75. His English poems are preserved in a ms. in the British Museum (Add. mss. 10, 308), which was prepared 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.