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 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN.

 
 Drummond of H awthornden : 
 
 %\\t Storg of his Jifc anb SEriirngs. 
 
 BY 
 
 DAVID MASSON, M.A., LL.D., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. 
 
 MAC MILL AN AND CO. 
 
 i§73-
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 Among the materials for this Volume may be mentioned the 
 original and subsequent Editions of Drummond's separate 
 Works, and of his Collected Poems, and also the first, and still 
 unique, Edition of his Prose Works and Poems together, pub- 
 lished at Edinburgh in 17 11 under the superintendence of 
 Bishop Sage and Thomas Ruddiman. This Folio contained 
 many prose pieces and some poems of Drummond's that had 
 never seen the light before ; it included also a good many 
 letters written by Drummond or to him ; and there was pre- 
 fixed to it a Memoir of Drummond by Bishop Sage. To the 
 knowledge of Drummond thus accessible nothing of conse- 
 quence was added till 1820, when Mr. David Laing began his 
 examination of the Hawthornden MSS., which had then for 
 about forty years been in the possession of the Society of Anti- 
 quaries of Scotland. By Mr. Laing's assiduity these valuable 
 relics were properly arranged, and bound in fifteen volumes ; 
 and the results of his examination of them took at length the 
 form of an elaborate paper, read before the Society on the 14th 
 of January 1828, and afterwards printed in their Transactions, 
 with this title : " A Brief Account of the Hawthornden Manu- 
 scripts in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries of Scot- 
 land ; with Extracts, containing several unpublished Letters 
 and Poems of William Drummond of Hawthornden." In the 
 Memoir introducing this paper interesting particulars of Drum- 
 mond's Biography, previously unknown, were ascertained and 
 stated with all Mr. Laing's accuracy, while the appended 
 Extracts of various kinds from the Hawthornden MSS. added 
 about sixty quarto pages to Drummond's Remains as printed 
 in the folio of 171 1. Few even of Mr. Laing's researches have 
 been of greater interest than this ; and he was. fortunately able
 
 viii PREFACE. 
 
 to complete it by the subsequent discovery, in the Advocates' 
 Library in Edinburgh, of an authentic copy of the famous 
 Notes which Drummond had left of Ben Jonson's Conversa- 
 tions with him at Hawthornden in 1619. It may be doubted 
 whether there has ever been a happier trouvaille of the kind 
 than those long-missing Notes, first produced by Mr. Laing 
 before the Society of Scottish Antiquaries on the 9th of 
 January 1832, and afterwards printed in the same Volume of 
 their Transactions which contains the Account of the Haw- 
 thornden MSS., and also separately as one of the publications 
 of the Shakespeare Society of London. They were a flash of 
 light on the literary and social history of England in the reign 
 of James I., and on the lives of Ben Jonson and Drummond 
 in particular. In the following pages I have availed myself of 
 parts of them, as well as of some of Mr. Laing's Extracts from 
 the Hawthornden MSS. and his accompanying elucidations. 
 For my private satisfaction, indeed, I thought it right to 
 obtain leave to turn over the Hawthornden MSS. themselves, 
 in the convenient form in which Mr. Laing's care has pre- 
 served them in the Library of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries 
 in Edinburgh. Mr. Laing's examination of these MSS., 
 however, had been so minute, and his report of theii 
 contents so exact, that I might have saved myself the 
 trouble. It has been of use mainly as yielding me those lively 
 impressions of fact and character which are always to be 
 derived from a direct inspection of autographs and the originals 
 of documents. For similar impressions of Drummond I am 
 indebted to the access I have have had to the collection of 
 books once belonging to him, and many of them with marks 
 in his handwriting, which is now preserved, as a special dona- 
 tion from himself to his Alma Mater, in the Library of the 
 University of Edinburgh. 
 
 Of the more miscellaneous materials employed in the 
 Narrative a sufficient idea will be obtained from the text or 
 from the occasional foot-notes. One further acknowledgment, 
 however, is expressly due in this Preface ; and it is still to Mr. 
 David Laing. To him, " easily the prince " of living authorities 
 in all matters of Scottish Literary History and Biography, I owe 
 my best thanks, not only for the use made of his published 
 Drummond researches, but also for help and advice given to 
 myself during the passage of this Volume through the press. 
 They were given with all the precision of his full knowledge,
 
 PREFACE. i x 
 
 and with the generous readiness of one who has long made it 
 his duty to forward every inquiry in the department of infor- 
 mation over which he presides. 
 
 There are about half-a-dozen professed portraits of Drum- 
 mond, some of them quite uncertified, and some of them (as is 
 the case with professed portraits of most of the celebrities of 
 his time) mutually irreconcileable. There is no doubt as to 
 the authenticity of the one selected for this volume. It is 
 the portrait engraved by Gaywood for the original Edition of 
 Drummond's " History of the Five Jameses," published in 
 1655, or less than six years after his death. As that volume 
 appeared under the care of his son and of other surviving 
 relatives and friends, the portrait must have been chosen by the 
 family as, on the whole, the best. It is farther sanctioned by 
 having been re-engraved, in larger size and clumsier style, for 
 the folio Edition of Drummond's whole works in 17 n, when 
 his son was still alive to take filial interest in such a matter. 
 Mr. Jeens, in his engraving after Gaywood, has avoided all 
 fallacious touching-up. He has kept true to the original, even in 
 points where the art may have seemed to him crude or quaint. — 
 The Vignette of Hawthornden House represents the house in 
 what I consider its most characteristic aspect. — The subjoined 
 fac-simile of Drummond's autograph is from his copy of the 
 Works of Samuel Daniel (London Edition of 1602), now in 
 the Library of Edinburgh University. 
 
 Edinburgh, November, 1873. 

 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 DRUMMOND IN HIS FATHERS LIFE-TIME. . , . -7 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE YOUNG LAIRD OF HAWTHORNDEN : HIS TASTES AND 
 
 SURROUNDINGS : STATE OF LITERATURE IN SCOTLAND. 1 7 
 
 CHAP 'PER IV. 
 
 TEA RS ON THE DEA TH OF MCELIAUES : FIRST MEETING WITH 
 SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER : MISS CUNNINGHAM OF BARNS 
 AND THE STORY OF DRUMMOND'S FIRST LOVE : PUBLICA- 
 TION OF HIS POEMS: KING JAMES IN SCOTLAND : FORTH 
 FEAST IX C. 
 
 3^ 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 DRUMMOND'S POETRY : FARTHER SPECIMENS, WITH A 
 
 CRITICISM. . . . . . . • .61
 
 xii CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LITERARY LONDON : DRUMMOND S CORRESPONDENCE' WITH 
 DRAYTON : BEN JONSON's JOURNEY TO SCOTLAND : HIS 
 VISIT TO DRUMMOND AND THEIR HAWTHORNDEN 
 CONVERSATIONS. . . . . . . -74 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 LAST SIX YEARS OF KING JAMES'S REIGN : KERR OF 
 ANCRAM'S BANISHMENT : AFFAIRS OF SIR WILLIAM 
 ALEXANDER : VARIOUS LETTERS OF DRUMMOND : HIS 
 FLOWERS OF SION AND CYPRESS GROVE. . . . II 5 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 FIRST FIVE YEARS OF THE REIGN OF CHARLES I. : DRUM- 
 MOND'S PATENT FOR MECHANICAL INVENTIONS, AND 
 HIS GIFT TO EDINBURGH , UNIVERSITY : UNCERTAINTY 
 OF HIS WHEREABOUTS DURING THOSE FIVE YEARS : 
 PROBABLY ABROAD FOR THE MOST PART. . . -153 
 
 CHAP TER IX. 
 
 DRUMMOND BACK IN HAWTHORNDEN : MORE LETTERS OF 
 HIS : DEATH OF DRAYTON : THE STRATHERNE-MENTEITH 
 SCANDAL : DRUMMOND'S INTERFERENCE IN IT : HIS 
 MARRIAGE. . . . . . . . -173 
 
 CHA P TER X. 
 
 Charles's coronation visit to Scotland, with laud in 
 his train : laud's projects for scotland : drum- 
 mond's reflections on the same. . . . 1 96
 
 CONTENTS. xiii 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 PACK 
 
 POETRY AND VERSE EXCHANGED FOR HISTORY AND PROSE : 
 DRUMMOND'S CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE EARL OF 
 PERTH AND INTEREST IN THE DRUMMOND GENEALOGY : 
 HISTORY OF THE FIVE JAMESES COMMENCED : A 
 GLIMPSE OF SCOT OF SCOTSTARVET. . . . . 214 
 
 CHAP TER XII. 
 
 PROGRESS OF LAUD'S POLICY IN SCOTLAND : DRUMMOND'S 
 POSITION : THE BALMERINO BUSINESS : DRUMMOND'S 
 MANLY LETTER ABOUT IT : THE EARL OF STIRLING'S 
 UNPOPULARITY : THE NEW SCOTTISH SERVICE BOOK. . 22<S 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 deliti.e poetarum scotorum : the jenny geddes riot 
 and its consequences : the scottish covenant : 
 griefs and disgrace of the earl of stirling : the 
 marquis of Hamilton's mission : drummond's 
 thoughts about public affairs : his irene and its 
 peculiar political philosophy : the glasgow as- 
 sembly and abolition of episcopacy in scotland : 
 hawthornden house rebuilt. .... 247 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 PREPARATIONS ON BOTH SIDES FOR THE FIRST BISHOPS' 
 WAR: DRUMMOND UNDER SUSPICION : LASSWADE PARISH 
 AND THE PRESBYTERY OF DALKEITH : DRUMMOND AS A 
 PSEUDO-COVENANTER, OR COVENANTER BY COMPULSION : 
 SECRET SQUIBS OF HIS IN VERSE AND PROSE : LESLIE AT 
 DUNSE LAW : CLOSE OF THE FIRST BISHOPS' WAR IN 
 THE PACIFICATION OF BIRKS : DRUMMOND'S CONCERN 
 IN THE AFFAIR : HIS LETTERS TO THE MARQUIS OF 
 DOUGLAS. . . . . . . . . .291
 
 xiv CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 SCOTLAND UNDER TIGHT PRESBYTERIAN RULE : DRUMMOND'S 
 DISGUST AND SARCASMS : PREPARATIONS FOR THE 
 SECOND BISHOPS' WAR : DEATH OF SECRETARY STIRLING : 
 THE SECOND BISHOPS' WAR, AND LESLIE'S INVASION OF 
 ENGLAND : TREATY OF RIPON : ACCIDENT AT DUNGLASS : 
 LETTER OF DRUMMOND'S TO THE EARL OF PERTH : 
 MEETING OF THE ENGLISH LONG PARLIAMENT. . . 323 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 first actions of the english long parliament : 
 charles's second state-visit to scotland : drum- 
 mondism an alias for scottish conservatism : the 
 earl of montrose and his relations to drummond : 
 montrose in prison : edinburgh incidents of the 
 kino's visit : balaam ending of the visit : drum- 
 mond's chagrin and montrose's despair : death of 
 arthur johnston : scotstarvet's new project : 
 charles back in england : outbreak of the eng- 
 lish civil war. ....... 338 
 
 CHAPTER XI' 1 1. 
 
 SCOTTISH ALLIANCE SOLICITED BY THE ENGLISH PARLIA- 
 MENT : DIVISION OF OPINION : THE HAMILTONIAN OR 
 ROYALIST PARTY: DRUMMOND'S SKIAMaCHIA: ITS 
 ANTI-CLERICAL SPIRIT AND INVECTIVES : REFLECTIONS 
 ON THE SAME : THE SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT : 
 DRUMMOND'S USELESS RE.VORAS TO IT : SCOTTISH AUX- 
 ILIARY ARMY IN ENGLAND : PROGRESS OF THE WAR 
 AND OF AFFAIRS GENERALLY IN ENGLAND TILL NASEBY : 
 DRUMMOND'S CONTINUED MOODINESS : MORE SQUIBS 
 AND EPIGRAMS : HIS INTENDED DEFENCE BEFORE THE 
 CIRCULAR TABLES : VACANCY IN LASSWADE PARISH, AND 
 CHOICE OF A NEW MINISTER : MONTROSE'S OUTBLAZE 
 AND TRIUMPH : DRUMMOND IN HIS RETINUE : BATTLE 
 OF PHILIPHAUGH, AND EXTINCTION OF THE BLAZE : 
 KING'S FLIGHT TO THE SCOTS, AND CONCLUSION OF THE 
 CIVIL WAR IN BRITAIN : MONTROSE'S FORCED EXILE : 
 HIS FAREWELL TO DRUMMOND. ..... 363
 
 CONTENTS. xv 
 
 CHAP TE R X VIII. 
 
 PACE 
 
 THE KING AT NEWCASTLE : QUESTION BETWEEN THE ENG- 
 LISH AND THE SCOTS AS TO THE CUSTODY OF HIS 
 PERSON : DRUMMOND'S PART IN THE DEBATE : KING 
 SURRENDERED BY THE SCOTS. ..... 409 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 CHARLES IN HIS ENGLISH CAPTIVITY : OMENS IN HIS 
 FAVOUR : THE SCOTTISH ENGAGEMENT AND THE SECOND 
 ENGLISH CIVIL WAR : DIVISION OF THE SCOTS INTO 
 ENGAGERS AND ANTI-ENGAGERS : DRUMMOND AMONG 
 THE ENGAGERS : HIS VINDICATION OF THE HAMILTONS : 
 COLLAPSE OF THE ENGAGEMENT AND END OF THE 
 SECOND CIVIL WAR : CROMWELL IN EDINBURGH : THE 
 ENGLISH ARMY OMNIPOTENT : EXECUTION OF THE KING. 418 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE LAST YEAR OF DRUMMOND'S LIFE. . . . 433 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 POSTHUMOUS PARTICULARS 458
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 ' Who knows not Melville's beechy grove, 
 And Roslin's rocky glen, 
 Dalkeith, which all the virtues love, 
 And classic Hawthornden ? " 
 
 CO Scott asked in one of those stanzas of his early ballad- 
 fragment, The Grey Brother, where he described that 
 wooded valley of the Esk, near Edinburgh, in which he made 
 his woful Scottish Pilgrim wander about in the agony of some 
 unshriven crime. Well might he introduce into the ballad 
 those stanzas of calm sylvan description, though they have 
 been thought inconsistent with the gloomy character of the 
 rest. No more sweet stream than the Esk, he could say truly 
 in 1799, rolled through more fair woods to the eastern sea. 
 The sweetness of the stream since that time has pretty well 
 been destroyed. Paper-mills and other works have risen here 
 and there on its banks; and, though the water tumbles along in 
 good brown volume still, the brown is no longer the clear 
 natural amber which the angler admires. The fair woods, 
 however, with the ascending and descending paths among them, 
 remain as fair as ever; and, though the neighbourhood has 
 ceased for many a day to be the haunt of anglers, it is still a 
 
 A
 
 DRUM MONO OF HAWT1I0RXDEN. 
 
 favourite resort of tourists visiting Edinburgh, and of the 
 citizens of Edinburgh themselves when on holiday or half- 
 holiday. No neighbourhood, indeed, close to Edinburgh, 
 attracts more frequent visitors than this glen or valley of the 
 Esk. There are, it is true, two Esks, called the north Esk and 
 the south Esk, which do not join till they are within three 
 miles of the Firth of Forth ; but they run so near each other 
 through the scenery of Scott's ballad that the singular form of 
 the name is there nearly sufficient. Dalkeith and Dalkeith 
 Palace, the seat of the Dukes of Buccleuch, and therefore 
 mentioned by Scott with such express fondness, are between 
 the two Esks, and may be said to be on either; Melville 
 Castle, Roslin, and Hawthornden, named in the same stanza 
 of the ballad, are on the north Esk, higher up its course. 
 
 Hawthornden belongs to the same "rocky glen" as Roslin, 
 and the two places are generally taken together by the excur- 
 sionist from Edinburgh. Sometimes, indeed, Roslin is taken 
 by itself; in which case the excursionist makes to it direct from 
 Edinburgh by rail or* coach. Then, after having satisfied 
 himself with the ruined old Castle of the St. Clairs and the 
 far-famed and now restored little Gothic Chapel, which are the 
 two special sights of Roslin, he is either content with the 
 general glimpse of the glen, in all its beauty of crag and leafage, 
 commanded from these two points, and returns to Edinburgh 
 as he came, or else he makes farther acquaintance with the 
 glen by taking the winding foot-path through it,. by the side of 
 the Esk, and so returning to Edinburgh by the village of 
 Lasswade, where Scott spent the first years of his married life, 
 and wrote his Grey Brother, his translation of Goctz von 
 Berlichi7igen, and his other earliest pieces, and where De 
 Quincey long afterwards lived and died. By this arrangement, 
 Hawthornden is all but missed, the heights of Roslin only 
 affording a vague view of its whereabouts farther down the 
 glen, and the path through the glen to Lasswade leaving it on 
 the right hand on the other bank of the stream. To visit
 
 HAWTHORNDEN AT PRESENT. 
 
 Hawthornden, therefore, tire proper way is to go to it first from 
 Edinburgh, and let Roslin come in as the sequel. 
 
 On such an arrangement this is what happens : — Half-an- 
 hour's rail from Edinburgh, if you have not preferred walking 
 (and the distance to the pedestrian is but about seven miles), 
 brings you to a quiet country-road, in which you see a lodge 
 and gate marking the avenue to a mansion. Having obtained 
 the necessary admission, you pursue this avenue, which des- 
 cends slightly from the road, with trees in rich abundance on 
 both sides, and a fine view of the Pentland Hills in front. 
 Hardly have you noticed this view of the Pentlands when the 
 farther descent veils it, and, passing through grounds where a 
 few quaint clipped yew-bushes remind you of old gardening- 
 tastes, you face a venerable and most picturesque-looking edi- 
 fice. The left side, as you face it, consists of a hoary mass of 
 ivy-clad masonry, perhaps six hundred years old, while the 
 more inhabited part to the right is a pleasant irregular house, 
 with gables and a turret, in the style of the early part of the 
 seventeenth century. Over a gateway near the middle, leading 
 into an inner court, you see armorial bearings carved in the 
 stone, and decipher the motto Hos gloria reddit honores. Your 
 impression, as you linger in front of the edifice, is that you 
 have seldom seen so remarkable a mansion of the antique kind, 
 with such a suggestion of nice old-fashioned rooms within, fit 
 for the residence of a family combining the distinction of 
 modern comfort and elegance with a due allegiance to far-back 
 memories. Not, however, till you have moved from imme- 
 diately in front of the mansion, so as to survey it in flank and 
 depthwise to the back, are you aware of its full picturesqueness. 
 If you move to the right, you find yourself on a path edging a 
 deep, precipitous, thickly-wooded dell, with the Esk below, and 
 you see, on glancing back, that the more modern portion of 
 the mansion overhangs this dell behind, the windows of the 
 chief rooms looking down into the dell, and athwart its woody 
 labyrinth, with a steepness almost dizzying. There are seats
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORXDEX. 
 
 along the path, some of them on points of rock overjutting the 
 dell, whence you obtain a striking sight of this inhabited and 
 well-windowed part of the building, rising sheer from the cliff, 
 and held to it as with rivets. For a new surprise, however, 
 you must return, repass the front and doorway, and descend on 
 the other or left flank of the house, where there is the massive 
 block of very ancient masonry to which the rest is an evident 
 addition. This block or tower rests also on the sandstone 
 rock springing up from the dell behind ; and it is part of the 
 established procedure of the visit that you should grope your 
 way through a dark excavation pointed out to you in the rock 
 itself, just beneath the masonry which it supports. Descending 
 a few steps, and stooping along this mine-like gallery, you 
 come to a hideous circular shaft, once a well, sunk deep down 
 through the rock, with an embrasure atop opening out danger- 
 ously on the clear chasm of the dell ; and thence, by similar 
 communications, you reach two chambers, also cut out of the 
 rock. One is a mere dark cavern, in which several men could 
 hide or sleep ; the other admits more light, and has the peculi- 
 arity that its sides all round, about ten or twelve feet in the 
 longest direction and four or five feet in the other, are scooped 
 out into a number of square holes or recesses, separated from 
 each other, vertically and horizontally, by partitions an inch or 
 two thick, much after the fashion of a bottle-rack for some 
 Troglodyte or Cyclops. When these caverns were made, and 
 for what purpose or in what freak, no mortal can tell. The 
 plain dark chamber is now called fantastically " Brace's Bed- 
 chamber;" and the one with the honey-combed or bottle-racked 
 sides is " Brace's Library," on the supposition that the square- 
 holed stone shelving must have served admirably for the nume- 
 rous books and parchments with which that scholarly hero may 
 have solaced himself in the hard time of his skulking and pro- 
 bationary fighting for the Scottish kingdom. But, though 
 legend will have it that these caves in the rock under Haw- 
 thornden House were actually the hiding-places of Scottish
 
 II A WTHORNDEN AT PRESENT. 
 
 patriots in the days of Bruce and of his son David II., archaeo- 
 logists push their origin much farther back, and imagine some 
 stronghold hereabouts of the old Pictish kings. Whether oi 
 Pictish antiquity, or of later, puzzles your powers of conjecture; 
 but it is with an increased respect for the whole mansion that 
 you emerge again in the open air, after having seen what 
 ghastly secrecies of some inscrutable past underlie its rocky 
 foundations. It is with this sense that, after observing what- 
 ever else is apparent to close inspection of the exterior, you 
 continue the walk which leads from it, on one side of the 
 romantic glen, in the direction of Roslin. Turning in this path 
 to look at the house now and again, at points where there is 
 an opening through the trees, you see it as artists most delight 
 to take it, a tall mass of gables and pinnacles shooting aloft 
 from its craggy socket in the ravine. So leaving it, you may 
 follow the path till it brings you down to a wooden bridge 
 crossing the Esk. This bridge has a gate on it, so constructed 
 that, if you pass through, you cannot re-open it from the other 
 side. If you do pass it, you are in the public pathway, two 
 miles of which will take you, still through the depths of the 
 glen, with the stream now on your left, to the Castle and 
 Chapel of Roslin. But, if you would rather keep the sensation 
 of Hawthornden unmixed, then, though it is unusual, there is 
 nothing to prevent you from stopping your walk at the bridge, 
 and retracing your steps so as to renew your sight of the house 
 in all the aspects in which you have already beheld it, only in 
 reversed order. A noble old sycamore, just in front of the 
 house, five hundred years old at least, may then arrest your 
 attention, as well as the clipped clumps of yew which you 
 noticed before. And so, regaining the road by the ascending 
 avenue, you have seen Hawthornden and will remember it for 
 ever. 
 
 Were there no special traditions of a historical kind about 
 Hawthornden House, were it simply the picturesque edifice we 
 have described, overhanging the beautiful glen of the Esk, part
 
 DRUM A/0 A'D OF HAWT//ORNDEN. 
 
 of it bringing back the seventeenth century by its look, and 
 part recalling a remoter and more savage Scottish eld, it would 
 be worth visiting, and would probably attract visitors. This, 
 however, is not the case. Hawthornden House has been for 
 three centuries in the possession of a family of Drummonds, a 
 branch of the wider Scottish race of that name, and it is inter- 
 esting as having been the residence of one man of this family 
 vv r ho took for himself a place in British Literature, and is known 
 pre-eminently as the Drummond of Hawthornden. He it was 
 indeed that built the more modern portion of the mansion as 
 we now see it, repairing or renewing the more ancient house 
 that stood on the same rock and fragments of which still 
 remain. Hawthornden, in short, is a kind of minor Abbots- 
 ford, much nearer Edinburgh, and much more antique than the 
 greater one; and it is this that makes it an object of curiosity, 
 and invests all its accessories with a precise human interest.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 DRUMMOND IN HIS FATHER'S LIFE-TIME. 
 1585—1610. 
 
 r ~PHE first Drummond of Hawthornden was John Drum- 
 mond, second son of Sir Robert Drummond of Carnock, 
 in Stirlingshire, the representative of a family of Drummonds 
 that had branched off from those more ancient Drummonds of 
 Stobhall in Perthshire whose chiefs had ranked in the Scottish 
 peerage since 147 1 as Lords Drummond of Stobhall. This 
 John Drummond was much about the Scottish court of King 
 James VI. ; he had acquired the Hawthornden property (com- 
 prising Hawthornden, Slipperfield, Whitfields, and Kingsfield) 
 from its previous possessors; and he had married Susannah 
 Fowler, sister of a Mr. William Fowler, who is styled Parson 
 or Rector of Hawick in some documents, but elsewhere merely 
 Burgess of Edinburgh, and is known in his actual life as a man 
 of means and court-connexions, with nothing of the parson 
 discernible about him. The eldest son of this first Laird of 
 Hawthornden and his wife Susannah Fowler was William 
 Drummond, the Poet. He was born at Hawthornden, Decem- 
 ber 13, 1585, in the nineteenth year of King James's reign in 
 Scotland, and seventeen years before his accession to the 
 English throne. That king, in fact, after his long and per- 
 plexed minority, was but assuming his real government of 
 Scotland, in the twentieth year of his age, when this subject 
 was born to him ; and it was not till four years afterwards that 
 he brought from Denmark the Princess Ann to be his Queen.
 
 8 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 In 1590 the Poet's father, then thirty-seven years of age, was 
 appointed gentleman-usher to the young king ; and about the 
 same time the Poet's uncle, William Fowler, became Private 
 Secretary to Queen Ann. From his infancy, therefore, the 
 Poet was within the radiance of Scottish Royalty, such as it 
 was. He had three brothers, younger than himself, James, 
 Alexander, and John, and three sisters, Ann, Jane, and Rebecca. 
 He was educated at the High School of Edinburgh, and 
 then at the recently-founded University of the same city. The 
 teaching-staff of the University then consisted of the Principal 
 and Professor of Divinity, Mr. Henry Charteris, the Professor 
 of Humanity, Mr. John Ray, and four Regents, or Professors 
 of Philosophy. Each of these regents had the special super- 
 intendence of his own class through the four years of varied 
 study which, with attendance on the Humanity Lectures 
 and the Divinity Lectures, constituted the complete college 
 curriculum. The Regent to whose class Drummond be- 
 longed was a Mr. James Knox; and in July 1605 Drummond 
 was one of twenty-four students who, after their due course of 
 four years with this gentleman, and their supplementary tuition 
 at the same time by Mr. John Ray and Principal Charteris, 
 took the usual degree of M.A. They were the eighteenth 
 batch of graduates sent forth by the University since its foun- 
 dation in 1582. Here are their names, as they are still to be 
 read, in their own handwriting, in the preserved Graduation- 
 Book :— 
 
 Thomas Bruce. Thomas Nicolson. 
 
 Guilielmus Somervall. Johannes Henrysone. 
 
 Guilielmus Drummond. Jacobus Fairme. 
 
 Alexander Skene. Joannes Cunynhame. 
 
 James Nisbitt. Jacobus Dundas. 
 
 Alexander Peirsoune. Jacobus Montethe. 
 
 Joannes Young. Thomas Nisbett. 
 
 Alexander Ambrosius. Thomas Henrysone. 
 
 Robertus Kinross. Jacobus Schaw. 
 
 Robertus Puisall. Jacobus Rollokus. 
 
 Jacobus Michelsone. Joannes Farquardus. 
 
 Joannes Bennett. Robertus Moore.
 
 sEtat. 1-25. IN HIS FATHER'S LIFE-TIME. 
 
 Two years before Drummond's graduation, King James had 
 been called from Edinburgh to London, to assume his long- 
 expected succession to Queen Elizabeth. It had been a sore 
 shock, not to Scottish national sentiment only, but also to more 
 substantial interests. James had done his best, indeed, to 
 console the Scots at his departure, or immediately afterwards, 
 by all sorts of promises of perpetual recollection of them in his 
 new sphere of duty, and by a lavish award of farewell honours 
 and privileges among corporations and individuals. There was 
 a new Charter to the City of Edinburgh, with special guarantees 
 in favour of the infant University ; there were peerages for 
 some select Scotsmen of high note; and there was a shower of 
 knighthoods among other Scots of distinction, including the 
 gentleman-usher Drummond, the Poet's father. 
 
 An insufficient compensation all this for what had been lost; 
 and more and more it was felt to be so. None of the com- 
 mercial bustle any longer, none of the picturesque jollity or 
 quaint ceremonial, that had gathered round resident Scottish 
 Royalty, slovenly as had been its tastes, and meagre as had 
 been its exchequer. No sight of Majesty now in the streets of 
 Edinburgh, or worshipping in any of the city-churches, or riding 
 out with retinue on any of the country highways ; no future 
 outlook of gentleman-usherships or other court-appointments, 
 except for such adventurous Scots as chose to follow their 
 emigrant Solomon into his richer southern kingdom, and hang 
 on by him there, like Richie Moniplies and his master in The 
 Fortunes of Nigel, announcing their names and antecedents, 
 and presenting their little " sifflications ! " Of these, indeed, 
 there was already a goodly number; and the number was to 
 increase, till the shoaling of hungry Scots Londonwards became 
 a bye-word in England, the sound of a Scottish voice in London 
 was detested, and the English wished that the successor of 
 their Elizabeth had come from Estremadura, or some yet 
 remoter part of the earth. But. save for the providential outlet 
 for Scottish energy thus afforded by the new connexion with
 
 io DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 England, Scotland had to acquiesce sullenly in what had 
 befallen her, and adjust her methods within herself to her new 
 conditions. The trial was perhaps hardest for Edinburgh and 
 its vicinity, and for such families as the Drummonds of 
 Hawthornden. 
 
 After all, the new conditions were not ruinous. Scotland, 
 from the Tweed to the Orkneys, did not find the presence of a 
 king within her bounds absolutely indispensable for the main 
 purposes of her small million of inhabitants ; Edinburgh still 
 remained the centre of purely Scottish affairs, with law-courts, 
 a Privy Council, and an occasional Parliament ; and, for a 
 young man of such Edinburgh training and such family- 
 connexions as Drummond's, there was the prospect, if he 
 qualified himself as a Scottish lawyer, of a considerable career 
 in the public business of his native country. This, and not a 
 migration to England, was the career for which his father had 
 destined him. Accordingly, after his graduation in Edinburgh 
 University, where the sole teaching then was in Arts and 
 Theology, it was decided that he should go abroad to study 
 Law. An incident of some consequence to the family at this 
 time (for the Scots of those days counted kin among themselves 
 with a peculiar relish, and the Drummonds thought their kin 
 among the best) was the elevation of their titular chief, James, 
 fourth Lord Drummond of Stobhall, to the Earldom of Perth. 
 After the accession of King James to the English throne, this 
 nobleman had gone on an embassy to Spain, in attendance on 
 the English High Admiral, the Earl of Nottingham ; and his 
 promotion to the Perth Earldom (March 4, 1605) was a reward 
 on his return. The honour was still a subject of congratulation 
 among all the Earl's kinsfolk, near or distant — i.e., among all 
 in Scotland who called themselves by the name of Drummond — 
 when the young Edinburgh graduate, whose interest in it was 
 that of very far-off cousinship indeed, traceable only in the 
 mists of an old Scottish genealogy, went abroad for instruction 
 in Law.
 
 /Etat. 1-25. IN HIS FATHER'S LIFE-TIME. n 
 
 He took London on his way. He was there, or in the 
 vicinity, it appears, for some considerable time in 1606, staying 
 probably with his uncle Fowler, who had retained his secretary- 
 ship to Queen Ann, and gone south in that capacity, and 
 employing himself, as a young stranger might be expected to 
 do, in going about and seeing the sights. Perhaps the earliest 
 letters of his now extant are six written in June, July, and 
 August, 1606, and addressed "to the Right Honourable the 
 
 Earl of ." The nobleman is not named further in the 
 
 preserved copies, but was evidently some Scottish Earl, with 
 whom young Drummond had the honour of an acquaintance, 
 and to whom news from London, and especially from the 
 Court, would be gratifying in his northern abode. 
 
 " Knowing the delight your Lordship was wont to take in 
 " the sports of Court, whether as beholder or actor," the young 
 correspondent begins, in his first letter, dated June 1, "I 
 " thought I should not importune your honour in sending you 
 " the challenge of the Errant Knights, proclaimed with sound of 
 " trumpet before the palace-gate of Greenwich." In other words, 
 a great court-pageant was in preparation at Greenwich, part of 
 which was to be a tournament in the Park, with other cere- 
 monial in revival of the ancient chivalry, and Drummond, who 
 had access, from his court connexions, to the whole display, 
 and might even be behind the scenes a little, thinks his northern 
 Lordship might like to have an exact copy of the challenge 
 issued by the four Champion Knights who were to lead off the 
 tournament part of the grand affair : viz., the Earls of Lennox, 
 Arundel, Pembroke, and Montgomery. These four Earls, it 
 seems, had challenged, at the palace-gate of Greenwich, " all 
 " honourable men of arms and knights-adventurers of hereditary 
 " note and exemplary nobleness" as follows — "Right Brave and 
 " Chivalrous, wheresoever through the world we four Knights- 
 " Errant, denominated of the Fortunate Island, servants of the 
 " Destinies, awaken your sleeping courages with Mavortial 
 "greetings: know ye that our Sovereign Lady and Mistress,
 
 12 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " Mother of the Fates and Empress of high achievements, 
 " revolving of late the adamantine leaves of her eternal volumes, 
 " and finding in them that the triumphal times were now at 
 " hand wherein the marvellous adventures of the Lucent Pillar 
 " should be revealed to the wonder of times and men (as 
 " Merlin, secretary to her most inward designs, did long since 
 " prophesy), hath therefore, — most deeply weighing with herself 
 " how necessary it is that sound Opinions should prepare the 
 " way to so unheard-of a Marvel, — been pleased to command 
 " us, her voluntary but ever most humble votaries, to publish 
 " and maintain by all the allowed ways of knightly arguing these 
 "four indisputable Propositions following: i. That in service 
 " of Ladies no Knight hath free will; 2. That it is Beauty 
 " maintaineth the world in valour ; 3. That no fair Lady was 
 "ever false; 4. That none can be perfectly wise but Lovers." 
 These propositions the four Earls-Champion were to maintain, 
 each his own proposition, at point of lance and sword in 
 the valley of Mirefleure (Greenwich Park), against all qualified 
 knights that should appear within forty days to dispute them, 
 and to take part in " the glorious issue of the thrice-famous 
 adventure of the Lucent Pillar," to be enacted in "three 
 several succeeding days of trial at tilt, tourney, and at barriers." 
 Such is the substance of Drummond's first letter; but he adds 
 that the King of Denmark, Christian IV., King James's brother- 
 in-law, was expected daily, and that the challenge seems to 
 have been given on his Danish Majesty's account, and to allow 
 
 him to show his prowess. In his next letter, dated June 28, 
 
 he reports that the challenge had been taken up by certain 
 noblemen in a document beginning " Most tonitruous, as- 
 " founding Chevaliers, re-know ye that we, of hereditary and 
 " fee-simple blood, and undegenerating valour to Doucel del 
 " Phoebus, Amadis de Gaul, Palmerin de Oliva, and Ascuper 
 " le Huge, rather by the bounds of your challenge than by the 
 " show of your meanings, have echoed in the vault of our under- 
 " standing the volley of your desires, and do allow you this for
 
 &tatl-2$. IN HIS FATHER'S LIFE-TIME. ! 3 
 
 The answer is that they are sorry any men in the 
 shape or apparel of valour should have undertaken a cause so 
 thoroughly given up by all rational creatures, and exploded by 
 all experience, as that of the defence of women against any crimes 
 whatever that might be alleged against them, and that they 
 tender back the flat contradictories of the four propositions, and 
 will maintain these manfully. The King, Drummond adds, was 
 
 in great glee over this answer, and much fun was expected. 
 
 Of the actual fun when it did come off, and of the precise 
 manner of the tourney, there are but rapid glimpses in the 
 subsequent letters. It appears from them, however, that the 
 pageant was deferred and the Court of Greenwich broken up in 
 consequence of the non-arrival of the King of Denmark ; that 
 his majesty did arrive at last in the Thames on the 16th of July ; 
 that King James then hastened from Oatlands to meet him ; 
 that there was a most cordial greeting between the two Kings 
 at Gravesend, and great joy on Queen Ann's part at Greenwich 
 on seeing her brother again ; that the Danish King struck 
 Drummond as a man of goodly person, middle stature, and 
 singularly like his sister ; that the two Kings went to London, 
 where there were days of wondrous rejoicings and revellings, 
 with trumpets, salvoes of cannon, street-processions and 
 masques, and where the King of Denmark mounted to the top 
 of St. Paul's and also visited Westminster Abbey. At length, 
 we are told, the court did return to Greenwich ; where, on the 
 5th of August, the sports that had been projected began, and 
 King Christian, mounted on a dapple grey, and clad in blue 
 armour spangled with gold, with a bunch of blue and white 
 feathers in his helm, acquitted himself in the tournament, 
 among the English Knights in their plain armour, " with 
 marvellous grace and great applause of the people." Finally, 
 on the 9th of August, the royal visitor took his departure, 
 barging down the river to his own ships at Gravesend, and 
 leaving Queen Ann at Greenwich crying.* 
 
 * The six letters are printed, rather out of their places, at pp. 231-233 of 
 the 171 1 Edition of Drummond's Works.
 
 14 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 Later in the same year the young Scot continued his journey 
 to France; and he was in France throughout 1607 and 1608, 
 alternating between Bourges and Paris, pursuing his law-studies 
 assiduously, but also amusing himself with observations of 
 foreign customs, and visits to all manner of places. One of his 
 letters, written from France at this time, has been preserved, 
 and is really interesting. It is dated "Paris, February 12, 
 1607," and is addressed "to his worthy friend, Sir George 
 Keith of Powburn." One supposes this Sir George Keith 
 to have been a fellow-student, or other young companion of 
 Drummond's, left in Scotland when Drummond went abroad 
 for his law-studies, and with whom it was natural for him to 
 correspond when there was the means of sending a letter home. 
 " When, out of curiosity, this last week " (so the letter begins) 
 " I had entered those large and spacious Galleries in which the 
 "Fair of St. Germains is kept, and had viewed the diverse 
 " merchandise and wares of the nations at that mart, above the 
 " rest I was much taken with the many portraits there to be 
 " seen. The devices, posies, ideas, shapes and draughts of the 
 '• artificers were various, nice, and pleasant. Scarce could the 
 " wandering thought light upon any story, fable, or gaiety, 
 " which was not here represented to the view." He then pro- 
 ceeds, at some length, and in a very careful and somewhat 
 ornate style, to give an account of the pictures in the galleries 
 that had struck him most. There was one of the Roman Em- 
 perors collectively, another of the Popes in the same fashion, 
 and another of the Kings of Europe; there were many fine 
 mythological subjects, including several Venuses; there was a 
 painting of Homer, " represented with closed eyes and a long 
 beard of the colour of the Night," and beside it one of Virgil, 
 "his head wreathed with bays, his face somewhat long, his 
 cheeks scarce with a small down ;" there were battle-pieces, 
 city-pieces, and whatnot; and there was one dainty "picture 
 of a Young Lady, whose hair drew near the colour of amber, but 
 with such a bright lustre that it was above gold or amber." He
 
 Mtat. 1-25. IN HIS FATHER'S LIFE-TIME. ^ 
 
 reserves to the last one picture of two figures which seems to 
 have been an anticipation of the idea of E Allegro and 77 Pen- 
 seroso. " The first, clothed in a sky-coloured mantle, bordered 
 " with some red, was laughing, and held out his finger, by way 
 " of demonstration, in scorn to another, in a sable mantle, who 
 " held his arms across, declined his head pitifully, and seemed 
 " to shed tears." This representation of the two moods of 
 Laughter and Melancholy, he says, had "drawn his thoughts 
 to more seriousness " than all the others in the galleries ; and 
 he ends with this comment on it : " Truly considering all our 
 " actions, except those which regard the service and adoration 
 " of God Almighty, they are either to be lamented or laughed 
 '■ at ; and Man is always a fool, except in misery, which is the 
 " whetstone of judgment." In the whole letter one discerns a 
 thoughtfulness, combined with an artistic sensitiveness, a cul- 
 tured dilettantism, and a fondness for rich and musical English 
 phraseology, which must have been very rare among young 
 Scots of that time.* 
 
 In 1609, with the benefits of about three years of travel and 
 foreign residence, Drummond was back in Scotland, having 
 probably again passed through London on his return. In 
 1610, for some reason, he paid another visit to London; after 
 which nothing remained, as it seemed, but that he should settle 
 himself in Edinburgh, be called in due form to the Scottish bar, 
 and begin the practice of Law in wig and gown, or whatever 
 professional apparel was then worn by Scottish lawyers. Sud- 
 denly, while he was about to do so, his father, Sir John Drum- 
 mond, died at the age of fifty-seven, and was buried in the 
 Abbey of Holyrood House ; and thus Drummond, at the age 
 of four and twenty, found himself Laird of Hawthornden, with 
 sufficiently ample means, and free to choose his own course of 
 life. 
 
 1 The letter is printed in the 171 1 edition of Drummond's Works 
 (pp. 1 39-141), but bears there the date "Paris, Feb. 12" only, without the 
 year. That is supplied by the scroll copy among the Hawthornden MSS. 
 as examined by Mr. David Laing {Arch. Scot., IV. 9S).
 
 1 6 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 During his absence abroad, it may be noted, another of the 
 Drummonds of the main or Perthshire line had been raised to 
 the Scottish peerage, in the person of James Drummond, uncle 
 of the Earl of Perth, created Lord Maderty, Jan. 31, 1609. A 
 closer incident in the family history, the date of which is not 
 so certain, but must have been near the same time, was the 
 marriage of Drummond's eldest sister, Ann, with a Mr. John 
 Scot of Knightspottie. This Mr. John Scot, afterwards better 
 known as " Scot of Scotstarvet," and very familiar to this day 
 by that designation to all who know anything of Scottish his- 
 tory, was almost exactly of Drummond's own age, or hardly a 
 year younger. He had somewhat preceded Drummond, how- 
 ever, in the race of life. Left an orphan in his third year 
 (1588) by the death of his father, and Laird of Knightspottie 
 since his seventh year (1592) by the death of his grandfather, 
 he had been educated at the University of St. Andrews, and 
 afterwards at a foreign University ; and, having been called to 
 the Scottish Bar, he had assumed, in 1608, when he was only 
 in his twenty-second year, the lucrative office of Director of 
 Chancery, which had been held by his grandfather, and which, 
 by a curious and rather circuitous legal arrangement, possible 
 in those days, that old worthy had managed to transmit to 
 him. The fact that Drummond of Hawthornden and Scot of 
 Knightspottie (afterwards Scot of Scotstarvet) were brothers-in- 
 law was to be of some interest in the lives of both. When 
 Drummond succeeded his father, it is also to be remembered, 
 all his unmarried sisters and brothers were alive, as well as the 
 eldest sister, by whose marriage this relationship was estab- 
 lished. Drummond's mother, the sister of Secretary Fowler, 
 was also still alive, in far from aged widowhood.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE YOUNG LAIRD OF HAWTHORNDEN : HIS TASTES AND 
 SURROUNDINGS: STATE OF LITERATURE IN SCOTLAND. 
 
 l6lO — 1613. 
 
 A \ THAT Drummond's course of life was likely to be when 
 he was free to choose for himself might have been 
 guessed by those that knew him. 
 
 From his boyhood his disposition had been meditative and 
 studious; in the University of Edinburgh he seems to have 
 owed much to the Humanity Professor, Mr. John Ray, of 
 whom he spoke afterwards as having been another Quintilian 
 to his pupils, whether he " read grave proses to them " or raised 
 "delight and wonder by a numbrous strain;" and, when he 
 left the University, it had been with an ingrained passion for 
 literature and music, and a turn for mathematics and specu- 
 lation superadded. The extension of his studies in the foreign 
 tongues abroad, and his glimpses of the London and Parisian 
 worlds, had but confirmed his bent. There exist, in his own 
 hand, exact lists of the books he had read during the five years 
 after he left the University, when he was nominally a student 
 of law. At the head of the list for 1606, and evidently read 
 before he set out from Scotland on his travels, is Knox's 
 History of the Reformation in Scotland; but, among some forty 
 other books read in the same year, not a few of them appar- 
 ently in London as he was passing through to the Continent, 
 are Sidney's Arcadia, Lyly's Euphues, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, 
 one or two pieces by Drayton, Dekker, and other living English 
 
 B
 
 Z S DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 poets and dramatists, and (most noteworthy of all) Shake- 
 speare's Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour Lost, Midsummer 
 Nighfs Dream, Lucrece, and Passionate Pi/grim. Naturally, 
 while he was abroad, in 1607-9, ^ ls readings had been more in 
 foreign books, especially French; but of what kind they were 
 may be guessed from the appearance in the lists for these years 
 of French translations from Tasso and Sannazaro, various odd 
 volumes of Aniadis de Gairie, several poems of Ronsard's, and 
 Du Bartas and Rabelais complete. In the last year, however, 
 and also in 16 10, marking his return home, and his new stay in 
 London for some time, English books become again inter- 
 mingled with the French and Italian: as, for example, the 
 works of Samuel Daniel, a comedy or two by Marston and 
 others, Sidney's Arcadia again, and Spenser's Faery Queene. 
 In all this there was something indicating a difference in Drum- 
 mond's tastes from those of most of his young fellow-country- 
 men. Others there may have been who had read as extensively 
 as he; but in the prevailing direction of his readings, in his 
 preference of pure and artistic literature to the ephemeral and 
 the controversial, and especially in his choice of modern books 
 of the luxurious and poetical order, one. sees a peculiarity. It 
 may be doubted whether in 1606, when Shakespeare was living, 
 retired from the London world, and with most of his work 
 done, at his home in Stratford-on-Avon, he could have been 
 told of any young Scotsman who had paid him the compliment 
 of reading three of his plays, and two of his smaller books of 
 poems, except precisely this William Drummond, a graduate of 
 Edinburgh University, who was in training to be a Scottish 
 lawyer. * 
 
 * Lists of the Books read by Drummond, year by year, from 1 606 to 
 1614 inclusively {eclat 21-29), are extant in his own hand, and have been 
 printed by Mr. David Laing in his "Account of the Hawthornden Manu- 
 scripts" [Archccot. Scotica IV. 73-76). They include more than 220 
 separate books, some of them large ones and in several volumes ; and 
 considerably more than half of these are entered as read before the end of 
 1610, the year of his father's death and of his own succession to the Haw- 
 thornden lairdship.
 
 ./■Hat. 2S-2S. BOOKS AND READINGS. 
 
 19 
 
 People who knew Drummond's tastes and tendencies cannot, 
 therefore, have been greatly surprised at what he did when, at 
 the age of four-and-twenty, he found himself the master of 
 sufficient inherited means, and free to arrange his future life to 
 his own liking. Abandoning at once all thoughts of the Law, 
 and of the public activity to which it led, "he retired," says his 
 earliest biographer, " to his own House at Hawthornden, a 
 " sweet and solitary seat, and very fit and proper for the Muses, 
 " and fell again to the studying the Greek and Latin authors." 
 
 This is substantially correct. We chance, indeed, to know 
 what books, and how many of each sort, young Drummond had 
 with him at Hawthornden in the first year of his bachelor 
 house-keeping and lairdship. He had 267 books in Latin, 
 including the Latin classics and miscellaneous modern Latin 
 books of philosophy and information; he had 35 Greek books; 
 he had 11 Hebrew books; and he had 61 Italian books 8 
 Spanish, 120 French, and 50 English. The proportions in the 
 different languages are instructive. There is no doubt that the 
 old biographer is right in representing Drummond's readings in 
 Hawthornden House as lying, to a great extent, among the 
 Greek and Latin authors. The French and Italian books, 
 however, must represent, and beyond the proportion of their 
 mere numbers, much favourite reading that was not of the 
 Latin and Greek sort; and, in the same sense, the 50 English 
 books are particularly interesting. These last included Sidney's 
 Arcadia (which had cost him 6s. English), Spenser's Faeiy 
 Queene (which had cost him the same) and some of Spenser's 
 Minor Poems, Drayton's Works (2^.), Daniel's Works (p\), 
 Fairfax's Tasso (5s.), one or two separate poems or plays oi 
 Greene, Marlowe, Chapman, and Drayton, King James's Basili- 
 con Doron, the Tragedies of William Alexander of Menstrie 
 (2s.), and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, Romeo and 
 Juliet (for which last he had paid 4^/.), and Midsummer Night's 
 Dream. One observes, also, among the English books, a 
 collection of choice extracts from forty-four English Poets,
 
 2o DRUMMOND OF HAWTHOKNDEN. 
 
 living and dead, Spenser and Shakespeare supplying far more 
 than any others, which had been published at London in 1600 
 by a bookseller named Allot, under the title of England's Par- 
 nassus, and is to this day an excellent, though rare, volume.* 
 
 Not for reading and acquiring alone, whether in Latin and 
 Greek, or in French, Italian, Spanish, and English, had 
 Drummond abjured the Law and public life, and become a 
 private Scottish gentleman. There was in his design also some 
 possibility of producing. Already, one knows not positively 
 from how far back, but presumably from the time of his 
 studentship in Edinburgh University, if not from his earlier 
 boyhood, he had been in the habit of writing verses. We have 
 his own information to this effect in one of his later sonnets, 
 where, looking back smilingly on those juvenile attempts, he 
 says : — 
 
 "In my first years, and prime yet not at height, 
 When sweet conceits my wits did entertain, 
 Ere Beauty's force I knew or false delight, 
 Or to what oar she did her captives chain, 
 Led by a sacred troop of Phcebus' train, 
 I first began to read, then love to write, 
 And so to praise a perfect red and white, 
 But, God wot, wist not what was in my brain." 
 
 It is a fair inference from those early letters of his which have 
 been already cited, and especially from the letter written from 
 Paris in February 1607, that his boyish attempts had not been 
 confined to verse, but that he had been in the habit also, when 
 at the University, of writing little prose essays of one kind or 
 
 * The inventory of Drummond's Library at Hawthornden in the year 
 161 1 [tctat 26) is extant in Drummond's own hand in eight separate lists, 
 entitled, " Table of my Italian Books, anno 161 1," " Table of my .Spanish 
 Books, anno 161 1," &c. ; and Mr. David Laing has printed entire the 
 Table of the English Books {Archceol Scot. IV. 77). The Latin Books, 
 which are the most numerous, are divided into groups — one large assort- 
 ment, of 103 separate books, consisting of Editions of the Latin Classics 
 and miscellaneous authors; and the remaining 164 being sub-divided into 
 Theology (31 books), Jurisprudence (24 books), Philosophy (54 books), and 
 Poetry (55 books). The lists are of much literary interest, There is proof 
 in Drummond's papers that * e knew Hebrew.
 
 sEUxt 25-28. EARLY LITERARY TASTES. 21 
 
 another. Probably even then the generalization of the old 
 biographer as to Drummond's ruling literary tendencies through 
 life was correct, when he says. " The delicacy of his wit ran 
 always on the pleasantness and usefulness of History, and on 
 
 the fame and softness of Poetry.'' Well, a confirmed versifier 
 
 already, and also fond of little exercises of descriptive and 
 historical prose, why should not the purpose of farther and 
 more systematic authorship both in Poetry and in History have 
 been the main motive of his retirement to Hawthornden ? 
 Believing that it was so, and that he looked forward, with 
 youthful ardour, to his possible success in both departments, it 
 is the fancy of the same old biographer that he might have met 
 any remonstrances from friends on his desertion of public life 
 for the Muses with these words of Ovid : — 
 
 '" Xon me verbosas leges ediscere ; non me 
 Ingrato vocem prostituisse foro. 
 Mortale est quod quceris opus : mihi fama perennis 
 Ouaeritur, in toto semper ut orbe canar." 
 
 This, however, seems much too strong for Drummond's real 
 ambition. I see no proof in him of any fervid desire ut in toto 
 orbe canereiur, but a much more modest state of self-appraise- 
 ment. It was enough, I believe, for a temperament like his, 
 and for the scheme of life he had formed, that he had his own 
 mansion in the glen of the Esk for a retreat, and that there, 
 with Edinburgh at hand for such relaxation of society as he 
 cared for, he could give himself up to books, ingenious inquiries, 
 his lute, walks amid moon-lit foliage, watchings of the stars 
 from his door-porch, writing now and then a prose essay, 
 a sonnet, or a madrigal, when the mood seized him, but not 
 much minding how far the rumour of such things should extend. 
 " Meis libris, meis oculis content 'us '," he used afterwards to say, 
 "apuero usque infra fortunam vivere didici; et, quantum possum 
 apud me kabitans, nihil extra me out sitspiro aut ambio : " 
 " Content with my books and the use of my eyes, I learnt even 
 from my boyhood to live beneath my fortune ; and, dwelling by
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 myself as much as I can, I neither sigh for nor seek aught that 
 is outside me." Seldom has a man in a few words more truly 
 hit off his own character; but the peculiarity is that the 
 description should be true of Drummond even at the early age 
 of four-and-twenty. 
 
 Little, indeed, in the way of active literary intention was 
 possible, in Drummond's circumstances, for one of his tempera- 
 ment. Literature in Scotland was then nearly at its lowest ebb. 
 The rich outburst of Scottish Poetry in Henryson, Dunbar, 
 Gavin Douglas, Sir David Lindsay, and other successors of the 
 older Barbour and James I., had ceased at the Reformation ; 
 the strong intellectual energy of the Scottish Reformation itself, 
 with Knox for its leader and preacher, and Buchanan for its 
 Latinist and scholar, was also a thing of the past; and, during 
 that whole intervening generation (i 580-1610) which had been 
 precisely the age of England's Elizabethan splendour, Scotland 
 had relapsed into chaos and sterility in comparison. The 
 causes of this relapse had been various. One cause had been 
 the incessant political confusions, the incessant strifes for the 
 Regency, during James's minority in Scotland; another perhaps 
 had been the nature of that Presbyterian system itself which 
 the Scottish Reformation had established, stricter by far as this 
 system was in its grasp of the popular habits than the contem- 
 porary Anglican or Prelatic system, and more repressive also 
 of individual efforts of mind, except in certain stiff authorised 
 directions. A third cause, however, had been that very con- 
 troversy between Presbyterianism and Prelacy which had 
 begun to agitate Scotland before James left it, though it did 
 not come to its height till James declared boldly for Prelacy 
 from his safer position on the English throne, and tried thence 
 to impose it by force on his Scottish subjects. This Kirk 
 controversy between Prelacy and Presbyterianism had, from 
 the very smallness and compactness of Scottish society, en- 
 grossed recent Scottish talent much more completely than the
 
 .■Jitat. 25-28. NAPIER OF MERCHISTON. 23 
 
 < orresponding Puritan controversy had engrossed recent talent 
 in England. While in England there had been a free and 
 varied literature of history, speculation, and poetry, not concern- 
 ing itself much with theological and ecclesiastical disputes, and 
 especially in London a vast activity in the popular Drama and 
 
 adjuncts, the scantier possibilities of authorship in Scotland 
 had been compelled mainly into the channel of the one national 
 controversy, or distributed grimly into skirmishing pro and con 
 along the opposed banks. " Are you for pure Presbyter}- and 
 the strict Genevan discipline, or are you for Bishops and 
 ceremonies?'' was the question forced upon all educated Scots, 
 as well as on the Scottish populace, and requiring from even- 
 body some kind of daily answer. This was not a state of things 
 favourable to the finer Muses ; and yet it was into this state of 
 things that Drummond had been born. 
 
 To every general description of this kind there are exceptions. 
 Let us qualify ours, therefore, by inquiring what remains of 
 intellectual activity, or symptoms of new literary enterprise, 
 there actually were in Scotland about that year, 1610, when 
 the bleakness seemed greatest, and when Drummond began 
 his musings in Hawthornden. 
 
 It is well, in such a case, to represent all as subject to 
 some one man, who can be spoken of, on general accounts, as 
 indubitably topmost. Nor is there any difficult}- in naming such 
 a man here. The most remarkable man, intellectually, all in 
 all, in Scotland at our present date, was John Napier, known 
 for seventeen years past as the author of a strange treatise on 
 the Apocalypse, but long wondered at also for his wizard-like 
 semi-necromantic habits and his devotion to mathematics and 
 the physical sciences, and now. in his veteran age, living 
 reclusely in his fine old castle of Merchiston, close to Edinburgh, 
 and perfecting there his invention of Logarithms. " Let not 
 your Majesty doubt,"' Napier had written in 1593, in a 
 Dedicatory Epistle to King James, prefixed to his Treatise on 
 the Apocalypse, but consisting of a very bold lecture to the
 
 24 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 young king himself on his duty of setting poor Scotland 
 thoroughly to rights, and, for that purpose, beginning with a 
 reform of his own house, family, and court, and of his own 
 heart first of all, " let not your Majesty doubt but that there are 
 ' : within your realm, as well as in other countries, godly and 
 " good ingines, versed and exercised in all manner of honest 
 " science and godly discipline, who by your Majesty's instigation 
 " might yield forth works and fruits worthy of memory, which 
 " otherwise, lacking some mighty Maecenas to encourage them, 
 " may perchance be buried with eternal silence." Seventeen 
 years having elapsed since these words were written, and James 
 having carried his Maecenas-ship into England, Napier of 
 Merchiston himself, at the age of sixty, and with his logarithms 
 and other wondrous devices for calculation about to burst from 
 his brain, stood now more distinctly than ever at the top of 
 those " good ingines " of his country for whom he had pleaded, 
 the only Scot of his time of absolutely European mark, and the 
 man entitled again to remonstrate patriotically for the rest. 
 Leaving him, then, in this category by himself, and taking no 
 account of certain Scots naturalized in France or other parts 
 of the Continent — such as Bellenden, Boyd, Barclay, and 
 Dempster- — let us inquire what other Scots there were in 1610 
 worth noting for our present purposes. They may be dis- 
 tributed roughly, I think, into two classes : — ■ 
 
 I. Miscellaneous Scholars, Latinists, and Writers in 
 the customary Scottish. — A good many of these had Edin- 
 burgh for their headquarters, and were as lesser lights twinkling 
 round Napier. Such, we shall say, was John Spotswood, titular 
 Archbishop of Glasgow for some time, but now, as an extra- 
 ordinary Lord of Session, Head of the Court of High Com- 
 mission, &c, frequently in Edinburgh on political business, and 
 superintending there that gradual conversion of Scotland to 
 complete Prelacy which James desired, and which was to 
 elevate himself to still higher powers in the realm. Such also 
 were two of Drummond's academic teachers already mentioned,
 
 yEtat. 25-28. SCOTO-LATINISTS. 25 
 
 Principal Henry Charteris of the University, and John Ray, 
 who had been Humanity Professor there, but had exchanged 
 that post in 1606 for the Rectorship of the High School. 
 Such perhaps were one or two of the city clergy, whether of 
 Prelatic or of Presbyterian leanings, the successors of the re- 
 cently deceased Ponts and Rollocks. Such, finally, were a few 
 laymen prominently connected with the Scottish Bar and Bench, 
 or occasionally resident in Edinburgh on business : — e.g., Gib- 
 son of Durie, chief clerk of the Court of Session, and with a 
 judgeship in prospect; Thomas Hope, a lawyer in large prac- 
 tice, and very popular for his intrepid defence of Presbyterian 
 ministers against the Government ; David Hume of Godscroft, 
 a veteran writer both in prose and in verse ; and even Drum- 
 mond's own young brother-in-law, John Scot of Knightspottie, 
 Director of Chancery, and a rising lawyer, but with tastes in 
 literature, and especially in Latin verse, which he had brought 
 from college. Less known to Drummond, but known to him 
 by reputation more or less, must have been some contemporary 
 scholars and writers scattered over the rest of Scotland, and 
 chiefly at or near the other University seats of St. Andrews, 
 Glasgow, and Aberdeen. St. Andrews, indeed, had lost her two 
 greatest luminaries by the recent banishment of Andrew Mel- 
 ville and his nephew James Melville; but, though all Scotland 
 missed the actual presence of these two distinguished men, and 
 especially of the elder of them (the ablest and most strenuous 
 leader of Scottish Presbyterianism since the death of Knox), 
 their past writings remained a valuable property for their ad- 
 mirers, there were hopes of their return, and there were still 
 communications from them both, — from Andrew in his prison 
 in the Tower of London, and from James on his parole at 
 Newcastle. Among Glasgow literati there were one or two 
 that had been heard of; and in or near Aberdeen were Duncan 
 Liddel the physician, Patrick Forbes the divine, David Wed- 
 derburn the Latinist, and the geographer Gordon of Straloch. 
 Altogether, reckoning up such stray scholars in various parts
 
 26 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEM. 
 
 of the country, Scotland in 1610 did not think herself so very de- 
 ficient in talent for thinking and writing; and the men themselves 
 would have been rather surprised to learn that the time they 
 were adorning would be reputed afterwards as a singularly 
 barren one in Scottish Literature, and that their existence 
 would be barely remembered. If we wrong them now, they 
 are partly themselves to blame. There was really excellent 
 Latinity among them ; for the old tradition of Scottish Latinity, 
 illustrated by Buchanan, had been kept up, and not a 
 few Scots wrote Latin verses which may be still admired 
 for their elegance when they are turned up in old books : 
 but who now is at leisure for turning up old books of 
 Latin epigrams, epistles, elegies, and epithalamia by seven- 
 teenth-century scholars? Then, when they wrote in English, 
 not only did the Kirk business and other merely Scottish 
 concerns lie heavy on their faculties, interfering with that 
 inventiveness, that lightsomeness, that universal inquisitive- 
 ness, that free play of all the pulses, out of which alone can 
 come writings of permanent vitality ; but they persevered, for 
 the most part, in a form of English which the literary Fates 
 were dooming as Provincialism. Time had been when the 
 North-English dialect was the language of a nation, and the fit 
 vehicle for all the indigenous literature of that nation ; nay, the 
 old Scottish Poetry and Prose had not differed so much from 
 the contemporary Poetry and Prose of England proper but 
 that a wide History of English Literature could treat them as 
 parallel and interrelated. It was even perhaps still within the 
 power of a Scot of competent genius to prolong this co-equality 
 and parallelism by such great creations in the Northern English 
 as would have compelled South-English attention and study ; 
 but, as no such thing had happened, and as the Elizabethan 
 ferment in England had supplied, in overwhelming overpropor- 
 tion, all that was noblest and richest in the recent literature of 
 the total island, the speech of that literature was clearly para- 
 mount, and might look forward to the united inheritance.
 
 .Etat. 25-28. SCOTO-ENGLISH WRITERS. 27 
 
 Unless, therefore, the plodding Scottish writers had been pre- 
 pared to put suddenly more of steam, more of the universal 
 and tremendous, more of Heaven and Hell, into their plodding, 
 their perseverance in their Scottish variety of English simply 
 limited their chances to one-sixth of the English-reading con- 
 stituency of Great Britain. Only a Burns or two produced at 
 once, or a great theatre in the Canongate, with plays pouring 
 into it from a score of dare-devil dramatists lodging round 
 about in garrets and taverns, could possibly have saved them. 
 
 II. Practitioners of the New English. — For a long 
 while before James's accession to the English throne, or even 
 before the likelihood of his accession, there had been so much 
 communication between England and Scotland, and such fre- 
 quent residence of Scots in England, that a partial conforma- 
 tion of the book-language of some Scottish writers to the 
 standard English had been observable. Knox's History of the 
 Reformation in Scotland, with all its raciness, exhibits some- 
 thing of this tendency, and might have been read by English- 
 men with no other sense of oddity than might arise from 
 occasional words and idioms, and certain Scottish peculiarities 
 of spelling. The tendency had naturally increased after James's 
 accession to the English throne had become a calculable pro- 
 bability, not only from the effects of that probability itself in 
 directing Scottish thought towards England, but also on ac- 
 count of the unusually powerful influence which England was 
 at this time able to exert in return. Whether James had been 
 to succeed to the English throne or not, Scotland could not 
 have remained impervious to ideas and forms from that won- 
 drous neighbour literature which had sprung up in England 
 since 1580, when Spenser first appeared as a poet, and heralded 
 the great era of the Elizabethans. Books from London must 
 have crossed the Tweed — heavy books of English Puritan 
 theology for the most part, but with occasionally a copy of 
 The Shepherd's Calendar, The Faery Queene, Sidney's Areadia, 
 Lyly's Euphucs, a Play of Shakespeare, or some other messen-
 
 28 DKUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 ger of light and sweetness, slipped into the parcel ; and these, 
 coming into fit hands, and imparting a pleasure unknown 
 before, must have been teachers also of a new phraseology and 
 a new verbal melody. The majority of Scottish scholars and 
 writers, as we have said, kept sturdily to their customary vernac- 
 ular, or to that eclectic form of the vernacular which had been 
 in use for book-purposes, but still was recognisedly Scottish ; 
 but here and there the taste for Sidney's English and Spenser's 
 began to prevail, and to lead to imitations. At the Scottish 
 Court of James, as was natural on all grounds, the influence 
 appeared soonest. King James's own Essays of a Prentise in 
 the Divine Art of Poesie, published at Edinburgh in 1585, when 
 the royal author was nineteen years old, are sonnets and other 
 metrical attempts in a kind of artificial English, though with a 
 decided Scottish tang in the vocabulary and the grammar. He 
 was probably encouraged in such efforts by a Thomas Hudson,, 
 and a Robert Hudson,- — two English musicians about his 
 Court who themselves wrote sonnets. There was already 
 about his Court, however, a native Scot who had somehow 
 attained the same art, and practised it on a more considerable 
 scale. This was no other than that William Fowler, Drum- 
 mond's maternal uncle, who had become Private Secretary to 
 Queen Ann. Among the Commendatory Poems prefixed to 
 the King's Prentise Essays is a sonnet by Fowler, as well as 
 one by Thomas Hudson. In 1587 Fowler completed, in 
 manuscript, a translation of Petrarch's " Triumphs of Love," 
 which the King honoured with a commendatory sonnet in 
 return ; and from that time forward Fowler, amid his duties at 
 Holyrood, continued to write sonnets and other poems, varying 
 the business with the making of anagrams, — for which ingenuity 
 he seems to have had a passion. His Poetry remains to this 
 day mostly in manuscript ; but, from specimens of it that have 
 been printed, it appears distinctly that in him, even more than 
 in James, there was a studied approximation to the Southern 
 English. P^uphuism in prose-writing had certainly made its
 
 Mtat 25-28. SCOrO-ENGLISII WRITERS. 
 
 29 
 
 way into Scotland long before James left it, and may be traced 
 in some of the younger Scottish courtiers, such as Archibald 
 Napier, the eldest son of Napier of the logarithms, and after- 
 wards the first Lord Napier. And so, others and others being 
 added gradually to the little group of courtly practitioners of 
 the new English with the pen (for it was easier so than with 
 the tongue), and the sonnets and other verses which the King 
 continued to write, and to publish for circulation in England 
 as well as in Scotland, showing less and less of Scotticism as 
 the time for his removal to England drew near, we reach that 
 important epoch. 
 
 When the King removed to England in 1603, he took a good 
 many Scots with him and others followed him ; and he and 
 they together acquired the English style more perfectly among 
 the English themselves, and a nearer acquaintance with its 
 living Elizabethan models. This too reacted on Scotland. 
 Coming and going periodically or occasionally between London 
 and Edinburgh, the Scottish courtiers of the King acted as 
 shuttles of connexion between the two countries, carrying to 
 Scotland books, reports of books, English notions of literary 
 taste, and doubtless, also, English criticisms on Scottish 
 authorship. Fowler, as we have seen, was one of those that 
 went to England ; and he remained there for some time, still, 
 apparently, in his official capacity to Queen Ann. Other and 
 younger Scots, however, of similar literary tendencies, and 
 better powers of execution, are heard of as at the English Court 
 from 1603 onwards. A Sir Robert Aytoun, born in 1570, who 
 was in England with the King as gentleman of the bedchamber, 
 and who seems to have succeeded Fowler in the private secre- 
 taryship to Queen Ann, attained to considerable celebrity after- 
 wards among the London poets and wits, and was probably 
 known as a writer of English verses thus early. Another 
 Scottish gentleman of the bedchamber was Sir Robert Kerr, 
 afterwards Earl of Ancram, who had been born in ^78, and 
 was also a versifier. A Sir David Murray of Gorthy, attached
 
 3° 
 
 DKUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 to the household of the young Prince Henry, practised versifi- 
 cation with some repute ; and a volume of his, entitled The 
 Tragical Death of Sophonisba, but containing other pieces, 
 was published at London in i6ir, the author styling himself 
 on the title-page " David Murray, Scoto-Briton." The Scoto- 
 Briton in chief, however, the Scot of far the widest and highest 
 reputation as a writer of English Poetry, in and about the year 
 1610, was William Alexander of Menstrie. 
 
 Born in 1580, and therefore five years older than Drummond, 
 Alexander had been educated partly at Glasgow University, 
 and, after his return from foreign travels, had published at 
 Edinburgh, in [603, a Tragedy of Darius. He appears already 
 to have been well known to the King, and regarded by him as 
 a promising young poet; and, though he did not. accompany the 
 King to England, he immediately followed him. In 1604 he 
 published in London A Tarxnesis to Prince Henry, and also 
 Aurora, containing the First Fancies of the Author's youth, the 
 last being a collection of sonnets and other poems addressed 
 to the Countess of Argyle. From that time, as one of the 
 household of Prince Henry, he was much with the King, 
 though visiting Scotland more frequently and regularly than 
 most of the Scottish Courtiers. In the same year he re- 
 published in London his Tragedy of Darius, with another 
 Tragedy of Croesus; in 1605 he published The Alexandrian 
 Tragedy; and in 1607 he added a fourth Tragedy of Julius 
 Caesar, re-issuing the other three with it under the general title 
 of The Monarchic Tragedies. All these Tragedies are in rhyme, 
 and in a stately, though diffuse and weak kind of English; and, 
 in virtue of them and of his other poems, Alexander was 
 indubitably, in 16 10, the Scotsman most celebrated, if not the 
 only Scotsman then recognised by English writers, as a master 
 of the art of classic English verse. He was to live on for many 
 years, writing more, but also involved more and more with 
 public affairs, and was to be known in successive stages of his 
 career as Sir William Alexander, Knight and Baronet, Viscount
 
 .■/■:/.!/. 25-28. ALEXANDER OF MENSTRIE. 31 
 
 Stirling, and Karl of Stirling. For the present, however, he 
 was simply William Alexander of Menstrie. The old house of 
 Menstrie, where he was born, still exists, in a finely-preserved 
 state, in Clackmannanshire, not far from Alloa and not far 
 from Stirling. 
 
 ■&■ 
 
 It was to this second band of Scottish writers, cultivating the 
 pure new English, that Drummond attached himself. His 
 constitution must have inclined him to it from the first ; the 
 example and precept of his Uncle Fowler may have helped 
 originally;"" and his visits to London in 1606 and subsequent 
 years, with his purchases and readings of so many choice 
 Elizabethan books, must have permanently decided him. As 
 has been already noticed, his earliest preserved letters exhibit a 
 nearly perfect emancipation from the Scottish vernacular, and 
 from the factitious refinement of the same which had been 
 adopted by many Scottish authors for book purposes, and a 
 liking for select, ornate, and even somewhat Euphuistic English. 
 His earliest verses, some of them written while James was still 
 at Holyrood, so that his uncle Fowler, or his father, Sir John 
 Drummond, might have brought them under the notice of that 
 monarch, had doubtless also been in the strictest English style. 
 Not by any means that the young Master of Hawthornden had 
 abjured his nationality or ceased to feel a patriotic interest in 
 all Scottish concerns. He was a Scot, we shall find, to the 
 last, with a keen and even studious fondness for Scottish 
 History and Traditions, including the traditions of old Scottish 
 
 * Fowler, whose Edinburgh residence seems to have been Dean House, 
 a large mansion with orchards and gardens, on the outskirts of the City, 
 died in 1614, when Drummond was eight-and-twenty years of age; so that 
 the influence of the uncle over the nephew may have been considerable. 
 In a Latin set of verses addressed to Drummond in after life by his old 
 Humanity Professor, John Ray, much stress is laid on the fact that his 
 mother was a Fowler; and in one or two of Fowler's Sonnets I have 
 detected a likeness to Drummond's way of thinking, and even phrases of 
 which Drummond was fond. After Fowler's death, his papers came into 
 Drummond's possession, and were carefully lo;ked after by him. — See Mr. 
 Laing's contributions, Arch. Scot. IV. 70, 71, 230-233, and 236.
 
 32 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Literature ; and I have no doubt that he could talk, and did 
 talk, the Scottish vernacular to the last, in ordinary intercourse, 
 as racily as his neighbours. He had simply perceived, with 
 others, that English must now be the vehicle for those pro- 
 ductions of Scottish intellect that were to become a component 
 part of the Literature of Great Britain. He retained, deliber- 
 ately or inadvertently, I may add, some slight traces of the 
 Scot even in his English writing, at least in its private or 
 manuscript state, as in using the form ane occasionally for the 
 indefinite article, or preferring occasionally the Scottish form of 
 the past participle of a verb, or sometimes putting will for shall. 
 With this exception, English had become as natural to his pen 
 as to that of any Londoner; and I do not see that he was 
 conscious of any difficulty, or any peculiar purism, in the matter. 
 Perhaps, indeed, by the time at which we are now arrived, that 
 bilingual habit, of English for select public purposes of speech 
 and writing, and the Vernacular for more slipshod and homely 
 purposes, had pretty fully formed itself among the younger 
 educated Scots, which we see transmitted into the subsequent 
 century and the next. 
 
 So far as Drummond intended authorship, in English, in 
 Latin, or in any other language, he had all the external means 
 and appliances about him when he entered on his young laird- 
 ship in Hawthornden. What a romantic spot to live in and 
 call one's own! What pleasant rooms, what views of dell and 
 grove from the windows, what liberty of sauntering out-of-doors, 
 or sitting musingly on a craggy seat, secure from all visits or 
 interruptions, except those that one had pre-arranged ! What a 
 nice library in the chief room within, with a choice of books in 
 all languages, and every book known and familiar to the fingers! 
 Then, in cabinets beside the books, portfolios of engravings, 
 printed music, various bundles of family-papers, all the notes of 
 one's College-Lectures, all one's own little miscellany of attempts 
 in verse and prose, and the commonplace-books in which one 
 had copied out, for four years past, fine passages from the poets
 
 JEtat. 25-28. AUTHORSHIP IN PRIVATE. 33 
 
 and moralists, with miscellaneous anecdotes, apophthegms, 
 memoranda, and references! In this last respect, it may be 
 noted, Drummond had been exemplary from his boyhood, 
 making extracts of whatever he particularly liked in books he 
 borrowed, and keeping scroll copies even of his own more 
 important letters. . 
 
 To avoid writing Poetry in such circumstances was the real 
 difficulty; and Drummond did not avoid it. There is no doubt 
 that, amid his readings, his music, his walks, his visits to friends, 
 their visits to him, and his correspondence with them, during 
 the first three years of his lairdship (1610-1613), he wrote and 
 carefully re-wrote and polished many Sonnets and other little 
 Poems. It is possible even that he may have had some of 
 these printed on loose leaves for his own satisfaction or for 
 private circulation; which, we know, was one of his habits in 
 later life. Thus, or in manuscript, he did, in a modest way, 
 let it be known among friends that he wrote verses. ' In one of 
 his letters, addressed to some lady, not dated in the scroll-copy, 
 but apparently written about this time, he says : " Here you 
 " have the Poems, the first fruits your beauty and many, many 
 " good parts did bring forth in me. Though they be not much 
 " worth, yet I hope ye will, for your own dear self s sake, deign 
 " them some favour, for whom only they were done, and whom 
 " only I wish should see them. Keep them, that hereafter, 
 " when Time, that changeth everything, shall make wither those 
 " fair roses of your youth, among the other toys of your cabinet 
 " they may serve for a memorial of what once was, being so 
 " much better than little pictures as they are like to be more 
 " lasting, and in them are the excellent virtues of your rare 
 " mind limned, though, I must confess, as painters do Angels 
 " and the Celestial World, which represent them no ways as 
 " they are, but in mortal shapes and shadows." Who the lady 
 was is unknown. Not improbably she was a young lady of 
 whom we shall hear presently, and of whose influence on 
 Drummond's life we shall have to take express account. Pos- 
 
 c
 
 34 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 sibly, however, it was some other fair one, only casually com- 
 plimented by Drummond in the way described in the letter, 
 and between whom and him there was to be no closer relation. 
 If so, one wonders whether she did keep the poems in her 
 cabinet, and live X.o look at them in her old age, when Drum- 
 mond was famous and dead, remembering when they had been 
 young together. 
 
 But, though Drummond wrote poems habitually during the 
 three years in question, and added them to the little stock of 
 more juvenile pieces he had kept, he was in no hurry to publish. 
 The reason seems to have been partly his knowledge of the 
 low condition into which Literature had fallen in Scotland, and 
 his doubt whether, with so much of the highest contemporary 
 excellence of all kinds in England, any moderate talent could 
 bear up against the disadvantage. This feeling, at all events, 
 appears strikingly in a letter of his, the subject of which as- 
 signs it most probably to the year 1613. A certain surviving 
 cousin or relative of George Buchanan, designated only by his 
 initials M. W. K., had consulted Drummond about the repub- 
 lication of Buchanan's Works, or a portion of them; and this 
 was Drummond's reply: — 
 
 " Simonides, the Lyric Poet, was wont to say that to a perfect 
 civil happiness, and to attain glory and fame, a man should 
 have for his native soil some renowned city or place. Alas ! to 
 what, then, can we obscure men attain? What can we perform 
 in this remote part of the earth, extra soils lunceque zias? If 
 he who was born at Blane [Buchanan, born 1506, on the banks 
 of the Blane in Stirlingshire] had had that happiness to have 
 lived at the Tiber, he had not been inferior in fame to many 
 who flourished in Augustus' time; and, if many of those famous 
 Romans and Grecians had changed their countries with our 
 cold heaths and mountains, this world had never heard tell of 
 them more than of the Antipodes. A more learned man than 
 your Cousin was this country has not brought forth; and now 
 we see, by the incommodities of this country, his excellent 
 works, especially his Sphczra, appear not to the world. Many 
 noble pieces of our countrymen are drowned in oblivion per
 
 ^Eiat. 25-28. AUTHORSHIP IX PRIVATE. 35 
 
 o-KOTiav Scotorum. He is a Phoenix: amidst such great con- 
 tempt of learning, and detraction of others' fame, who can 
 escape oblivion? Envy ever followeth virtue; but more fre- 
 quently amongst us than in the most renowned kingdoms. For 
 the learned and virtuous amongst them are so many that she 
 knoweth not how to direct her darts. The small number of 
 them here gives her a constant mark to aim at. I would 
 advise you to essay the publishing of his Works by the Ger- 
 mans: who always render virtue her due, and hold dear even 
 deserving strangers." 
 
 And so Drummond lived on, in his retirement at Haw- 
 thornden, to the twenty-eighth year of his age without having 
 himself published anything to disturb, for better or worse, that 
 thick a-Korui. Scotorum, that settled Scottish gloom.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 TEARS ON THE DEATH OF MCELIADES: FIRST MEETING WITH SIR 
 WILLIAM ALEXANDER: MISS CUNNINGHAM OF BARNS, AND THE 
 STORY OF DRUMMOND'S FIRST LOVE: PUBLICATION OF HIS 
 POEMS: KING JAMES IN SCOTLAND: FORTH FEASTING. 
 
 1613 — 1617. 
 
 r ~PHE event which first brought Drummond publicly forth as 
 a poet was the death, on the 6th of November, 161 2, of 
 King James's eldest son, Henry, Prince of Wales, heir-apparent 
 to the throne. Oh ! what a calamity that seemed at the time. 
 He was but eighteen years of age; but he had given such good 
 promise in all ways that he was the young hope of the two 
 nations, already contrasted by many with his father to that 
 father's great disadvantage, and preferred by almost all to his 
 younger and more sombre brother Charles, who now came in 
 his place as the future sovereign of the British realms. Long 
 afterwards, at least, when Charles was actually King, it was 
 remembered that there had been this prophetic preference, and 
 people often said, " O, if Prince Henry had lived!" Un- 
 doubtedly, at the time, the sensation was deep and universal. 
 Each of the two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge sent 
 out a volume of funereal verses; all the poets, great and 
 small, sent out elegies or sonnets of grief; all the preachers 
 preached sermons; there were biographic sketches, pamphlets, 
 obituary memorials of all kinds : if the total literature in prose 
 and verse caused by Prince Henry's death were collected now,
 
 JEtat. 28-32. TEARS FOR MOZLIADES. 37 
 
 one would be astonished at the array of volumes, many of them 
 printed on black-edged paper, and the pages of some presenting 
 the peculiar ghastly appearance of white letters and white 
 mourning devices printed on a black ground. To enumerate 
 the English poets who wrote on the occasion would be to run 
 over the names of nearly all the English poets of that time now 
 known to our lists, and to resuscitate a great many more from 
 the obscurities of Orcus. 
 
 The lamentation extended over Scotland. Among the book- 
 sellers and printers of Edinburgh, for example, the chief was 
 Andrew Hart, or, as he spelt himself, Andro Hart, having his 
 shop on the north side of the High Street, opposite the Cross.* 
 From this shop there issued at least three little volumes to the 
 memory of the dead Prince. The earliest (for some copies 
 bear the date of 16 12, and it must, therefore, have been pub- 
 lished immediately after the news of the Prince's death reached 
 Scotland) was An Elegie on the Death of Prince Henrie, in four 
 leaves, by William Alexander of Menstrie. It is to be inferred 
 that this poet, who had been for some years a gentleman of the 
 Prince's chamber, either chanced to be in Scotland at the time, 
 or considered it proper that there should be an Edinburgh 
 publication of his grief. Next, with the date 16 13, was a com- 
 pilation of six leaves, entitled Mausoleum, or the choicest Flowers 
 of the Epitaphs written on the Death of the tiever-too-much-to-be- 
 lamented Prince Henrie, and consisting of reprinted Epitaphs 
 by the English Poets, Chapman, Wither, Rowley, and Holland, 
 together with one by an Irish or Scoto-Irish Walter Quin, a 
 musician in King James's household, and one by Drummond. 
 Thirdly, also dated 16 13, was a finished elegy, wholly by Drum- 
 mond, in six leaves, printed within black borders, and entitled 
 
 The identical place, I believe, was afterwards the shop of the famous 
 Archibald Constable through the greatest time of his publishing career 
 (1795-1823). Here the Edinburgh Reviezu was commercially hatched in 
 1802, after it had been planned by Sydney Smith and others in Jeffrey's 
 residence in Buccleuch Place; and here w^ere the great dealings in Scott's 
 Poems and Novels between him and Constable.
 
 ?S DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 Tearcs on the Death of Moeliades. This, in fact, is to be 
 reckoned as Drummond's first publication. 
 
 The Elegy is in nearly 200 lines of rhymed verse, of the 
 kind called Decasyllabics or Heroics. The form is that of a 
 Pastoral; and we are told in a note that "the name which in 
 these verses is given Prince Henry is that which he himself, 
 in the challenges of his martial sports and mascards, was wont 
 to use: Mceliades, Prince of the Isles; which, in anagram, 
 maketh Miles a Deo." The versification is really fine, and is 
 much more varied than might be expected from the general 
 measure. Especially there is a very artistic paragraphing, or 
 division into musical parts, helped by the closing of four of the 
 interior paragraphs with this repeated couplet, which also 
 closes the whole elegy: — 
 
 " Moeliades, sweet courtly nymphs, deplore 
 From Thule to Hydaspes' pearly shore." 
 
 Altogether, in reading the elegy, one is led to fix on Milton's 
 Lycidas as the poem of subsequent celebrity most resembling 
 it, even while so greatly superior to it; and one receives 
 also an impression that Milton must have known it be- 
 fore he wrote Lycidas. Not only in the structure, and in 
 certain particular lines and phrases, is this suggested ; but, 
 there is something of the same sustained pastoralism, the same 
 poetical tact, the same skill in throwing historical facts into an 
 ideal air. Thus : — 
 
 WHAT PRINCE HENRY MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 
 
 " Mceliades, O that by Isters streams, 
 Amongst shrill-sounding trumpets, naming gleams 
 Of warm encrimsoned swords, and cannons' roar, 
 Balls thick as rain poured by the Caspian shore, 
 Amongst crushed lances, ringing helms and shields, 
 Dismembered bodies ravishing the fields 
 In Turkish blood made red like Mars's star, 
 Thou ended hadst thy life and Christian war ; 
 Or, as brave Bourbon, thou hadst made' old Rome, 
 Queen of the world, thy triumph's place and tomb !
 
 /Etat. 28-32. TEARS FOR MCELIADES. 39 
 
 So Heaven's fair face, to the unborn which reads, 
 
 A book had been of thine illustrious deeds; 
 
 So to their nephews aged sires had told 
 
 The high exploits performed by thee of old — 
 
 Towns razed, and raised victorious, vanquished bands, 
 
 Fierce tyrants flying foiled, killed by thy hands ; 
 
 And in dear arras virgins fair had wrought 
 
 The bays and trophies to thy country brought ; 
 
 While some new Homer, imping pens to fame, 
 
 Deaf Nilus' dwellers had made hear thy name. 
 
 That thou didst not attain those honours' spheres, 
 
 It was not want of worth, O no ! but years. 
 
 A youth more brave pale Troy with trembling walls 
 
 Did never see, nor she whose name appals 
 
 Both Titans' golden bowers, for bloody fights 
 
 Mustering on Mars's field such Mars-like knights. 
 
 The heavens had brought thee to the highest height 
 
 Of art and courage, showing all their might 
 
 When they thee framed. Ay me ! that what is brave 
 
 On earth they as their own so soon should crave ! 
 
 Mceliades, sweet courtly nymphs, deplore 
 
 From Thule to Hydaspes' pearly shore." 
 
 AN INVITATION TO GENERAL MOURNING. 
 
 " Chaste Maids which haunt fair Aganippe's well, 
 And you in Tempe's sacred shade who dwell, 
 Let fall your harps, cease tunes of joy to sing; 
 Dishevelled make all Parnassus ring 
 With anthems sad : thy music, Phoebus, turn 
 In doleful plaints, whilst Joy itself doth mourn. 
 Dead is thy darling, who decored thy bays, 
 Who oft was wont to cherish thy sweet lays, 
 And to a trumpet raise thine amorous style, 
 That floating Delos envy might this Isle. 
 You Acidalian archers, break your bows, 
 Your brandons quench, with tears blot beauty's snows, 
 And bid your weeping mother yet again 
 A second Adon's death, nay Mars's plain. 
 His eyes once were your darts ; nay, even his name, 
 Wherever heard, did every heart inflame. 
 Tagus did court his love with golden streams, 
 Rhine with his towns, fair Seine with all she claims ; 
 But ah ! poor lovers, Death did them betray, 
 And, not suspected, made their hopes his prey. 
 Tagus bewails his loss with golden streams, 
 Rhine with his towns, fair Seine with all she claims. 
 Mceliades, sweet courtly Nymphs, deplore 
 From Thule to Hydaspes' pearly shore.'"
 
 4° 
 
 DRVMMOND OF HAWTHORN DEN. 
 
 Perhaps Drummond's elegy on Prince Henry's death, slight 
 as it is, was the most graceful and most intrinsically poetical of 
 all the tributes evoked by the occasion in Great Britain. It is 
 far finer, at all events, than Alexander of Menstrie's, in which 
 that poet seems hardly to have done his best, and of which this 
 is a specimen : — 
 
 " How can my heart but burst, while as my thoughts would trace 
 The great Prince Henry's gallant parts and not-affected grace ? 
 Ah ! that I chanced so long (O worldly pleasure frail \) 
 To be a witness of the worth which I but live to wail ! 
 How oft have I beheld (a world admiring it) 
 His martial sports even men amaze, his words bewitch their wit ; 
 Whose worth did in all minds just admiration breed. 
 When but a child, more than a man (ah ! too soon ripe indeed), 
 Still temperate, active, wise, as born to do great things, 
 He really shew what he was, a quint-essence of kings, 
 With stately looks, yet mild ; a majesty humane 
 Both love and reverence bred at once ; enticed, yet did restrain. 
 What acting anywhere, he still did grace his part, 
 A courtly gallant with the King, a stately Prince apart ; 
 When both together were, O how all hearts were won 
 A sire so loving to behold, so dutiful a son ! 
 
 In competition with such verses, though by a poet of estab- 
 lished reputation, Drummond's elegy won on the popular taste; 
 and Andro Hart had to print a second edition of it in the 
 same year, and a third in 1614. But, though so much success 
 as this attended Drummond's first publication, there is an in- 
 terval of more than three years between it and his next. The 
 records enable us to fill up this gap of three years (16 13-16 16) 
 with two incidents of importance. 
 
 The first is the beginning of Drummond's friendship with his 
 rival for the moment in the Prince Henry subject, Alexander 
 of Menstrie. Although Drummond's acquaintance among the 
 Scottish families of his time was large, and there is evidence 
 that he already knew two of the small group of Scots at the 
 English Court who had pretensions to literature — Sir David 
 Murray of Gorthy and Sir Robert Kerr of Ancram — Alexander
 
 sEtat. 2$-32. MEETING WITH ALEXANDER. 41 
 
 and he had not had an opportunity of meeting. The opportu- 
 nity came, however, in 16 14. Alexander had meantime passed 
 into the service of the new heir-apparent, Prince Charles, as 
 gentleman-usher, had received the honour of knighthood, and 
 had been appointed to the post of Master of Requests. With 
 these new dignities, he and Lady Alexander were on one of 
 their visits to Scotland when Drummond, on an excursion from 
 Hawthornden, chanced to pass their house of Menstrie. He 
 describes the result in a letter to some unknown friend. " As 
 " to my long stay in these parts," he says, " ye shall impute it 
 " [rather] to so sociable a company, from whom I am even loth 
 " to depart, than to a wilful neglect of promised coming to you. 
 " Fortune this last day was so favourable as by plain blindness 
 " to acquaint me with that most excellent spirit and rarest gem 
 " of our North, S. W. A. [Sir William Alexander] ; for, coming 
 " near his house, I had almost been a Christian father to one 
 " of his children. He accepted me so kindly, and made me so 
 " good an entertainment (which, whatsomever, with him I could 
 " not have thought but good), that I cannot well show. Tables 
 " removed, after Homer's fashion well satiate, he honoured me 
 " so much as to show me his books and papers. This much 
 " I will say, and perchance not without reason dare say : he 
 " hath done more in one day than Tasso did all his life and 
 " Bartas in his two weeks, though both one and the other be 
 " most praiseworthy. I esteemed of him, before I was acquaint 
 " with him, because of his works ; but I protest henceforth I 
 " will esteem of his works because of his own good, courteous, 
 " meek disposition. He entreated me to have made longer 
 " stay ; and, believe me, I was as sorry to depart as a new- 
 " enamoured lover would be from his mistress." 
 
 For the full understanding of this letter it is only necessary 
 to explain that the " papers" of Alexander's which he was so 
 kind as to show to Drummond, and to which Drummond refers 
 enigmatically in such terms of praise, must have been the manu- 
 scripts or proof-sheets of a poem which Alexander had long
 
 42 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 been engaged on and intended to be his greatest work, and 
 which, when actually published that same year by Andro 
 Hart of Edinburgh, bore the title of DoonCs-Day, or the Great 
 Day of the Lord's Judgment. It is a very long performance, 
 in eight-line rhyming stanzas, and divided into twelve books, 
 called the " The First Hour," " The Second Hour," &c. Per- 
 haps it is Alexander's greatest work, though he himself allowed 
 it in his dedication to be of "too melancholic a nature" for 
 young minds ; but I venture to say that, from the date of its 
 publication till now, it has been read through by no mortal, 
 except Sir William himself and three or four readers for the 
 press in divers printing-offices. What does that matter ? Talk 
 of the first meeting of Goethe and Schiller, or of this other 
 modern poet with that other modern poet ! Have we moderns 
 alone the deliciousness of such first meetings ? Could not two 
 people meet for the first time before the eighteenth century ? 
 Why, here, two hundred and sixty years ago, in the House of 
 Menstrie, near Alloa in Clackmannanshire, which any one may 
 see to this day, there was a model first meeting of two poets, 
 with a pleasant dinner between them to begin with, and, after 
 the cloth was removed, an infinity of literary chat, and as much 
 inspection as you like of papers and proof-sheets ! The elder 
 of the two, Alexander, was thirty-four or thirty-five years of age; 
 the younger, Drummond, was about twenty-eight. Alexander, 
 though rather verbose in his printed remains for our modern 
 tastes, may have been a most agreeable man personally, and 
 full of interesting talk. At all events, he was " the rarest gem 
 of our North" for young Drummond, and Drummond looked 
 up to him admiringly, and prophesied that his Doom's-Day 
 would beat all Tasso, or at least the Divine Weeks and Works 
 of Bartas. 
 
 It is pleasant to add that there was no hypocrisy in all this. 
 There was a real friendship between Drummond and Alexander 
 from this time forward. They continued to take interest in 
 each other's doings; and they corresponded regularly. Thus,
 
 Mtat. 28-32. MISS CUNNINGHAM Of BARNS. 43 
 
 not to anticipate too much at present, there was an immediate 
 exchange of poetic compliments between them, Drummond 
 furnishing Alexander with a commendatory sonnet to be pre- 
 fixed to his forthcoming Doom 's-Day, and Alexander furnishing 
 a similar sonnet for the next edition of Drummond's Mxliadcs. 
 Also, besides a letter from Drummond to Alexander, written 
 immediately after their meeting, and showing, in very res- 
 pectful phraseology, how much he valued the new acquaint- 
 ance, there are extant two of Alexander's to Drummond, sent 
 from England within the next two years. In the first, dated 
 London, April 12, 1615, and signed "your Loving Brother," 
 Alexander speaks of certain criticisms he had taken the liberty 
 of making on pieces which Drummond had submitted to his 
 judgment; and in the second, dated Newmarket, Feb. 4, 1616, 
 he tells of an interesting conversation he has just had with the 
 King on a point of prosody, and encloses a copy of a Sonnet 
 just composed by his Majesty, with copies of two of his own 
 thereby occasioned. History is such a crush and jumble that 
 we are obliged to forget such things; and, though Alexander's 
 two letters are before me, with the temptation of the Royal 
 sonnet in one of them, and the exact point of prosody about 
 which the King and Alexander conversed at Newmarket, it is 
 not worth while to quote them. What is chiefly of interest for 
 us is that from 1614 onwards Alexander and Drummond were 
 fast friends, calling each other, in pastoral fashion, Alexis and 
 Damon.* 
 
 Friendship is great, but Love is greater; and it must have 
 been about the time of the formation of Drummond's friendship 
 
 * Drummond's letter to some unnamed friend, describing his first meeting 
 with Alexander, and his first preserved letter to Alexander himself after 
 their meeting, are among those printed by Mr. David Laing from the Haw- 
 thornden MSS. {Arch. Scot. IV. 83, 84); the two Letters referred to from 
 Alexander to Drummond are in the 171 1 Edition of Drummond's Works 
 (pp. 149, 150). — There remains, I should say, some little doubt as to the 
 exact date of the first meeting of the two poets. Drummond's letter about 
 their first meeting is not dated ; from various circumstances, one would have
 
 44 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 with Sir William Alexander that he was in the midst of an affair 
 of far deeper consequence in his biography, though the recol- 
 lection of the details of it is more hazy. The substance is 
 given but curtly in the Memoir of Drummond prefixed to the 
 collected edition of his works in 171 1, when it would have been 
 comparatively easy for the biographer, whether Bishop Sage or 
 Thomas Ruddiman, if either of them had taken the trouble, to 
 recover all the particulars. " Notwithstanding his close retire- 
 " ment and serious application to his studies," says the Memoir, 
 u Love stole in upon him, and did entirely captivate his heart; 
 " for he was on a sudden highly enamoured of a fine, beautiful 
 " young Lady, daughter to Cunningham of Barns, an ancient 
 " and honourable family. He met with suitable returns of 
 "chaste love from her, and fully gained her affections; but, 
 " when the day for the marriage was appointed, and all things 
 " ready for the solemnization of it, she took a fever, and was 
 " suddenly snatched away by it, to his great grief and sorrow." 
 To this we may add that Barns, the seat of that family of Cun- 
 ninghams to which the young lady belonged, is near Crail in Fife- 
 shire, on the side of the Firth of Forth opposite to that on which 
 Edinburgh and Hawthornden stand; that the direct distance of 
 Barns from Hawthornden aslant the Firth is thirty miles or 
 more; that Drummond had first seen the young lady on some 
 visit of his to Fifeshire, not at Barns itself, but on the banks of 
 the Ore Water, somewhat nearer Edinburgh; that the wooing, 
 its difficulties, and the betrothal, may have spread over a year 
 or two, during a portion of which time the young lady seems to 
 have resided in Edinburgh or elsewhere on Drummond's own 
 side of the Firth; and that the terrible blow of her death must 
 have occurred in or near 161 5. 
 
 supposed it earlier than 1614 by at least a year or two; and in Drummond's 
 Mceliades, published in 1613, there is an allusion to Alexander under the 
 name of Alexis, not necessarily implying personal acquaintance, but rather 
 suggesting it. The reason for fixing on 1614 is that in Drummond's letter 
 about the meeting he calls Alexander distinctly Sir W. A., and Alexander, 
 if I may trust the usual authorities, had not that promotion tdl 1614. 

 
 /Etat. 28-32. POEMS: THEIR LOVE-STORY. 45 
 
 So much for the prosaic particulars of time and place, as 
 they have been preserved more uncertainly than might be 
 wished. For the rest, Drummond himself, through a large 
 portion of his writings, is the historian of his love-suit and of 
 the effects of the bereavement upon his mind and life. For, 
 though the old memoir is right in saying that "the grief for 
 the death of his mistress " was unusually profound, and left in 
 him a settled melancholy, it is demonstrably wrong in the 
 statement that the immediate effect was to drive him abroad 
 for eight long years of foreign peregrinations. He did go 
 abroad again, but not now, nor for a good while to come. On 
 the contrary, he seems to have shut himself up more closely 
 than ever in Hawthornden, brooding on his sorrow, and telling 
 it over and over to himself in verse, with a resolution to tell 
 it also in that form to the world. In 16 16, at all events, there 
 appeared his second publication, entitled, Poems: Amorous, 
 Punerall, Divine, Pastoral!: in Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madri- 
 gals: By W. D., Author of the Teares on the Death of Mas Hades. 
 This, like the former, was published by Andro Hart. It was 
 in such demand that a " second impression " was called for the 
 same year, in which the title was simplified into Poems: By 
 William Drummond, ofHazathome-Denne.* 
 
 This second Book of Drummond's may be called a Memorial 
 of his Love and his Sorrow. For, though a portion of the con- 
 
 * Only one copy of the First Edition is known to exist now (Lowndes's 
 Bibl. by Bohn). In the Maitland Club Edition of Drummond's Poetical 
 Works the reprint is from the Second Impression. The old memoir, be- 
 sides being wrong in the particular statement mentioned in the text, seems 
 altogether to misdate Drummond's love-affair and the death of his betrothed ; 
 for it does not bring in that incident until it has mentioned writings of 
 Drummond's which did not appear till 1623, thus suggesting, though not 
 positively asserting, that the love-affair came after that date. As usual, 
 subsequent memoirs have lazily followed the old one ; so that, in all sketches 
 of Drummond's life known to me, you are at and past the year 1623 before 
 you hear a word of Drummond's love and of poor Miss Cunningham of 
 Barns. Any ordinary reading of Drummond's own poetry would have 
 shown that this was a post-dating by at least seven years, and that Drum- 
 mond was known to the world in the character of a bereaved lover, cele- 
 brating his mistress, and lamenting her death, in 1616.
 
 4 6 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 tents consists of a kind of Appendix of miscellaneous Madrigals, 
 Epigrams, Sextains, and Sonnets, which may have been written at 
 various times from his boyhood, some of them of a witty turn, one 
 or two rather worse than witty, but almost all exhibiting Drum- 
 mond's sweetness and clear softness of language, the real matter 
 is found in what are distinguished as the " Poems " by special 
 title, occupying the first three-fourths of the volume, and divided 
 into two " Parts." On reading these two Parts consecutively, 
 one finds that "The First Part" is a history of Drummond's 
 love, with a celebration of the beauties and graces of his mis- 
 tress while she was yet alive, and that "The Second Part" 
 (though a reprint of Maliades is included in it) comes as a fell 
 sequel, commemorating his desolation and sorrow. 
 
 For a little history of love and its painful deliciousness there 
 is nothing sweeter than the Poems of the First Part. Ranging 
 among them as a whole, in any order, the reader has a version 
 of the old, old story, good for any time, and requiring for 
 scenery only woods, groves, a stream, a seashore, and a pair of 
 lovers. Should he want to chronologize them, however, so as 
 to see more precisely the story of the loves of the young Laird 
 of Hawthornden and the beautiful Miss Cunningham of Barns, 
 there is no difficulty : — First we see Drummond heart-whole, a 
 reader and versifier about Love from his boyhood, but, as he 
 says, in awful ignorance of the truth. He is happy in his lot 
 and in Hawthornden. 
 
 " Dear wood, and you, sweet solitary place, 
 Where from the vulgar I estranged live, 
 Contented more with what your shades me give 
 Than if I had what Thetis doth embrace, 
 What snaky eye, grown jealous of my peace, 
 Now from your silent horrors would me drive, 
 When Sun, progressing in his glorious race 
 Beyond the Twins, doth near our pole arrive ? 
 What sweet delight a quiet life affords, 
 And what it is to be of bondage free, 
 Far from the madding worldlings' hoarse discords, 
 Sweet flowery place, I first did learn of thee. 
 Ah ! if I were mine own, your dear resorts 
 1 would not change for princes' stately courts." 

 
 . Etat. 28- \i. STOK V OF HIS FIRST LOl 'A'. 
 
 47 
 
 But by this time he is not his own. A fair volume, the volume 
 of his fate, has been set before his eyes, convincing him of the 
 absurdity of all his rhymings of Love hitherto, and teaching him 
 the real mystery. 
 
 " That learned Grecian, who did so excel 
 In knowledge passing sense that he is named 
 Of all the after worlds Divine, doth tell 
 That at the time when first our souls are framed, 
 Ere in these mansions blind they come to dwell, 
 They live bright rays of that eternal light, 
 And others see, know, love, in Heaven's great height, 
 Not soiled with aught to reason doth rebel. 
 Most true it is ; for straight at the first sight 
 My mind me told that in some other place 
 It elsewhere saw the idea of that face 
 And loved a love of heavenly pure delight. 
 No wonder now I feel so fair a flame, 
 Sith I her loved ere on this Earth she came." 
 
 In another sonnet he tells that the spot of this first blessed 
 vision was by the Ore in Fifeshire. He enumerates, in a 
 splendid list, all the famous rivers of the world, and concludes 
 that not all of them together 
 
 " Have ever had so rare a cause of praise 
 As Ora, where this northern Phoenix stays." 
 
 There is much about her exquisite beauty. Thus : — 
 
 " Vaunt not, fair Heavens, of your two glorious lights, 
 Which, though most bright, yet see not when they shine, 
 And shining cannot show their beams divine 
 Both in one place, but part by days and nights ; 
 Earth, vaunt not of those treasures ye enshrine, 
 Held only dear because hid from our sights, 
 Your pure and burnished gold, your diamonds fine, 
 Snow-passing ivory that the eye delights ; 
 Nor, Seas, of those dear wares are in you found ; 
 Vaunt not rich pearl, red coral, which do stir 
 A fond desire in fools to plunge your ground. 
 Those all more fair are to be had in her : 
 Pearl, ivory, coral, diamond, suns, gold, 
 Teeth, neck, lips, heart, eyes, hair, are to behold."
 
 48 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Again : — 
 
 " All other beauties, howsoe'er they shine 
 In hairs more bright than is the golden ore, 
 Or cheeks more fair than fairest eglantine, 
 Or hands like hers that comes the sun before, 
 Matched with that heavenly hue and shape divine, 
 With those dear stars that my weak thoughts adore, 
 Look but like shadows ; or, if they be more, 
 It is in that that they are like to thine. 
 "Who sees those eyes, their force and doth not prove, 
 Who gazeth on the dimple of that chin, 
 And finds not Venus' son entrenched therein, 
 Or hath not sense or knows not how to love. 
 To see thee had Narcissus had the grace, 
 He sure had died with wondering on thy face." 
 
 Of the effects upon him of this new sense of feminine beauty, 
 the tumult and wild longing it awoke within him, there is a 
 semi-mystical allegory in an interpolated little poem. On a 
 summer-day, in a wood surrounding a part of the flowery banks 
 and sweet meanderings of the Ora, he falls asleep and has a 
 dream. Out of a myrtle-bush there seem to burst on his 
 sight three nymphs, the representatives of beauty at its freest, 
 but one the paragon. They run across the verdure, and plunge 
 into the stream, which half veils them. He is riveted by the 
 contemplation, and would be riveted for ever, nothing doubt- 
 ing, when lo ! a whirring of wheels, and the vision of a golden 
 chariot, hooded with scarlet, in which sat a lady of august and 
 awe-compelling mien. Straight to the banks of the stream the 
 chariot is driven, and then away again, the three beauties 
 caught up into it lightly, and lost to the view. Whirled away 
 whither? Ah ! to the Tower of Maiden Modesty, standing high 
 on a rock of shining crystal, ample, gorgeous, open to all the 
 heaven, nothing concealed, its arches of sparkling topaz, its 
 walls all one window, but the passage to it barred by two 
 flaming hills, a narrow bridge and gate the sole entrance, and 
 these defended by a moat flooded with the inky tears of 
 lovers. The meaning of all which it is not difficult to dis- 
 cern. He was deliriously in love ; but O ! should the loved
 
 /Etat. 28-32. STORY OF HIS FIRST LOVE. 49 
 
 one ever be his ? There were difficulties, it seems, difficulties 
 of various kinds, but chiefly in the young lady herself. Some- 
 times, indeed, she is near and gracious, and there seems hope. 
 Thus : — 
 
 " O sacred blush, impurpling cheeks' pure skies 
 With crimson wings which spread thee like the morn ! 
 O bashful look, sent from those shining eyes, 
 Which, though cast down on earth, couldst heaven adorn ! 
 
 tongue, in which most luscious nectar lies, 
 That can at once both bless and make forlorn ! 
 Dear coral lip, which beauty beautifies, 
 
 That trembling stood ere that her words were born ; 
 And you her words ! words ! no, but golden chains ! " 
 
 Again, once when she stood in a garden, fingering flowers : — 
 
 " The winds and trees amazed 
 With silence on her gazed ; 
 The flowers did smile, like those upon her face ; 
 And, as their aspen stalks those fingers band, 
 That she might read my case, 
 A hyacinth I wished me in her hand." 
 
 Once he sees her in a boat on the Forth : — 
 
 " Slide soft, fair Forth, and make a crystal plain ; 
 Cut your white locks, and on your foamy face 
 Let not a wrinkle be, when you embrace 
 The boat that earth's perfections doth contain." 
 
 At other times all is doubtful : — 
 * 
 
 " I joy, though oft my waking eyes spend tears ; 
 
 1 never want delight, even when I groan, 
 Best companied when I am most alone ; 
 
 A heaven of hopes I have midst hells of fears." 
 
 Once the case is dreadful : — 
 
 " The Hyperborean hills, Ceraunus' snow, 
 Or Arimaspus cruel, first thee bred ; 
 The Caspian tigers with their milk thee fed, 
 And Fauns did human blood on thee bestow ; 
 Fierce Orithya's lover in thy bed 
 Thee lulled asleep, where he enraged doth blow ; 
 Thou did'st not drink the floods which here do flow, 
 
 D
 
 5 o DRUM MO ND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 But tears, or those by icy Tanais' head. 
 
 Sith thou disdains my love, neglects my grief, 
 
 Laughs at my groans, and still affects my death, 
 
 Of thee, nor heaven, I'll seek no more relief, 
 
 Nor longer entertain this loathsome breath, 
 
 But yield unto my star, that thou may'st prove 
 What loss thou hadst in losing such a love." 
 
 From this depth there is again a rebound, and all is ecstasy 
 and gladness : — 
 
 " Phoebus, arise, 
 And paint the sable skies 
 With azure, white and red ; 
 Rouse Memnon's mother from her Tithon's bed, 
 That she thy cariere may with roses spread ; 
 The nightingales thy coming eachwhere sing; 
 Make an eternal spring 
 
 Give life to this dark world which lieth dead; 
 Spread forth thy golden hair 
 In larger locks than thou wast wont before, 
 And, emperor-like, decore 
 With diadem of pearl thy temples fair ; 
 Chase hence the ugly night, 
 
 Which serves but to make dear thy glorious light. 
 This is that happy morn, 
 That day, long wished day, 
 Of all my life so dark 
 (If cruel stars have not my ruin sworn, 
 And fates not hope betray) 
 Which, only white, deserves 
 A diamond for ever it should mark ; 
 This is the morn should bring into this grove 
 My love, to hear and recompense my love." 
 
 Absence is one great torture; and the closing pieces of " The 
 First Part " are the plaints of some one long period of absence, 
 she by the banks of the Ora again, and he left at Hawthornden. 
 He counts the nights that have passed since the parting; he 
 looks at the deserted window that had shrined the dear image; 
 he converses mournfully with a tress of her hair. Finally, this 
 is the message which he sends across the Firth: — 
 
 " Tritons, which bounding dive 
 Through Neptune's liquid plain,
 
 . Stat. 28-32. STOR Y OF HIS FIRST 1 1 'F. 5 1 
 
 When as ye shall arrive 
 
 With tilting tides where silver Ora plays, 
 
 And to your King his watery tribute pays, 
 
 Tell how I dying live, 
 
 And burn in midst of all the coldest main.'' 
 
 Suddenly the black curtain falls, and we are in a world of woe. 
 An interval has to be supposed, that dismal, unthinkable inter- 
 val of the illness, the death, the burial somewhere, the numb, 
 dumb, senseless anguish. That is past when " The Second 
 Part "opens; the fountains of words are again unlocked; and 
 it is to such strains as these that we listen: — 
 
 " Those eyes, those sparkling sapphires of delight, 
 Which thousand thousand hearts did set on fire, 
 Which made that eye of heaven that brings the light 
 Oft jealous stay amazed them to admire ; 
 That living snow, those crimson roses bright, 
 Those pearls, those rubies, which did breed desire, 
 Those locks of gold, that purple fair of Tyre, 
 Are wrapt, ay me ! up in eternal night. 
 What hast thou more to vaunt of, wretched world, 
 Sith she who cursed thee made blest is gone ? 
 Thine ever-burning lamps, rounds ever whorled, 
 Can unto thee not model such a one : 
 
 For if they would such beauty bring on earth 
 The)' should be forced again to give her birth." 
 
 il As in a dusky and tempestuous night 
 A star is wont to spread her locks of gold, 
 And, while her pleasant rays abroad are rolled, 
 Some spiteful cloud doth rob us of her sight, 
 Fair soul, in this black age so shined thou bright, 
 And made all eyes with wonder thee behold, 
 Till ugly Death, depriving us of light, 
 In his grim, misty arms thee did enfold." 
 
 " Sad Damon, being come 
 To that forever lamentable tomb, 
 Which those eternal powers that all control 
 Unto his living soul 
 A melancholy prison had prescrived, 
 Of hue, of heat, of motion quite deprived, 
 In arms weak, trembling, cold, 
 A marble he, the marble did enfold."
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 " This world is made a hell, 
 Deprived of all that in it did excel. 
 O Pan, Pan, winter is fallen in our May ; 
 Turned is in night our day." 
 
 " Sweet soul, which in the April of thy years 
 So to enrich the heaven mad'st poor this round, 
 And now, with golden rays of glory crowned, 
 Most blest abid'st above the sphere of spheres, 
 If heavenly laws, alas! have not thee bound 
 From looking to this globe that all upbears, 
 If ruth and pity there above be found, 
 O deign to lend a look unto these tears. 
 Do not disdain, dear ghost, this sacrifice ; 
 And, though I raise not pillars to thy praise, 
 Mine offerings take. Let this for me suffice : 
 My heart a living pyramid I raise ; 
 
 And, whilst kings' tombs with laurels flourish green, 
 Thine shall with myrtles and these flowers be seen." 
 
 " I have nought left to wish : my hopes are dead ; 
 And all with her beneath a marble laid." 
 
 Before the actual close of this series of melancholy ditties, there 
 is a poem intended to suggest the beginning, at least, of a slow 
 recovery of reason and spirit out of the depths of his misery. 
 A celestial figure appears to him in a dream, remonstrates with 
 him on his persistence in such unmanly and useless grieving, 
 tells him of the beatified condition of the beloved, and 
 calls upon him to fix his regards on all the unseen entities of 
 that great world which now contains her, and to pursue his 
 duties in the world of his present pilgrimage in the spirit of 
 one chastened and dedicated to the service of the Highest. 
 In consistency with this, one observes, after the whole series of 
 the Love Poems proper, though included in the same Second 
 Part which contains those of his despair, a little group separ- 
 ately entitled " Urania, or Spiritual Poems," and consisting of 
 Sonnets and other pieces in a strain of devout religiousness, 
 and one of them a Hymn of Prayer. With all this, however, 
 the impression of the previous poems of agony and broken- 
 heartedness remains the final one; so that, construing the latest
 
 jEtat. 28-32. KING JAMES IN SCO TI AND. 53 
 
 contents of the volume of 16 16 into an image of the authors 
 mental state in that year, we have to fancy him wandering 
 about Hawthornden woods, or alternating between Hawthorn- 
 den and Edinburgh, haggard and disconsolate, an object of 
 pity to all who knew of his recent calamity. By way of his- 
 torical coincidence, it may be noted that it was the year of 
 Shakespeare's death at Stratford- on- A von. 
 
 There may have been an intention by Drummond of a 
 foreign journey at this time to divert his thoughts from things 
 too near ; but, if so, it was either not carried into effect, or the 
 absence can have been but for a few months. For not only 
 was he in Scotland through a great part of 161 6, as we have 
 had evidence ; but he was certainly in Scotland in the early 
 part of 1617, and then, despite his melancholy, in the midst of a 
 bustle which agitated tire whole country, or at least the whole 
 of the Lowlands. » 
 
 After an absence of fourteen years King James had resolved 
 to revisit his native land. The effects of the announcement all 
 over Scotland may be imagined. Not only was all the official- 
 ism, all the magistracy, of poor old Scotland stirred ; but there 
 was a commotion among the poets, fiddlers, orators, jewellers, 
 portrait-painters, scene-decorators, tailors, mercers, drapers, and 
 all artists whatsoever. All got their implements ready, that 
 they might do their very best. At last the great event came to 
 pass. On the 13th of May, 161 7, James crossed the border at 
 Berwick; on the 16th he entered Edinburgh; and he remained 
 in Scotland till about the end of July, making a progress which 
 included Linlithgow, Stirling, Dunfermline, Falkland, Perth, 
 Cupar, St. Andrews, Dundee, Montrose, Paisley, Glasgow, and 
 Dumfries. Of course, Edinburgh had most of him ; and here 
 he held a Parliament in person, where much was done openly, 
 besides what was done privately, towards the accomplishment of 
 one of the objects of his visit — the confirmation and extension 
 of the Episcopal system of Church-government in Scotland, and
 
 54 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 the introduction of Anglican ceremonies of worship. Round 
 about these graver matters, and intertwined with them, one may 
 guess the amount of pageanting, banqueting, and speechifying. 
 The literary memorials of the occasion, in the shape of the 
 speeches and addresses of welcome at the different towns, and 
 the Latin, Greek, and other poems that were furbished up by 
 local scholars and wits, exist in an elaborately edited folio volume, 
 called Ta twv Movo-wv EtcroSia; The Muses Welcome to the High 
 and Mighty &-r., &>e., published at Edinburgh in the following 
 
 year.- Perhaps the drollest portion of the contents is an 
 
 account of a formal Disputation for his Majesty's entertainment 
 by the Professors of the University of Edinburgh. Actually, 
 he had all of them out to Stirling Castle for the purpose on the 
 19th of July, where they had to fight before him in Latin for a 
 whole evening, in the established academic style, like game- 
 cocks in gowns, on certain selected questions for debate. Oc- 
 casionally he struck in himself; and at the end, after supper, 
 when they were brought in to be thanked, he complimented 
 them before his courtiers thus : " Methinks these gentlemen, 
 " by their very names, have been destined for the part which 
 " they have performed to-day. Adam was the first father of all, 
 " and therefore very fitly Adanison [Mr. John Adamson, an 
 " ex-Professor whom Principal Charteris had deputed to preside 
 " for him on the occasion] had the first part in this act. The 
 " defender is justly called Fairly [Mr. James Fairly, one of the 
 " Regents] : his theses had some fairiies, and he sustained 
 " them very fairly, and with many fair lies given to his 
 " opponents. And why should not Mr. Sands [Mr. Patrick 
 "Sands, an ex-Regent] be the first to enter the sands? But 
 " now I clearly see that all sands are not barren, for certainly 
 " he hath shown a fertile wit. Mr. Young [Mr. Andrew 
 " Young, one of the Regents] is very old m. Aristotle; and Mr. 
 " Reid [Mr. James Reid, another Regent] need not be red 
 " with blushing for his acting to-day. Mr. King [Mr. William 
 " King, another Regent] disputed very kingly, and of a kingly
 
 jEtat. 28-32. FORTH FEASTING. 55 
 
 " purpose, concerning the royal supremacy of reason over anger 
 " and all passions." No notice having been taken of the 
 Principal of the University, Mr. Henry Charteris, who, though 
 he had shrunk from appearing in the debate, was one of the 
 company, and the King having been reminded of this by some 
 one, the omission was at once remedied thus : " Well, his 
 " name agreeth very well with his nature ; for charters contain 
 " much matter, yet say nothing, but put great purposes in 
 " men's mouths." Whatever may have been thought of these 
 royal compliments by their recipients, what followed made 
 amends. "lam so satisfied" continued his Majesty, "with 
 " this day's exercise, that I will be god-father to the College of 
 " Edinburgh, and have it called The College of King James; 
 " for, after the foundation of it had been stopped for several 
 " years in my minority, as soon as I came to any knowledge, I 
 " zealously held hand to it, and caused it to be established. 
 " And, although many look upon it with an evil eye, yet I will 
 " have them to know that, having given it this name, I have 
 " espoused its quarrel." To the extent of giving the University 
 the benefit of his name, he was as good as his word ; for he 
 forwarded from Paisley, July 25, 1617, a letter to the Magis- 
 trates and Town Council of Edinburgh, ordering it to be called 
 thenceforth The College of King James.* 
 
 Drummond, who may have been drawn from his retirement 
 by the whirl and excitement of the King's Visit to Scotland, 
 and involved in it to some small extent personally, thought it 
 his duty, at all events, not to be wanting with his own par- 
 ticular tribute of respect. Accordingly, by far the finest literary 
 product of the Visit was a longish English Poem of his in 
 
 * The actual speeches in the disputation, by Adamson, Sands, Young, 
 Reid, and King, are given in The Muses' Welcome, pp. 221 -23 1 ; but the 
 King's punning colloquy at supper is only generally described there, and its 
 substance given in a set of English verses, and three Latin versions of the 
 same, written, by way of report, by some of the learned auditors. I take 
 the extended prose report of his Majesty's discourse from Dalzel's History 
 of the University of Edinburgh, II., 67, 68.
 
 5 6 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 which he represented the River Forth and all her region as 
 rejoicing and vocal with the unusual honour. Forth Feasting: 
 A Panegyric to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty is the title of 
 the Poem. Though afterwards included in the general col- 
 lection of the Memorials of the Visit, it was separately published 
 at Edinburgh in 1617, and, of course, by Andro Hart. By 
 this time, indeed, one begins to connect the old printer with 
 Drummond, and to fancy Drummond's lounges in Andro Hart's 
 shop in the High Street, for the purpose of looking over Hart's 
 books, and especially the foreign books which he imported, as 
 one of his weekly recreations. " Weel, Hawthornden, and hoo 
 are you the day ?" we seem to hear the old printer saying to 
 him regularly every time he dropped in. 
 
 Forth Feasting will be sufficiently described by four extracts : — 
 
 THE FORTH'S INVITATION TO THE SCOTTISH STREAMS 
 
 AND LAKES. 
 
 " And you, my Nymphs, rise from your moist repair ; 
 Strew all your springs and grots with lilies fair : 
 Some swiftest-footed get her hence and pray 
 Our floods and lakes come keep this holiday:— 
 Whate'er beneath Albania's hills do run, 
 Which see the rising or the setting sun, 
 Which drink stern Grampius' mists or Ochils' snows : 
 Stone-rolling Tay, Tyne tortoise-like that flows, 
 The pearly Don, the Dees, the fertile Spey, 
 Wild Navern, which doth see our longest day, 
 Ness smoking sulphur, Leven with mountains crowned, 
 Strange Lomond for his floating isles renowned, 
 The Irish Ryan, Ken, the silver Ayr, 
 The snaky Doune, the Ore with rushy hair, 
 The crystal-streaming Nid, loud-bellowing Clyde, 
 Tweed, which no more our kingdoms shall divide, 
 Rank-swelling Annan, Lid with curled streams, 
 The Esks, the Solway where they lose their names : 
 To every one proclaim our joys and feasts, 
 Our triumphs ; bid all come and be our guests." 
 
 SKETCH OF KING JAMES'S LIFE. 
 
 " When years thee vigour gave, O then how clear 
 Did smothered sparkles in bright flames appear! 
 Amongst the woods to force a flying hart,
 
 Mtat.2%-12. FORTH FEASTING. 57 
 
 To pierce the mountain-wolf with feathered dart, 
 
 See falcons climb the clouds, the fox ensnare, 
 
 Outrun the wind-outrunning da?dal hare, 
 
 To loose a trampling steed alongst a plain, 
 
 And in meandering gyres him bring again, 
 
 The press thee making place, were vulgar things. 
 
 In admiration's air, on glory's wings, 
 
 O ! thou far from the common pitch didst rise, 
 
 With thy designs to dazzle Envy's eyes ! 
 
 Thou sought'st to know this All's eternal source ; 
 
 Of ever-turning heavens the restless course, 
 
 Their fixed eyes, their lights which wandering run ; 
 
 Whence Moon her silver hath, his gold the Sun ; 
 
 If Destine be or no, if planets can 
 
 By fierce aspects force the free will of man ; 
 
 The light and spiring fire, the liquid air, 
 
 The flaming dragons, comets with red hair, 
 
 Heaven's tilting lances, artillery and bow, 
 
 Loud-sounding trumpets, darts of hail and snow, 
 
 The roaring element with people dumb, 
 
 The Earth, with what conceived is in her womb, 
 
 What on her moves, were set unto thy sight, 
 
 Till thou didst find their causes, essence, might. 
 
 But unto nought thou so thy mind didst strain 
 
 As to be read in man and learn to reign, 
 
 To know the weight and Atlas of a crown, 
 
 To spare the humble, proudlings pester down. 
 
 When from those piercing cares which thrones invest, 
 
 As thorns the rose, thou wearied wouldst thee rest, 
 
 With lute in hand, full of celestial fire, 
 
 To the Pierian groves thou didst retire : 
 
 There, garlanded with all Urania's flowers, 
 
 In sweeter lays than builded Thebas's towers, 
 
 Or them which charmed the dolphins in the main, 
 
 Or which did call Eurydice again, 
 
 Thou sung'st away the hours, till from their sphere 
 
 Stars seemed to shoot, thy melody to hear. 
 
 The god with golden hair, the sister maids, 
 
 Left nymphal Helicon, their Tempe's shades, 
 
 To see thine Isle; here lost their native tongue, 
 
 And in thy world-divided language sung." 
 
 JAMES'S PEACEFUL REIGN. 
 
 " That murder, rapine, lust, are fled to hell, 
 And in their rooms with us the Graces dwell, 
 That honour more than riches men respect, 
 That worthiness than gold doth more effect, 
 That piety unmasked shows her face,
 
 5 8 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHOKNDEN. 
 
 That innocency keeps with power her place, 
 That long-exiled Astrasa leaves the heaven, 
 And useth right her sword, her weights holds even, 
 That the Saturnian world is come again, 
 Are wished effects of thy most happy reign. 
 
 That daily peace, love, truth, delights, increase, 
 And discord, hate, fraud, with encumbers cease, 
 That men use strength not to shed others' blood, 
 But use their strength now to do others good. 
 That fury is enchained, disarmed wrath, 
 That, save by Nature's hand, there is no death, 
 That late grim foes like brothers other love, 
 That vultures prey not on the harmless dove, 
 That wolves with lambs do friendship entertain, 
 Are wished effects of thy most happy reign. 
 
 That towns increase, that ruined temples rise, 
 And their wind-moving vanes plant in the skies, 
 That ignorance and sloth hence run away, 
 That buried arts now rouse them to the day, 
 That Hyperion far beyond his bed 
 Doth see our lions ramp, our roses spread, 
 That Iber courts us, Tiber not us charms, 
 That Rhine with hence-brought beams his bosom warms, 
 That evil us fear and good us do maintain, 
 Are wished effects of thy most happy reign." 
 
 PRAYER TO JAMES TO REMAIN IN SCOTLAND. 
 
 " O ! long, long haunt these bounds, which by thy sight 
 Have now regained their former heat and light ! 
 Here grow green woods, here silver brooks do glide, 
 Here meadows stretch them out, with painted pride 
 Embroidering all the banks ; here hills aspire 
 To crown their heads with the ethereal fire — 
 Hills, bulwarks of our freedom, giant walls, 
 Which never fremdling's slight nor sword made thralls ; 
 Each circling flood to Thetis tribute pays ; 
 Men here in health outlive old Nestor's days; 
 Grim Saturn yet amongst our rocks remains, 
 Bound in our caves with many-metaled chains ; 
 Our flocks fair fleeces bear, with which for sport 
 Endymion of old the moon did court ; 
 High-palmed harts amidst our forests run, 
 And, not impaled, the deep-mouthed hounds do shun; 
 The rough-foot hare him in our bushes shrouds, 
 And long-winged hawks do perch amidst our clouds. 
 The wanton wood-nymphs of the verdant spring 
 Blue, golden, purple flowers shall to thee bring ; 
 Pomona's fruits the panisks ; Thetis' girls
 
 j&tat. 28-32. FORTH FEASTING. 59 
 
 Thy Thule's amber with the ocean pearls ; 
 The Tritons, herdsmen of the glassy field, 
 Shall give thee what far-distant shores can yield, 
 The Serian fleeces, Erythrean gems, 
 Vast Plata's silver, gold of Peru streams, 
 Antarctic parrots, Ethiopian plumes, 
 Sabaean odours, myrrh, and sweet perfumes ; 
 And 1 myself, wrapt in a watchet gown, 
 Of reeds and lilies on my head a crown, 
 Shall incense to thee burn, green altars raise, 
 And yearly sing due paeans to thy praise." 
 
 Naturally, one stumbles a little now over such panegyric on 
 King James. The contrast between such passages and what is 
 now universally felt and written about the same king might 
 check our modern flatterers and make living princes shudder. 
 The Scottish Solomon, however, had some good confused quali- 
 ties, which could perhaps be construed into " great " while he 
 shambled about alive; and Drummond, when he wrote so, 
 under the license of the poetic form, and amid the pageantry 
 of a patriotic occasion, need not be thought of as even smilingly 
 dishonest. How did Bacon speak and write of James, and 
 how had Shakespeare himself written poetically of him at the 
 end of his King Henry Villi 
 
 Drummond's panegyric was at least disinterested. No 
 honour or emolument came to him from King James's visit, 
 and none had been expected. More fortunate in this respect 
 was his brother-in-law, Mr. John Scot, the Director of the 
 Scottish Chancery. This gentleman and lawyer, whom we left 
 in 1610 as Mr. John Scot of Knightspottie, in Perthshire, had 
 been getting on in the world since then, and no longer bore 
 that inherited designation. In October 161 1, being then only 
 twenty-five years of age, he had obtained a charter of the lands 
 of Overtown, Nethertown, Caiplie, and Pitcorthie, in Fifeshire ; 
 in November of the same year he had obtained a charter of the 
 lands and barony of Tarvet, in the same county, with a strong 
 old tower on the lands, which is still extant; and, after wavering 
 about for a new collective name for all this acquired property,
 
 6o DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. , 
 
 and contenting himself apparently for some time with the 
 translation of his title from " Scot of Knightspottie " to 
 " Scot of Caiplie," he had conceived the bright idea of com- 
 bining the name Scot with the name Tarvet, and re-christening 
 all his Fifeshire lands as Scotstarvet. This having been at 
 length duly confirmed by legal ceremonial, he becomes hence- 
 forth for us, as he has long been in Scottish memory, " Scot of 
 Scotstarvet.'' Nay, but there was more. The King's visit of 
 1617, bringing honours to so many of his countrymen, did not 
 leave him undistinguished. He had knighthood conferred 
 upon him, and was appointed one of his Majesty's Scottish 
 Privy Council. He, therefore, became " Sir John Scot of 
 Scotstarvet," and his wife, the Poet's sister, became Lady of 
 Scotstarvet. Several sons and daughters of a total family of 
 nine had already been born to them. When Drummond 
 visited Scotstarvet, near Cupar, it was but a good forenoon's 
 walk to Barns, between Crail and Kilrenny, where the beautiful 
 Miss Cunningham had lived, or to the banks of the Ore Water, 
 where he had first met her.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 drummond's poetry : FARTHER specimens, with a criticism. 
 
 1617 — 161s. 
 
 HP HE year 161 7, which we have now reached, is a con- 
 venient stopping-place in Drummond's life, and gives 
 pause for a little critical enquiry. At the age of thirty-one, by 
 three several publications in Edinburgh, he may be said now to 
 have offered 'himself, however modestly, into that fraternity of 
 English poets proper, into which, by the votes of its London 
 committee of chiefs, only Sir William Alexander, and perhaps 
 Sir Robert Aytoun, of his contemporary fellow-countrymen, had 
 been admitted before him. What was likely to be the judg- 
 ment on these offered poems of a new candidate, these strains 
 from Hawthornden ? Before trying to answer this question, it 
 is right, in justice to Drummond, to have a few more specimens 
 from him before us. What has been already quoted is available 
 as evidence ; but, as most of those passages have been quoted 
 for biographic and historic reasons, they do not exhibit Drum- 
 mond fully in his intellectual and poetical character, and it is 
 right that we should see him in a few more extracts that may 
 supply the deficiency : — 
 
 sonnet. 
 
 " The Sun is fair, when he with crimson crown 
 And flaming rubies leaves his eastern bed ; 
 Fair is Thaumantia in her crystal gown, 
 When clouds engemmed hang azure, white, and red ; 
 To western worlds when wearied day goes down, 
 And from Heaven's windows each star shows her head, 
 Earth's silent daughter, Night, is fair, though brown ;
 
 62 DRUMMOND OF IIAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Fair is the Moon, though in love's livery clad ; 
 
 Fair Chloris is when she doth paint Aprile ; 
 
 Fair are the meads, the woods ; the floods are fair ; 
 
 Fair looketh Ceres with her yellow hair, 
 
 And apples' Queen when rose-cheeked she doth smile. 
 
 That Heaven and Earth and Seas are fair is true; 
 
 Yet true that all please not so much as you." 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE DEAD PRINCE. 
 
 ' Dear Ghost, forgive these our untimely tears, 
 By which our loving mind, though weak, appears ; 
 Our loss, not thine, when we complain, we weep. 
 For thee the glistering walls of Heaven do keep 
 Beyond the Planets' wheels, above that source 
 Of Spheres that turns the lower in its course; 
 Where Sun doth never set, nor ugly Night 
 Ever appears in mourning garments dight; 
 Where Boreas' stormy trumpet doth not sound, 
 Nor clouds, in lightning bursting, minds astound. 
 From care's cold climates far and hot desire, 
 Where time is banished, ages ne'er expire, 
 Amongst pure sprites environed with beams, 
 Thou think'st all things below to be but dreams, 
 And joy'st to look down to the azured bars 
 Of Heaven, indented all with streaming stars, 
 And in their turning temples to behold 
 In silver robe the Moon, the Sun in gold, 
 Like young eye-speaking lovers in a dance, 
 With majesty by turns retire, advance. 
 Thou wonder'st Earth to see hang like a ball, 
 Closed in the ghastly cloister of this All ; 
 And that poor men should grow so madly fond 
 To toss themselves for a small foot of ground ; 
 Nay, that they even dare brave the powers above 
 From this base stage of change that cannot move." 
 
 Mceliades. 
 
 A KISS. 
 
 " Hark, happy lovers, hark ! 
 This first and last of joys, 
 This sweetener of annoys, 
 This nectar of the gods 
 Ye call a kiss, is with itself at odds, 
 And half so sweet is not 
 In equal measure got 
 At light of sun as it is in the dark : 
 Hark, happy lovers, hark ! "
 
 ^Etat. 32-33. HIS POETRY: MORE SPECIMENS. 63 
 
 A VISION IN A WOOD. 
 
 " As more I would have said, 
 A sound of whirling wheels me all dismayed, 
 And with the sound forth from the timorous bushes, 
 With storm-like course, a sumptuous chariot rushes, 
 A chariot all of gold : the wheels were gold, 
 The nails and axle gold on which it rolled ; 
 The upmost part a scarlet veil did cover." 
 
 Poem, entitled " A Song" 
 
 SONNET. 
 
 " With flaming horns the Bull now brings the year ; 
 
 Melt do the mountains' horrid helms of snow ; 
 
 The silver floods in pearly channels flow ; 
 
 The late bare woods green anadems do wear ; 
 
 The nightingale, forgetting winter's woe, 
 
 Calls up the lazy morn her notes to hear ; 
 
 There flowers are spread which names of princes bear, 
 
 Some red, some azure, white, and golden grow ; 
 
 Here lows a heifer, there baa-wailing strays 
 
 A harmless lamb, not far a stag rebounds ; 
 
 The shepherds sing to grazing flocks sweet lays, 
 
 And all about the echoing air resounds. 
 
 Hills, dales, woods, floods, and everything doth change 
 But she in rigour, I in love am strange." 
 
 SCRAP. 
 
 " If this vain world be but a sable stage 
 Where slave-born man plays to the scoffing stars." 
 
 From a Sonnet. 
 
 THE MEETING-PLACE. 
 
 " Now, Flora, deck thyself in fairest guise; 
 If that ye, winds, would hear 
 A voice surpassing far Amphion's lyre, 
 Your stormy chiding stay ; 
 Let Zephyr only breathe, 
 And with her tresses play, 
 Kissing sometimes these purple ports of Death. 
 The winds all silent are ; 
 And Phoebus in his chair, 
 Ensaffroning sea and air, 
 Makes vanish every star; 
 Night like a drunkard reels 
 Beyond the hills to shun his flaming wheels ;
 
 64 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 The fields with flowers are decked in every hue; 
 The clouds bespangle with bright gold their blue ; 
 Here is the pleasant place, 
 And everything save her who all should grace." 
 
 From U A Song." 
 
 SONNET. 
 
 " What doth it serve to see Sun's burning face, 
 And skies enamelled with both Indies' gold, 
 Or Moon at night in jetty chariot rolled, 
 And all the glory of that starry place ? 
 What doth it serve Earth's beauty to behold, 
 The mountain's pride, the meadow's flowery grace, 
 The stately comeliness of forests old, 
 The sport of floods which would themselves embrace ? 
 What doth it serve to hear the Sylvans' songs, 
 The wanton merle, the nightingale's sad strains, 
 Which in dark shades seem to deplore my wrongs ? 
 P"or what doth serve all that this world contains, 
 Sith she for whom those once to me were dear 
 No part of them can have now with me here ?" 
 
 THE VANITY OF LIFE. 
 
 " And tell me, thou who dost so much admire 
 This little vapour, smoke, this spark or fire, 
 Which life is called, what doth it thee bequeath 
 But some few years which birth draws out to death ? 
 Which if thou paragon with lustres run, 
 And them whose cariere is but now begun, 
 In Day's great vast they shall far less appear 
 Than with the sea when matched is a tear. 
 But why wouldst thou here longer wish to be ? 
 One year doth serve all Nature's pomp to see ; 
 Nay, even one day and night. This Moon, that Sun, 
 Those lesser fires about this round which run, 
 Be but the same which under Saturn's reign 
 Did the serpenting seasons interchain. 
 How oft doth life grow less by living long ! 
 And what excelleth but what dieth young ? " 
 
 From a Poem, entitled 1 '' A Song.' 
 
 SONNET. 
 
 " If with such passing beauty, choice delights. 
 The Architect of this great round did frame 
 This palace visible which World we name, 
 Yet silly mansion but of mortal wights,
 
 ^5"/^ 32-33- HIS POETRY: MORE SPECIMENS. 65 
 
 How many wonders, what amazing lights, 
 Must that triumphing seat of glory claim 
 Which doth transcend all this great All's high heights, 
 Of whose bright sun ours here is but a beam ! 
 O blest abode ! O happy dwelling-place ! 
 Where visibly the Invisible doth reign! 
 Blest people, who do see true beauty's face, 
 With whose fair dawnings He but earth doth deign, 
 All joy is but annoy, all concord strife, 
 Matched with your endless bliss and happy life." 
 
 A PRAYER. 
 
 " Great God, whom we with humble thoughts adore, 
 Eternal, Infinite, Almighty King, 
 
 Whose palace heaven transcends, whose throne before 
 Archangels serve and Seraphim do sing ; 
 Of nought who wrought all that with wondering eyes 
 We do behold within this spacious round ; 
 Who mak'st the rocks to rock, and stand the skies ; 
 At whose command the horrid thunders sound ; 
 Ah ! spare us worms ; weigh not how we, alas ! 
 Evil to ourselves, against Thy laws rebel : 
 Wash off those spots which still in conscience' glass, 
 Though we be loth to look, we see too well. 
 Deserved revenge O do not, do not take. 
 If Thou revenge, what shall abide Thy blow ? 
 Pass shall this world, this world which Thou didst make, 
 Which should not perish till thy trumpet blow. 
 For who is he whom parents' sin not stains, 
 Or with his own offence is not defiled ? 
 Though Justice ruin threaten, Justice' reins 
 Let Mercy hold, and be both just and mild." 
 
 Fro7)i " Spiritual Poems." 
 
 PHILLIS. 
 " In petticoat of green, 
 Her hair about her eyne, 
 Phillis beneath an oak 
 Sat milking her fair flock : 
 Among that strained moisture, rare delight ! 
 Her hand seemed milk in milk, it was so white." 
 
 SONNET. 
 
 " My lute, be as thou wast when thou didst grow 
 With thy green mother in some shady grove, 
 When immelodious winds but made thee move, 
 And birds on thee their ramage did bestow.
 
 66 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Sith that dear voice which did thy sounds approve, 
 
 Which used in such harmonious strains to flow, 
 
 Is reft from earth to tune tbose spheres above, 
 
 What art thou but a harbinger of woe ? 
 
 Thy pleasing notes be pleasing notes no more, 
 
 But orphan wailings to the fainting ear ; 
 
 Each stop a sigh, each sound draws forth a tear : 
 
 Be therefore silent as in woods before ; 
 
 Or, if that any hand to touch thee deign, 
 Like widowed turtle still her loss complain." 
 
 How do these and the previous passages that have been 
 quoted from Drummond strike us in respect of poetic merit ? 
 How, in particular, do they strike us in comparison with that 
 aggregate of English poetry in James's reign into the midst of 
 which they came ? 
 
 Not badly, by any means ! " Very fairly," we may say, raising 
 the estimate. ■" They are extremely good," we may say, still 
 rising in our appreciation, "though they fall short of the highest, 
 and the fit of the wording to the metre and rhyme is sometimes 
 both forced and slack." So much by way of general impression; 
 but one may venture on an observation or two more specific 
 and incisive : — 
 
 i. What strikes us throughout in Drummond's pieces is the 
 combination of a certain poetic scnsuonsness, or delight in the 
 beauty of scenery, colours, forms, and sounds, with a tender 
 and rather elevated thought/ ulness. " Warm encrimsoned 
 swords," " golden bowers," " Hydaspes' pearly shore," " Night's 
 pale queen," "a sumptuous chariot all of gold," "a scarlet veil," 
 " Phoebus in his chair, ensaffroning sea and air," " the clouds 
 bespangling with bright gold their blue," " the Moon rolling at 
 night in jetty chariot," " Serian fleeces, Erythrean gems, Plata's 
 silver, gold of Peru, Antarctic parrots, Ethiopian plumes, and 
 Sabsean odours " — such phrases as these, and such passages as 
 that in which there is the fond enumeration of the Scottish 
 rivers by their names and epithets, exemplify at once the 
 presence in Drummond's mind of the element we have called 
 sensuousncss. It is an essential element of poetic genius; but
 
 sEtaL 32-33. CRITICAL REMARKS. 67 
 
 in some poets it is so pronounced as almost to seem in excess. 
 Keats's poetry, for example, is a perfect maze, an endlessly-rich 
 wilderness, of such luxuriances of sound and colour, such 
 sensuous verbal sweets. Drummond, with more of monotony, 
 is yet Keats-like in as far as he possessed, in a pleasing degree, 
 and in sufficient variety, that love of delicious imagery and 
 phraseology which almost always marks a real poet. At the 
 same time the general effect was tempered, redeemed from mere 
 lusciousness, and perhaps thinned, by a considerable presence in 
 his mind of the other, and more intellectual, element (which 
 Keats also possessed in no ordinary degree) of pensive reason, 
 or thoughtful ness. In many of his poems this domination of 
 the artistic sensuousness by a philosophical pensiveness may be 
 distinctly observed, and not least in some of his sonnets. 
 Drummond, whether from his intimacy with the Italian poets, or 
 from other causes, was especially fond of this form of com- 
 position, and wrote so much in it, and so well, that he came to 
 be named, even in his life-time, " the Scottish Petrarch." More 
 recently, Southey, Hallam, and other critics, have spoken of 
 Drummond's sonnets as indubitably among the best in the 
 English language after Shakespeare's, Milton's, and some of 
 Wordsworth's. 
 
 2. Although Drummond had steeped himself in Italian, 
 French, and Spanish poetry, and especially in Italian, there is 
 proof that he had studied the English Elizabethan poets with 
 peculiar affection, and with a desire to fashion himself by them. 
 Nay more, one can refer him to that particular class or series 
 of English poets, descending out of Elizabeth's reign into 
 the reigns of James I. and Charles I., for whom the name 
 " Spenserians " is perhaps the best collective designation. 
 Under this name I would include that succession of English 
 poets, from about 1580 to about 1640, in whom, apart from the 
 dramatists, but with some of the dramatists to be classed with 
 them for their minor and non-dramatic pieces, the tradition of 
 pure poetry was best kept up. The reason of the name is that
 
 68 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 the poets of this series all confessed a certain allegiance to 
 Spenser as their master and exemplar, and continued his style 
 of rich sensuous description and purely ideal phantasy, generally 
 with a tendency also to his favourite form of the pastoral, and 
 sometimes, though not always, with his liking for allegory. 
 In the list may be mentioned, after Spenser himself, Shake- 
 speare for his earlier poems, Drayton and others of the Shake- 
 spearian group on similar grounds, Fairfax, the brothers Giles 
 and Phineas Fletcher, William Browne, and finally, a little later 
 on, Milton, while yet only promising his independent greatness. 
 Now, the Scottish Drummond links himself on at a certain 
 point to this fine English list. Perhaps the English Spenserian 
 to whom he comes closest is William Browne, the author of 
 Britannia 's Pastorals. Browne was almost exactly of Drum- 
 mond' s age; in the very year, 1613, in which Drummond made 
 his first appearance in his Tears on the Death of Ma 'Hades, 
 Browne had made his first appearance in a poem on the very 
 same subject, named more directly An Elegy on Prince Henry ; 
 and Browne's Pastorals, partly published in the same year, were 
 completed in 16 16, when Andro Hart sent forth Drummond's 
 collected Poems. The coincidence, however, is more than one 
 of time ; it extends to the manner of the two poets. One 
 might read some detached passages of Drummond's and think 
 them Browne's, or of Browne's and think them Drummond's, 
 though Drummond is decidedly the superior, and much the 
 clearer in his cutting and finish. The resemblance is the more 
 curious because there is no evidence that either poet, when he 
 first took his place, had heard of the other's existence. There 
 is, at least, no trace of a copy of Browne in Drummond's 
 library. Among the English books in that library, however, as 
 we have seen, there was even an over-proportion of choice earlier 
 poetry of the Spenserian sort. There is evidence, in the marginal 
 markings and underlinings in Drummond's hand, still to be seen 
 in some of these books, how carefully they had been read, and 
 with what lingering over their finer passages and phrases. There
 
 .■Ktat. 32-33. CRITICAL REMARKS. 69 
 
 is no doubt that flakes and recollections from them, as well as 
 from the now less known Italian, French, and Spanish poets, 
 may be found in Drummond's own verse. Such, by the very 
 law of memory in its relation to invention, must always be the 
 case; and it is a different thing from plagiarism. Two 
 instances, however, almost bordering on plagiarism, are worth 
 notice. Forth Feasting, in her various panegyric on King 
 James, dwells at some length on that monarch's poetic gifts or 
 powers of song, telling him that, when he retired from state- 
 business into the Pierian groves, lute in hand and garlanded, 
 his lays were sweeter than the fabled ones which had "charmed 
 the dolphins," and ending 
 
 " Thou sungst away the hours, till from their sphere 
 Stars seemed to shoot, thy melody to hear." 
 
 Aha ! Master Drummond ! Shakespeare's Midsummer Nig/ifs 
 
 Dream, Act II., Scene 1. 
 
 " Thou remember'st 
 Since once I sat upon a promontory, 
 And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back 
 Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath 
 That the rude sea grew civil at her song, 
 And certain stars shot madly from their spheres 
 To hear the sea-maid's music." 
 
 Again, in the seventh piece of our last set of extracts from 
 Drummond, the reader may have noted that powerful phrase 
 about the effects of Phcebus or the rising sun, 
 
 " Night like a drunkard reels 
 Beyond the hills to shun his flaming wheels." 
 
 This too is from Shakespeare ; for in Romeo and Juliet, one of 
 the plays which we know Drummond had read, we have (Act 
 II., scene 3) — 
 
 " And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels 
 Forth from Day's path and Titan's fiery wheels." 
 
 The fault of such borrowing, if it be a fault, is venial; and one is
 
 70 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 glad to see that Drummond was so well acquainted with the three 
 plays of Shakespeare which were in his library. I believe that 
 he had sipped again and again the honey of these plays and of 
 the two other pieces of Shakespeare that were in his possession. 
 Perhaps, indeed, he had read more largely in Shakespeare than 
 can be proved by such direct evidence. I am inclined to think 
 he knew Shakespeare's Sonnets. They had been published in 
 1609. 
 
 3. I have spoken of a certain pensive, or reflective, vein to 
 be found in Drummond's poetry, tempering and sometimes 
 saddening its luxuriousness. The observation may now take 
 a more specific form. In several of the passages quoted, and 
 in many that have not been quoted, one is struck with the 
 recurrence of such phrases as "this All," "this great round," 
 " this palace visible which World we name," " Day's great 
 vast," "this vapour, smoke, or spark, called Life," and their 
 speculative and sentimental cognates. This is most sig- 
 nificant. Here in Drummond, a young Scottish gentleman of 
 the early part of the seventeenth century, we find, in a 
 degree even unusual, that mood which, in one form or another, 
 will be found underlying all literary genius, or human genius of 
 any sort, that has worked touchingly on the world. It is the 
 metaphysical mood. It is that mood which, however rich and 
 splendid be the image formed of the whole physical Universe 
 in which man lives, and which rolls itself for ever round him in 
 diurnal and nocturnal show, yet will always be thinking of it as 
 only a painted phantasmagory hung in an infinite unknown, 
 and will always be tending towards the utmost verge of this 
 phantasmagory, wondering what bounds it in and what lies 
 eternally beyond. We all know the Shakespearian expression 
 of this mood, — 
 
 " We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of ; and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep." 
 
 Well, of this mood, the deepest that man can come to by all
 
 Mtat. 32-33. CRITICAL REMARKS. 71 
 
 natural effort, there is a tinge, little less than Shakespearian in 
 its intensity, in our amiable North Briton. It was not, how- 
 ever, I believe, by any indoctrination from Shakespeare that he 
 had caught the mood ; it was, I believe, the natural working-out 
 of a constitutional tendency. From the contemporary theology 
 of his countrymen, and the controversies connected with it, he 
 seems to have stood singularly aloof, shutting himself up in a 
 natural piety that did not inquire much about creeds and forms 
 of doctrine, though sympathizing, on grounds of political con- 
 servatism, rather with the Episcopacy which James was establish- 
 ing in Scotland than with the zealous popular Presbyterianism 
 which was struggling for repossession. Glad enough to see the 
 country have its bishops and all quiet Anglican church-forms, 
 and reverent of those forms so far as now and then to write a 
 hymn heralding the church-tone of some of Herbert's, he yet 
 tended in the main to a style of religious musing which was 
 philosophic and general rather than theological, and which 
 indeed might have been Pagan -with only a Christian suffusion. 
 " This All," " this vapour we call Life," " this palace visible 
 which we name our World " — these, I repeat, are among the 
 favourite phrases of Drummond ; and they indicate unmistake- 
 ably the themes of his ultimate meditations, and the nature, 
 extent, and limit of his metaphysics. The mood, I think, does 
 not differ much from that discernible so continually in Shake- 
 speare. But in Drummond (and this is really curious) it is 
 associated with a definite optical imagination of " the All," a 
 definite visual cosmology, which cannot be called Shakespearian, 
 but is more like an anticipation of Milton's boldness in astrono- 
 mical diagram. Through Drummond's poems, as afterwards 
 through Milton's, there runs a constant fancy of the whole phy- 
 sical frame of things according to the strict teachings of the 
 Ptolemaic or Alphonsine astronomy, or to such renderings of 
 these in vision as a poet might adopt. The brown earth in the 
 centre; then the pale moon in her sphere; then the other six 
 planets successively in their spheres, but with Sol or Sun outlord-
 
 72 
 
 DRUMMOND OF II A WTHORNDEN. 
 
 ing them all in glory ; beyond all these planetary spheres the 
 vaster revolution of the one sapphire sphere whose glittering 
 burden is the whole multitude of the stars ; and so at length to 
 the primum mobile, or outmost shell, whose wheeling incloses 
 all, harmonises all, and separates the total orb of Cosmos from 
 blackness or nothingness unimaginable : — this was the universe 
 of Drummond's musings, " the All" about which he puzzled 
 himself. Let him again speak for himself : — 
 
 " How that vast Heaven entitled First is rolled, 
 
 If any other worlds beyond it lid, 
 
 And people living in Eternity, 
 
 Or essence pure that doth this All uphold ; 
 
 What motion have those fixed sparks of gold ; 
 
 The wandering carbuncles that shine from high, 
 
 By sprites or bodies contrar-wise in sky 
 
 If they be turned, and mortal things behold ; 
 
 How Sun posts heaven about, how Night's pale Queen 
 
 With borrowed beams looks on this hanging Round ; 
 
 What cause fair Iris hath, and monsters seen 
 
 In Air's large fields of light and Sea's profound : 
 
 Did hold my wandering thoughts, when thy sweet eye 
 Bade me leave all and only think of thee." 
 
 We are yet, be it remembered, only at the year 1617 ; or let 
 us include another year, and say 1618. Has Drummond, so 
 far, been introduced sufficiently ? I think he has. Do we not 
 see him, any night in those two years, at his door-porch in 
 Hawthornden, or on his solitary walk along the cliff on which 
 the house stands, or deeper down the glen in the leafy laby- 
 rinth ? Edinburgh is dumb in the distance ; the glen is dark ; 
 the banks on the opposite side are glimmering and silvery ; up 
 through the darkness and the silver glimmer comes the mur- 
 muring of the Esk ; at hand, in the antique rock, with its strange 
 excavations, there is an unearthly eeriness, as of moanings and 
 clanking chains from an inscrutable past ; but overhead all the 
 while is the blue vault with its luminaries, and superb among 
 these the full-orbed moon. Thither, and chiefly at the moon, 
 the poet gazes as he walks, all the sights and sounds of the
 
 JSfat. 32-33. CRITICAL REMARKS. 73 
 
 glen playing into his senses and fancies, but ending in the one 
 thought, how all this visible round, from dark earth to the last 
 depth of the spangled concave, is but a mystic transitory vision, 
 and the one wonder what Eternal Essence beyond surrounds, up- 
 holds, and pervades the Allegory. But lo ! he has regained his 
 door-porch ; and there, in this night of moonlight, soft as any 
 Italian night, though the scene on which it rests is Scottish, let 
 us leave him for the present.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 LITERARY LONDON : DRUMMOND'S CORRESPONDENCE WITH DRAY- 
 TON : BEN JONSON'S JOURNEY TO SCOTLAND: HIS VISIT TO 
 DRUMMOND, AND THEIR HAWTHORNDEN CONVERSATIONS. 
 
 1618 — 1619. 
 
 A CCOUNT has been taken of the impressions likely to be 
 made now by Drummond's poetry so far as it had been 
 published before the year 16 18. But what were the impressions 
 made on his contemporaries of that year, and especially on the 
 jury of poets, wits, and critics in London, by whose opinions 
 the place of a new candidate for honour in the English world 
 of letters was principally determined ? 
 
 Who were the chiefs of that jury ? Shakespeare, after some 
 ten or twelve years of retirement from London, was recently 
 dead, leaving his fame to chance, and half of his plays still in 
 manuscript. But there survived, of the Elizabethans, besides 
 such men of non-poetical note as Bacon and the scholar Cam- 
 den, these poets and dramatists — Chapman, Daniel, Sylvester, 
 Drayton, Webster, Sir John Davies, Dr. Donne, Ben Jonson, 
 Marston, Dekker, Heywood, and Fletcher; round whom, as 
 younger comers of James's own reign, and therefore more nearly 
 coevals of Drummond, were Sir John Beaumont, Giles and 
 Phineas Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, George Wither, William 
 Browne, and others. Central figure in this group of surviving 
 Elizabethans, mixed with younger Jacobans, was Ben Jonson. 
 He was now in the forty-fifth year of his age, not yet appointed 
 nominally to the laureateship, but in expectation of that hon-
 
 JEtat. 33-34. LITERARY LONDON : BEN JONSON. 75 
 
 orary post when Daniel should leave it — already practically 
 laureate by King James's favour, and of larger bulk in the public 
 eye than any of his seniors or juniors, and dominating them all 
 by the mass, variety, and loudness of his powers. Jonson's dic- 
 tatorship in the London world of letters, and in the tavern-life 
 in which that world had so much of its being, was an established 
 fact, not only known in London itself, but rumoured in quiet 
 country places, when London and its delights were the theme 
 of conversation. Though he does not seem yet to have set up 
 his throne in that " Devil Tavern " in Fleet Street which he 
 afterwards made famous as his " Oracle of Apollo," he had his 
 clubs or meetings in other taverns, frequented by his admirers 
 for the pleasures of wine and literary talk under his boisterous 
 presidency, and resorted to by stray visitors from the provinces 
 for the chance of an introduction to him, that they, too, might 
 thus be enrolled among the wits and good fellows of the right 
 metropolitan brotherhood, or, as the phrase was, be " sealed of 
 the tribe of Ben." Of course, in some quarters, Ben's dictator- 
 ship was resented. Some of his quieter Elizabethan seniors, 
 like Chapman, Daniel, and Drayton, appear even to have pre- 
 ferred a country life, or, at least, a life in the shade, after Ben's 
 loud mastery in London had begun. In London itself, behind 
 his back, all sorts of evil things were said of him. His huge 
 corpulency and his rocky visage were in themselves never- 
 ending matter of joke; his ill-girt mode of life, in one continual 
 round of drink, debt, and mendicancy, save when he shut him- 
 self up for his proper work and produced some laborious play, 
 masque, or poem, was a too obvious mark for comment ; and 
 in his egotism, his dogmatism in talk, his quarrelsomeness, his 
 carelessness what harsh or savage things he said about anybody 
 or everybody, there were special provocations to everybody 
 and anybody in turn. Nevertheless, there he sat, supreme in 
 his order, with a bludgeon for his sceptre. There might be the 
 buzz of criticism and sarcasm all round him, but it was hushed 
 in his presence. Nobody dared meddle with him face to face.
 
 76 DRUMMOND OF HAIVTHORNDEN. 
 
 You had to be big Ben's subject or to keep out of his way. 
 And so, what with his undoubtedly great qualities, his real 
 weight of metal, and what with his abundant sociability and his 
 personal imperiousness and force of tongue into whatever 
 society he came, there was no man in all London better known 
 than Ben among those who took any interest in books, plays, 
 or poetry, from the King and his courtiers downwards, and no 
 man whose judgments were more quoted. Perhaps, indeed, 
 there was no living Londoner, belonging to the literary craft, or 
 metropolitan band of wits and dramatists, of whose physiog- 
 nomy and ways a more distinct idea had been carried over the 
 whole island by gossip, or respecting whom scholars and 
 readers at all distances from London were more curious. With 
 a difference, or with several important differences, Ben Jonson's 
 position in the English world of letters in and about 1618 was 
 like that of his namesake, Dr. Samuel, a hundred and fifty years 
 later. Nor were the men themselves unlike. Both rolled up 
 Fleet Street with the same unwieldy gait ; both were hypochon- 
 driac in temperament, and sought refuge from the horrors of 
 hypochondria in perpetual club-life ; both were dictatorial in 
 talk, and used the butt-end of the pistol when they missed fire ; 
 and, if there were screws loose in Ben morally that were nobly 
 tight afterwards in Dr. Samuel, the laxness was compensated by 
 a greater poetical richness. Nay, at the heart of Ben too, 
 ill-girt and full of bluster and faults as was his life among his 
 fellows, there was a stalk of essential nobleness, an abiding 
 rough notion of what constitutes true worth in literature or in 
 anything else, and a scorn of the reverse. Hear him in an 
 epistle, written after the present date, declare the ideal he 
 aspired to himself, and the qualities he would exact in all that 
 desired to be sealed of liis tribe : — 
 
 " Live to that point I will for which I am man, 
 And dwell as in my centre as I cn.n, 
 Still looking to and ever loving Heaven, 
 With reverence using all the gifts thence given
 
 Mtat. 33-34. LITERARY LONDON: BL<1N JONSON. 77 
 
 'Mongst which if I have any friendships sent, 
 Such as are square, well-tagged, and permanent, 
 Not built with canvas, paper, and false lights, 
 As are the glorious scenes at the great sights ; 
 And that there be no fevery heats nor colds, 
 Oily expansions or shrunk dirty folds, 
 But all so clear and led by Reason's flame 
 As but to stumble in her sight were shame ; 
 These I will honour, love, embrace, and serve, 
 And free it from all question to preserve. 
 So short you read my character, and theirs 
 I would call mine ; to which not many stairs 
 Are asked to climb, first give mc faith, who know 
 Myself a little ; I will take you so 
 As you have writ yourself : now stand, and then, 
 Sir, you are sealed of the Tribe of Ben." 
 
 How was a new poet, living so far north as the vicinity of 
 Edinburgh, to be heard of in that London world of wits and 
 critics, over which Ben Jonson presided ? In the first place 
 there was a book-trade even then between Edinburgh and 
 London. Andro Hart, I daresay, had his London agents. Still, 
 the thing would not have been so easy but for those living 
 links of connexion that we wot of between the Scottish or 
 Edinburgh world and the world of London. Were there not 
 those Scots who had gone south to be in attendance on James 
 at his English Court, but were perpetually coming and going, 
 or at least sending and fetching, between the two king- 
 doms ? Among these, above all, were there not Drummond's 
 bosom-friend Sir William Alexander, now gentleman-usher to 
 Prince Charles, and his other friends, Sir Robert Kerr, Sir 
 Robert Aytoun, and Sir David Murray? Drummond saw 
 these friends of his when they came to Scotland, and corres- 
 ponded with them while they were in England ; and it may 
 have been through them that copies of his Mceliades, his Poems, 
 and his Forth Feasting, found their way to London. But, 
 indeed, copies of the Mceliades, from the very nature of its- 
 subject, must have been about the English Court from the time 
 of its publication ; and copies of the Forth Feasting must have 
 been taken to England by some of the numerous retinue of the
 
 7 8 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 King who were with him in Scotland in that royal progress 
 which the poem celebrated. By the year 1618, accordingly, 
 a few people here and there in England, including some of the 
 London wits, had heard of a Master William Drummond, a 
 Scottish gentleman, living near Edinburgh, who wrote verses 
 that were really English. Among these, doubtless, was Ben 
 Jonson. Not only was he too wide-awake to let any new 
 appearance escape him in that realm of British Poetry over 
 which his sway extended ; but Sir William Alexander, Sir 
 Robert Kerr, and Sir Robert Aytoun, who were all among 
 Ben's acquaintances, and in the habit of meeting him, would 
 have been sure to report Drummond's recent volumes to him 
 even had he missed them himself. There is proof, in short, 
 that he had read them, or portions of them, soon after they 
 had issued from the Edinburgh press. 
 
 The first person of the English fraternity of poets, however, 
 who stretched out a hand of liking and recognition to 
 Drummond through the space that separated them was not Ben 
 Jonson, but Ben Jonson's senior, Michael Drayton. 
 
 This worthy, born one year before Shakespeare, and in 
 Shakespeare's own county of Warwick, had begun his literary 
 career in London about the same time that Shakespeare had be- 
 gun his, and had been one of Shakespeare's private friends and 
 public competitors from that early date. As far back as 1598, 
 when Shakespeare had written about half his plays and most of 
 his minor poems, so that critics ranked him as the first of English 
 dramatists, and also as among the best of English lyrists and 
 elegiac poets, Drayton, in consequence of a series of pieces 
 nearly as bulky, including his Hcroical Epistles, Barons' Wars, 
 and Legends, had been named with respect among the English 
 tragic dramatists, and also among the English lyrists, elegiac 
 poets, and epigrammatists. Through James's reign, though 
 Shakespeare had then far over-topped him, and Ben Jonson 
 and others had thrown him into the shade, he had sustained or 
 increased his reputation by additional writings, the chief of which
 
 .7-ltat. 33-34. DRUMMOND AND DRAYTON. 79 
 
 was the first part of his ponderous but interesting Polyolbion, 
 or a Chorographical Description of Great Britain, digested into 
 a Poem, published in 16 13. And now, five years after this last 
 publication, and two years after Shakespeare's death (which had 
 happened, as tradition will have it, close after Shakespeare's 
 too hospitable reception of Drayton and Ben Jonson, in a visit 
 they paid to him at Stratford-on-Avon), Drayton, at the age of 
 fifty-five, was living on, generally in London, but often in the 
 country, a mildly radiant veteran in comparison with Ben, but 
 more liked by those who preferred profuse poetry of a Spenserian 
 tinge to Ben's massive intellectualism. Of such a taste, I should 
 say, was Drummond. As long ago as 1606, when we first hear of 
 his readings in Shakespeare, he had read at least one of 
 Drayton's poems; in 161 1 he had two of Drayton's books in 
 his library ; in 161 2 he added to his acquaintance with Drayton 
 by reading his Heroical Epistles, Barons' Wars, and Legends ; 
 and in 16 13, when the first part of Drayton's Polyolbion 
 appeared, that book found its way at once to Hawthornden. 
 To this last date, on the other hand, there is no proof that 
 Drummond had read anything else of Ben Jonson than his 
 Epigrams. When, therefore, during the next five years (1613-18), 
 Drummond ventured to offer himself among the English poets 
 of his generation, there was probably no surviving Elizabethan 
 whose good word about what he had published he would have 
 valued more than Drayton's. 
 
 We are not left to guess on the subject. Among the papers 
 of Drummond posthumously published there is a brief one 
 which the editors entitled Character of Several Authors, but 
 which evidently consists of mere remarks loosely jotted down 
 by him in the course of his readings, without systematic inten- 
 tion. They are not dated ; but, as Shakespeare is spoken of 
 in them as still alive, and as Sir William Alexander is mentioned 
 by his knightly title, they must have been written mainly 
 between 16 13 and 1616. They are an authentic indication, 
 therefore, of Drummond's tastes and preferences, at that time,
 
 80 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 in the matter of poetry. Here is the substance of them, all 
 that refers to Drayton duly retained : — ■ 
 
 " The Authors I have seen on the subject of Love are the 
 Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt (whom, because of their 
 antiquity, I will not match with our better times), Sidney, Daniel, 
 Drayton, and Spenser. He who writeth The Art of English 
 Poesy [Puttenham] praiseth much Raleigh and Dyer ; but their 
 works are so few that are come to my hands I cannot well say 
 anything of them. The last we have are Sir William Alexander 
 and Shakespeare, who have lately published their works. Con- 
 stable, saith some, hath written excellently ; and Murray, with 
 others, I know, hath done well, if they could be brought to 
 publish their works ; but of secrets [books not made public] 
 who can soundly judge? The best and most exquisite poet of 
 this subject, by consent of the whole senate of poets, is 
 Petrarch. . . . Among our English poets, Petrarch is imitated, 
 nay surpassed in some things, in matter and manner. In 
 matter none approach him to Sidney, who hath songs and 
 sonnets in matter intermingled ; in manner the nearest I find 
 to him is W. Alexander. . . . After which two, next, methinks, 
 foiloweth Daniel, for sweetness in rhyming second to none. 
 Drayton seemeth rather to have loved his Muse than his 
 Mistress, by I know not what artificial similes ; this showeth 
 well his mind, but not the passion. As to that which Spenser 
 calleth his Amoi~etti, I am not of their opinion who think them 
 his ; for they are so childish that it were not well to give them 
 so honourable a father. Donne, among the Anacreontic Lyrics, 
 is second to none, and far from all second. ... I think, if he 
 would, he might easily be the best epigrammatist we have found 
 in English. . . . Drayton's Polyolbion is one of the smoothest 
 pieces I have seen in English, poetical and well prosecuted ; 
 there are some pieces in him I dare compare with the best 
 Transmarine Poems. The 7th song [of the Po/yo/bio/i] pleaseth 
 me much; the 12th is excellent; the 13th also (the Discourse 
 of Hunting passeth with any poet) ; and the 18th, which is the 
 last in this edition of 16 14. I find in him, which is in most part 
 of my compatriots [by "compatriots" Drummond here means 
 " Englishmen," his fellow-islanders], too great an admiration of 
 their country ; on the history of which whilst they muse, they 
 forget sometimes to be good poets. Sylvester's Translation of 
 Tudith and the Battle of Pory [poems by the French Bartas]
 
 /Etat. 33-34. DRUMMOND AND DRAYTON. 81 
 
 are excellent. He is not happy in his inventions [i.e., his 
 original works]." * 
 
 It must have been a real pleasure to Drummond, having such 
 a liking for Drayton as is here shown, when, some time in 16 18, 
 a friend of Drayton's, called Joseph Davis, then on a visit to 
 Scotland for some reason or other, found him out at Haw- 
 thomden or in Edinburgh, and delivered some message to him 
 from Drayton, partly of kindly paternal greeting on account of 
 his poetiy, and partly introductory of Joseph Davis himself. 
 Drummond seems to have shown Joseph Davis, whoever he 
 was, all the attention in his power ; and, either by Davis, when 
 he returned to London, or by some other conveyance, he sent 
 this letter to Drayton : — 
 
 " To the Right Worshipful Mr. Michael Drayton, Esq. 
 
 "Sir, 
 
 " I have understood by Mr. Davis the direction he re- 
 ceived from you to salute me here ; which undeserved favour 
 I value above the commendations of the greatest and mightiest 
 in this Isle. Though I have not had the fortune to see you 
 (which sight is but like the near view of pictures in tapestry), 
 
 * The paper of which this is a condensation will be found at pp. 226,227 of 
 the 171 1 edition of Drummond's Works. It is a pity it is not dated. 
 From some of the phrases one might infer that it was written, at least in part, 
 at a considerably earlier date than between 1613 and 1616; but among the 
 particulars that assign most of it to that date is the criticism of Drayton's 
 Polyolbion, the first part of which did not appear till 1613. The mention 
 of Shakespeare is very slight, and his conjunction with Sir William Alexander 
 monstrous ; but it must be remembered that, in the particular connexion, it 
 is only Shakespeare's minor Poems that are thought of. The omission of 
 Ben Jonson's name is noteworthy : Drummond then hardly knew his Poems. — 
 After the mention of Sylvester quoted in the text, Drummond proceeds thus : 
 " Who likes to know whether he or Hudson hath the advantage of "Judith, 
 "let them compare the beginning of the 4th Book, 'O silver-bowed Diana,' 
 "&c. ; and the end of the 4th Book 'Her waved locks,' &c, the midst of 
 " the 8th Book ' In Ragau's ample plain,' &c." The Hudson here thought of 
 as quite comparable to Sylvester is that Thomas Hudson of whom we have 
 already heard (ante p. 28) as an English musician at the Scottish Court of 
 King James, and then associated with Drummond's uncle Fowler. He had 
 published at Edinburgh in 1584 a translation of the ///story of Judith by 
 Du Bartas. Sylvester's translation of the same was a later affair. 
 
 F
 
 8 2 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 yet, almost ever since I could know any, ye have been to me 
 known and beloved. Long since your amorous (and truly 
 Heroical) Epistles did ravish me ; and lately your most happy 
 Albion [Polyolbion : Part L] put me into a new trance — works 
 (most excellent portraits of a rarely endued mind) which, if one 
 may conjecture of what is to come, shall be read, in spite of 
 envy, so long as men read books. Of your great love, courtesy, 
 and generous disposition, I have been informed by more than 
 one of the worthiest of this country ; but what before was only 
 known to me by fame I have now found by experience : your 
 goodness preventing me in that duty which a strange bashful- 
 ness, or bashful strangeness, hindered me to offer unto you. 
 You have the first advantage : the next shall be mine ; and 
 hereafter you shall excuse my boldness if, when I write to your 
 matchless friend, Sir W. Alexander, I now and then salute you, 
 and in that claim, though unknown, to be 
 
 " Your loving and assured friend, 
 
 "W. Drummond." 
 
 There could hardly be a more gentlemanly letter than this ; 
 but Drummond, not content with it, seems to have followed it 
 up with one still more exuberant. "Your great learning," 
 he says in the scroll of a second letter, "first bred in me 
 " admiration, then love. . . . When first I looked into 
 " your Heroical Epistles, I was rapt from myself, and could 
 " not contain myself from blazing that of you which both 
 " your worth and my love deserved ; although whatever I 
 " can say of you is far under your ingine and virtue. So 
 " far as I can remember of our Vulgar Poesy, none hath 
 " done better, or can do more, and from none can we 
 " expect more." 
 
 Receiving this, or something like it, in addition to the first 
 letter (and one notes that it was about the time when London 
 was astir with the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh, Oct. 29, 
 16 18), Drayton replied thus : —
 
 Mtat. 33-34. DRUMMOND AND DRAYTON. 83 
 
 " To my Honourable Friend, Mr. William Drummond, 
 
 in Scotland. 
 
 " My dear noble Drummond, 
 
 " Your Letters were as welcome to me as if 
 they had come from my mistress ; which I think is one of the 
 fairest and worthiest living. Little did you think how oft that 
 noble friend of yours, Sir William Alexander (that man of men), 
 and I have remembered you before we trafficked in friendship. 
 Love me as much as you can, and so I will you : I can never 
 hear of you too oft, and 1 will ever mention you with much 
 respect of your deserved worth. 1 enclose this letter in a letter 
 of mine to Mr. Andrew Hart of Edinburgh, about some busi- 
 ness I have with him, which he may impart to you. Farewell, 
 noble Sir ; and think me ever to be 
 
 " Your faithful Friend, 
 
 " Michael Drayton. 
 " London, 9 Nov., 1618. 
 
 "Joseph Dayis is in love with you."' 
 
 One likes the flowing amiability of this letter of the veteran 
 Elizabethan, but is curious also as to the business he could 
 have with Andro Hart of Edinburgh. Andro Hart, it may 
 be remembered, was Sir William Alexanders publisher, as well 
 as Drummond's. Was Drayton in difficulties with the London 
 publishers as to the bringing out of the rest of his Polyolbion, 
 and had Sir William Alexander recommended a negotiation 
 with Andro Hart ? Had Drayton a notion that Hart might 
 speak to Drummond on the subject, and that Drummond might 
 help? This was actually the case. Here, for proof, is 
 Drummond's third letter to Drayton, written before he had 
 received Drayton's reply to the two former, and when he was 
 doubtful whether they had reached him : — 
 
 " To the Right Worshipful Michael Drayton, Esquire. 
 
 " Sir, 
 
 " I have understood by Sir W. Alexander's letters ye 
 have not received my last. If I could have thought of their 
 loss, or coming so late, I had prevented them ere now by
 
 84 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 others. I am oft with Sir W. and you in my thoughts, and 
 desire nothing more than that by letters we may oft meet and 
 mingle our souls. Your Works make you ever present to me ; 
 than which there is not any book I am more familiar with, nor 
 any by which I esteem myself more happy by familiarity con- 
 tracted with the author. I long to see the rest of your Polyol- 
 bion come forth ; which is the only epic poem England, in my 
 judgment, hath to be proud of; to be the author of which I 
 had rather have the praise than, as Aquinas said of one of the 
 Fathers' commentaries, to have the seignory of Paris. These 
 our times now are so given to envenomed satires and spiteful 
 jests that they only taste what is rank, smelling, and hoarse. 
 Out of what part of the world your late prosaic versers have 
 their poesies it is hard to find : it may be said of their new fits 
 of poetizing at Court : " Et pcnitus toto divisos orbe Britannos." 
 
 Evidently Drummond had heard something from Sir William 
 Alexander about Drayton's difficulties with his Polyolbion, though 
 as yet in writing to Drayton he speaks only generally. But on 
 the 20th of December, 1618, having meanwhile received Dray- 
 ton's own epistle, he is more explicit. On that day, indeed, 
 he sent to London two letters of sympathy with complaining 
 authors. One was to Sir William Alexander himself, full of 
 affection. "Never any friendship of mine," he says, "went so 
 " near my thoughts as yours, because I never thought any so 
 " worthy. It is all the treasure and conquest, when death shall 
 " remove this pageant of the world from me, that I have here 
 "to vaunt of; neither would I wish another epitaph and Hie 
 u jaeet over my grave than that you esteemed me worthy of 
 " your friendship. There is nothing I long so much for as to 
 " see the perfection of your Works. May Fortune one day be 
 " ashamed to see such a spirit so long attend the ungrateful 
 " court, that deserves to have the sovereignty of all Parnassus ! " 
 Sir William, it appears from this, had his troubles, though they 
 were not money ones : he did not find himself sufficiently 
 appreciated. Drayton's trouble, however, was of a more de- 
 finite and immediate nature ; and to him Drummond wrote, on 
 the same day, thus : —
 
 Miat. 3.3-34. DRUMMOND AND DRAYTON. 85 
 
 " To the Right Worshipful Mr. Michael Drayton, Esq. 
 
 " Sir, 
 
 "If my letters were so welcome to you, what may 
 you think yours were to me, which must be so much more wel- 
 come in that the conquest I make is more than that of yours. 
 They who by some strange means have had conference with 
 some of the old heroes can only judge that delight I had in 
 reading them ; for they were to me as if they had come from 
 Virgil, Ovid, or the Father of our Sonnets — Petrarch. I must 
 love this year of my life more dearly than any that forewent it, 
 because in it I was so happy to be acquainted with such worth. 
 Whatever were Mr. Davis's other designs, methinks some secret 
 Providence directed him to these parts only. For this I will, 
 in love of you, surpass as far your countrymen as you go beyond 
 them all in true worth, and shall strive to be second to none, 
 save your fair and worthy mistress. Your other letters I de- 
 livered to Andrew Hart, and have been earnest with him in 
 that particular. How would I be overjoyed to see our North 
 once honoured with your Works as before it was with Sidney's.* 
 Though it be barren of excellency in itself, it can both love and 
 admire the excellency of others. 
 
 "December 20, 1618." 
 
 At this point, leaving the Polyolbion affair still hanging, we 
 must interrupt the correspondence between Drummond and 
 Drayton, t because a burlier figure than either tumbles in on 
 the scene. For, while* the first message of Drayton to Drum- 
 mond, and Drummond's reply, were passing through the four 
 hundred miles that separated Edinburgh from London, Ben 
 Jonson himself, no less, was actually on the tramp northwards, 
 
 * Drummond alludes to the third Edition of Sidney's Arcadia: which 
 was published by Robert Waldegrave at Edinburgh in 1599, with the title 
 "The Countesse of Pembroke's Arcadia, now the third time published, 
 with sundry new additions of the same Author." 
 
 f The letters of the correspondence, so far as quoted, will be found partly 
 in the 171 1 Edition of Drummond's Works, dispersed into two places, viz., 
 p. 153 and pp. 233 — 234, partly among Mr. David Laing's Excerpts from 
 the llawthornden MSS., Arch. Scot. IV. 90. The copies of Drummond's 
 letters, except the last, are not dated; but consideration of them in relation 
 to Drayton's letter determines their elates and succession easily enough.
 
 86 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 through those four hundred miles, on a visit to Drummond's 
 country. 
 
 What induced Ben, at the age of forty-five, to this adventure, 
 rather longsome and difficult in those days, can partly be guessed. 
 There had been a considerable fuss about Scotland all through 
 England for the last fifteen years or more ; and Literature, in its 
 quest after subjects, is always determined in those directions in 
 which events have already roused popular interest and inquisi- 
 tiveness. It would accordingly be easy to prove that, since the 
 death of Elizabeth and the accession of James, there had been 
 a tendency, among the English dramatists and other -popular 
 writers, to Scotland and Scottish history, as offering to the 
 English Muse a yet unhackneyed field of fine wild subjects. 
 The division of the country into the Lowlands and Highlands; 
 the strange manners and speech of even the former and more 
 accessible division, and the absolutely savage and mountainous 
 mystery of the other; the antiquities of both ; the battle-fields, 
 and other memorials telling of their mutual wars and their joint- 
 wars against English invasion; Edinburgh, Stirling, Linlithgow, 
 Dunfermline, Perth, with their palaces and castles, which had 
 been the birth-places or residences of the kings of the Stuart 
 line, or kings still earlier; the original seats and estates of 
 minor Scottish persons and families that had transplanted them- 
 selves into England, or lived half the year at the English Court : 
 about all this there had been long a growing rumour and a 
 growing curiosity. Add that James's royal visit to Scotland in 
 1617, with so many Englishmen in his train, after his fourteen 
 years of absence, had given a fresh fillip to the English interest 
 in Scotland and Scottish matters; and Ben Jonson's resolution 
 in 1618 to make a journey to his Sovereign's native North will 
 seem natural enough. A book might come out of it, a book 
 that would sell; a drama might come out of it. a drama that 
 would please the king, and be as picturesque for the Londoners 
 as Shakespeare's MacbdJi had been! Who knew what might 
 come out of it? Scotland had not a Ben Jonson in her every
 
 ^Etat. 33-34. BEN JONSON ON Tl/E TRAMP. 87 
 
 day; and might not the eye of a Ben Jonson, roving over the 
 hills and lakes of Scotland, her cities and men, their manners 
 and their humours, extract thence such matter of literary novelty 
 as should astonish or beneficially irritate the natives, and amuse 
 the English? Here, also, there was an anticipation in Ben 
 Jonson's life of what was to be done by his namesake, and suc- 
 cessor in corpulency and the literary dictatorship of London, 
 Dr. Samuel. When Bozzy lugged Dr. Samuel out of Fleet 
 Street and Cheapside, and hauled him away in triumph into the 
 Scottish Lowlands, and thence into the far Highlands, the 
 adventure itself, the delight of a plunge out of London mono- 
 tony into a splendid unknown savagery, was the main induce- 
 ment; but there was the prospect all the while of social note- 
 taking in the new region, and materials for a book when he 
 came back. Not otherwise, one hundred and fifty-five years 
 earlier, did Ben Jonson, with no Bozzy to pilot him, make up 
 his mind for the same unusual feat of travel. A few months in 
 Scotland for one whose life for so many years had been a round 
 of the London streets and taverns, varied only by runs into the 
 suburbs or some of the nearer English counties, would be the 
 most bracing possible form of holiday, and worth the trouble 
 were it nothing else; but one might pick up somewhat among 
 the Scots, to be turned to account on one's return, and pay 
 one's expenses. With all this, however, there was one motive 
 in Ben Jonson's visit to Scotland which was absent in Dr. 
 Samuel's later visit. If any one had hinted to Dr. Johnson that 
 he was of Scottish descent, he would have knocked the person 
 down; but Ben not only was of Scottish descent and knew it, 
 but was fond of letting the fact be known. His father, who had 
 died a month before Ben's birth in Westminster in 1574, had 
 been a grave English Protestant minister, apparently of the 
 Puritan stamp; and Ben, through all his hard youth of brick- 
 laying and book-learning together, entailed upon him by his 
 mother's second marriage with a master-bricklayer, and again 
 through the struggles of his authorship, had cherished in some
 
 88 DRVMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 nook of his rough heart the memory of this father whom he had 
 never seen, and the knowledge that that fathers father had 
 been a Johnston of Annandale in Scotland. " Johnston " had 
 been softened into "Johnson" or "Jonson," and the Scottish 
 descent thereby disguised. But what of that ? One had still 
 the Scottish blood in one that had been in the veins of those 
 Johnstons of Annandale, who were said to have been for gener- 
 ations a noted Border clan, celebrated in Scottish songs and 
 ballads; and, in passing into Scotland, one might take that 
 district in the way, and look up the scenes of one's ancestors. 
 Something of this " salmon-like instinct," as King James called 
 it, of re-ascending to one's origin did mingle with Ben Jonson's 
 other motives to his Scottish journey, and imparted a kindliness 
 to his preconceptions of Scotland which Bozzy would have 
 given guineas to see in Dr. Samuel's. 
 
 Ben's intention of visiting Scotland, especially as he an- 
 nounced that he was to make the whole journey on foot, was 
 the subject of a good deal of talk and banter in London. The 
 King seems to have encouraged him and wished him well 
 through it. Bacon, the man in all London whom Ben res- 
 pected most, and who had just been raised to the Lord-Chan- 
 cellorship as Baron Verulam, had his joke on the occasion. 
 He told Ben, when he called to take leave, that " he loved not 
 to see poesy go on other feet than poetical dactylus and 
 spondaeus." But this was not the worst of the business. No 
 sooner was Ben's intention public than it entered into the 
 head of another Londoner, John Taylor the Water-poet, who 
 earned his living by rowing a passage -boat on the Thames, but 
 was universally known also as a humourist, and a writer of 
 doggerel verses which he hawked about for sale, that he too 
 would make a journey to Scotland, beating Ben in this, that he 
 would not only do it on foot, but would do it without taking a 
 penny in his pocket. It was Ben's belief that the Water-poet had 
 been egged on to this by some of the wags about town, to turn his 
 own expedition into ridicule. It was as if, after a gentleman's
 
 /Etat 33-34. BEN JONSON IN SCOTLAND. 89 
 
 chariot had set out in proper style on the north road, a coster- 
 monger's cart had been despatched in mischief to follow it, 
 or as if behind a civic dignitary, marching in some procession, a 
 lout of comic reputation had been posted to ape his gestures. 
 So, at all events, it seemed to Ben. Nevertheless, duly some 
 time in June, or early in July 1618, he did set out as adver- 
 tised, taking to the great north road, as I should think, staff in 
 hand, by Islington, Highgate, Finchley and Barnet. The 
 Water-poet followed by the same route, on the 14th of July. 
 
 A month was a fair allowance in those days for a foot-journey 
 between London and Edinburgh. Accordingly, as we find that 
 Taylor the Water-poet reached Edinburgh on the 13th of 
 August, we may suppose that Ben Jonson had preceded him 
 into Scotland by a week or a fortnight. What places he had 
 visited on his route we do not know : only we find that he 
 had provided himself with a new pair of shoes at Darlington in 
 Durham, and suffered a good deal from them for a day or two ; 
 and it is fair to assume that from Darlington he had struck 
 westward, Carlisle-ways, so as to enter Scotland by his ancestral 
 Annandale, and reach Edinburgh through the counties of 
 Dumfries and Peebles. Neither of the inn at which he first put 
 up in Edinburgh, nor of his movements generally after he was 
 within the bounds of Scotland, have we any such accurate 
 record as Bozzy's care has preserved for us of the Scottish tour 
 of the great Dr. Samuel. It was the autumn-time, the fittest for 
 travelling in the country-parts of the Lowlands, and in such 
 parts of the Highlands as were then accessible to travel at all ; 
 and, as not a few of the Scottish lords and gentlemen of the 
 English Court, known to Ben, and who may have concurred in 
 inviting him to Scotland, were then back in their Scottish 
 homes, it is possible that, without settling in Edinburgh first, 
 he made a round of some of the western and southern districts. 
 Gifford, in his Life of Ben Jonson, expressly mentions "the 
 connexions of the Duke of Lennox " as among the Scottish 
 friends from whom he expected hospitality ; and it is certain
 
 go 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 that Ben did make personal acquaintance, in the course of his 
 tour, with the Lennox district of Scotland, including the 
 beauties of Lochlomond, and perhaps a touch more of the 
 Highlands in that vicinity, where Rob Roy afterwards lurked 
 and held rule. But, then as now, August and September were 
 the likeliest months for a tour in that beautiful region, and 
 glimpses of its mountains, glens, and lochs. The Water-poet, 
 at all events, as he told people in his account of his Pennyless 
 Pilgrimage, when he published it, did the Highland part of his 
 Scottish rambling in this season, leaving Edinburgh late in 
 August, after he had been about a week there, and, " after five- 
 and-thirty days hunting and travel " in the Highlands, returning 
 to Edinburgh before the end of September. Till then he and 
 Ben Jonson had not crossed each other in their wanderings ; 
 but, both by this time having done a good deal of Scotland in 
 different directions and in different sorts of society, they did 
 meet once before Taylor set out on his return to London. 
 " The day before I came from Edinburgh," says Taylor in his 
 account of this return journey, " I went to Leith, where I found 
 " my long-approved and assured good friend, Master Benjamin 
 " Jonson, at one Master John Stuart's house. I thank him for 
 " his great kindness towards me; for, at my taking leave of him, 
 " he gave me a piece of gold of two-and-twenty shillings to drink 
 " his health in England ; and withal willed me to remember his 
 " kind commendations to all his friends. So, with a friendly fare- 
 " well, I left him as well as I hope never to see him in a worse 
 " state ; for he is amongst noblemen and gentlemen that know 
 " his true worth and their own honours, where with much 
 " respective love he is worthily entertained." One is glad to 
 know that Ben had gold to give away. Probably Taylor 
 vowed to him " by the faith of a Christian," as he did after- 
 wards in his book, that the story that he had undertaken the 
 .Scottish expedition "in malice or mockage " of him was utterly 
 false ; and, though Ben still believed that he had been urged to 
 it by others in London with that view, he could not but pity
 
 , Etat. 33-34. BEN JONSON IN SCOTLAND. y 1 
 
 the poor man all forlorn in Leith, and think how he could ever 
 get back again to his wherry on the Thames. Thanks to Ben's 
 piece of gold, he did get back all safe in quicker time than 
 he had come ; for he was in London on the 18th of October, 
 ready to open the budget of his news to any who would listen, 
 and tell in what clover amon^ the Scots he had left Master 
 Jonson. 
 
 The Water-poet's absence from London had been for three 
 months only ; but Ben's absence was prolonged over nine 
 months in all, some six of which were spent in Scotland. 
 From September on through the winter of 16 18-19 ne seems to 
 have ranged about among various friends in the southern 
 counties ; there is a hint of his having been as far north as St. 
 Andrews ; but Edinburgh or Leith appears to have been his 
 head-quarters. One fancies his great figure seen day after day, 
 for a month or two in that winter, in the fields between 
 Leith and Edinburgh, or climbing the old Canongate and High 
 Street from Holyrood to the Castle, or seated in Andro Hart's 
 shop, or descending some of the closes for a call, or sauntering 
 out as far as the College, or again, in various directions, to 
 Musselburgh and Pinkie, Craigmillar, and such-like spots of 
 local fame in the neighbourhood. Scores of the Edinburgh and 
 Leith people of that day must have seen him, talked with him, 
 entertained him; and he himself remembered afterwards among 
 the number with special regard " the beloved Fentons, the 
 Nisbets, the Scots, the Livingstons." Unfortunately, none of 
 these thought of taking notes of the sayings and doings of their 
 illustrious visitor. In short, but for one acquaintanceship which 
 Ben Jonson formed in the course of his Scottish visit, we 
 should have barely known that there was such a visit, and it 
 would not have been an event of so much distinction as it is in 
 British literary history. This was his acquaintanceship with 
 Drummond of Hawthornden. 
 
 The traditional statement that Jonson came to Scotland " on 
 purpose to visit Drummond" is a pure imagination. He knew
 
 9 2 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTI10RXDEN. 
 
 of Drummond's existence, and of his poetry, and he may have 
 thought of him as one of the Scots he would like to see ; but 
 his journey had been undertaken for much more miscellaneous 
 reasons, and the meeting with Drummond was but an episode 
 in it. Their first meeting may have occurred soon after Jonson's 
 arrival in Edinburgh, or before Taylor saw Jonson in Leith; and 
 there may have been occasional meetings besides in Edinburgh 
 houses through the winter of 1 6 18-19. But the meeting of 
 meetings, the one long meeting Avhich made the two men 
 thoroughly known to each other, and Drummond's account of 
 which has been faithfully transmitted to our time, was during 
 the two or three weeks which Jonson spent with Drummond 
 continuously, by invitation, in Drummond's own house in 
 Hawthornden. The exact weeks cannot be determined ; but 
 they were certainly before January 17, 16 19, and may have 
 been some time about the Christmas-season of that year. Better 
 than most myths of the kind is the myth which would tell us 
 exactly 'how the visit began. Drummond, it says, was sitting 
 under the great sycamore-tree in front of his house, expecting 
 his visitor, when at length, descending the well-hedged avenue 
 from the public road to the house, the bulky hero hove in sight. 
 Rising, and stepping forth to meet him, Drummond saluted 
 him with "Welcome, welcome, royal Ben!" to which Jonson 
 replied " Thank ye, thank ye, Hawthornden !" and they laughed, 
 fraternized, and went in together. 
 
 For two or three weeks, at all events, Drummond had Ben 
 Jonson all to himself. There would, doubtless, be friends from 
 Edinburgh, perhaps Scot of Scotstarvet and two or three 
 more, asked out every other day to make dinner-company for 
 the great man ; and, again, once or twice, Drummond and Ben 
 may have trudged into Edinburgh together in the forenoon, or 
 walked together by cross-roads to the house of some neighbour 
 of Drummond's. (Carriages were not then much in fashion near 
 Edinburgh, and I do not think Drummond kept one, or had a 
 horse fit for a rider of Ben's size.) But then, even when there
 
 Mtat. 33.34. BEN JONSON'S VISIT TO DRUMMOND. 93 
 
 were other guests at Drummond's table, Ben would be the 
 principal talker; and, when Ben and Dnimmond walked briskly 
 together in the winter-weather by the paths in the glen itself, 
 close to the house, or on the high-way or cross-roads near, Ben 
 would still be talking, and Drummond chiefly listening. You 
 must remember also that Drummond's was a bachelor's house- 
 hold, and that, when he and Ben were alone together in the 
 evenings, and the candles were lit in the chief room, and the 
 supper was removed, there would still be wine on the board. 
 Then, if you know anything of the two men, you can see the 
 scene as distinctly as if you had been peeping through the 
 window. You can see the two sitting on snugly by the ruddy 
 fire far into the night, hardly hearing the murmur of the Esk 
 and the moaning of the wind outside, but talking of all things 
 in heaven or earth, Ben telling anecdotes of his London 
 acquaintances back to Shakespeare, and reciting scraps of 
 poetry, and pronouncing criticisms on poets, and Drummond 
 now and then taking out a manuscript from a desk and 
 modestly reading as much as Ben would stand, and Ben 
 helping himself and going off again, and the noise and the 
 laughter always increasing on his part, till Drummond at length 
 would grow dizzy with too much of it, and light their bedroom 
 tapers by way of signal. And next morning you may be sure it 
 would be a late breakfast, and Ben would be surly and taciturn 
 for a while ; but gradually he would come round, and the day's 
 talk would begin again. As surely, I repeat, as if you had been 
 a spy sent to watch, this is what went on in Hawthornden House 
 during that fortnight or so when the great Ben from London 
 was the guest of the cultured Drummond. 
 
 The visit was one to be marked with a red mark in 
 Drummond's calendar. , Here he had been for many years in 
 his Scottish retirement, far from the London world of politics 
 and letters, and with only such information from that world as 
 might be blown to him among his books by rumour, or brought 
 occasionally by Sir William Alexander and other friends. But
 
 94 DRUMMOND OF II A WTHORNDEN. 
 
 now he had under his own roof the very laureate of the London 
 world, the man who had known everybody of note in it since 
 Elizabeth was queen, and whose habits of talk made him the 
 very paragon of gossips. It was, doubtless, a great treat. 
 But there is nothing perfect under the sun. There is evidence 
 that Drummond, when he had Ben all to himself, began to feel 
 that he had caught a Tartar. Ben's own poetry, it is to be re- 
 membered, the poetry of general and miscellaneous strength 
 rather than of the pure and soft musical vein, was not that 
 which would have predisposed Drummond to forgive him his 
 personal faults from a sense of literary allegiance. Hence, 
 though he was scrupulously polite to Ben all the while he was 
 his guest, and must have thought him one of the most massive 
 and impressive fellows he had ever met, his private feeling, as 
 he sat opposite, watching the vast bulk in the chair, and the 
 lighting up of his surly visage as he swilled off glass after glass, 
 must have been " Can this really be the accepted living chief of 
 British Literature?" Fortunately for us, nevertheless, Drum- 
 mond, whose leisurely life had led him, as we know, into the 
 habit of abundant note-making and keeping of commonplace- 
 books, did make notes of Ben Jonson's conversations. Here 
 is a sample of the items which, while Ben was with him or 
 immediately afterwards, he thus jotted down : — 
 
 ben's gossip about various eminent people. 
 
 Queen Elizabeth. — "Queen Elizabeth never saw herself after 
 she became old in a true glass : they painted her, and some- 
 times would vermilion her nose. She had always, about Christ- 
 mas Evens, set dice that threw sixes or fives (and she knew not 
 they were other) to make her win, and esteem herself fortunate. 
 King Philip had intention, by dispensation of the 
 Pope, to have married her." 
 
 Elizabeth's Earl of Leicester. — " The Earl of Leicester 
 gave a bottle of liquor to his lady, which he willed her to use in 
 any faintness ; which she, after his return from Court, not 
 knowing it was poison, gave him, and so he died [Sept. 1588]."
 
 AEtat. 33-34. THE HAWTHORNDEN CONVERSATIONS. 95 
 
 King James. — "The King said Sir P. Sidney was no poet; 
 neither did he see ever any verses in England [equal] to the 
 Sculler's [i.e., to Taylor the Water-poet' s]. . . He [Ben Jon- 
 son] said to the King that his master, Mr. George Buchanan, 
 had corrupted his ear when young, and learnt him to sing 
 verses when he should have read them. . . . Sir Francis 
 Walsingham said of our King, when he was ambassador in 
 Scotland, ' Hie nunquam regnabit superius." " 
 
 Inigo Jones. — " He [Ben Jonson] said to Prince Charles of 
 Inigo Jones, that, when he wanted words to express the greatest 
 villain in the world, he would call him an Inigo." 
 
 BEN'S CENSURE OF ENGLISH WRITERS, LIVING AND DEAD, 
 AND GOSSIP ABOUT THEM. 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney. — " That Sidney did not keep a decorum 
 in making every one speak as well as himself. . . . For 
 a Heroic Poem, he said, there was no such ground as King- 
 Arthur's fiction; and that Sir P. Sidney had ane intention to 
 have transformed all his Arcadia to the stories of King Arthur. 
 . . . Sir P. Sidney was no pleasant man in countenance, 
 his face being spoiled with pimples, and of high blood, and 
 long. . . . The Countess of Rutland [died 1612] was 
 nothing inferior to her father, Sir P. Sidney, in poesy." 
 
 Spenser. — "Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, nor his 
 matter. . . . That, the Irish having robbed Spenser's 
 goods, and burnt his house and a little child new born, he and 
 his wife escaped, and after he died for lack of bread in King 
 Street, and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of 
 Essex, and said he was sorry he had no time to spend them. 
 That, in that paper Sir W. Raleigh had (from Spenser) of the 
 Allegories of his Faery Qtteene, by the 'Blatant Beast' the 
 Puritans were understood, by the ' False Duessa ' the Queen of 
 Scots." 
 
 Raleigh. — " That Sir W. Raleigh esteemed more of fame 
 than conscience. The best wits of England were employed for 
 making his History. Ben himself had written a piece to him 
 of the Punic war, which he altered and set in his books. Sir 
 W. Raleigh hath written the life of Queen Elizabeth, of which 
 there is copies extant." 
 
 Hooker. — " Hooker's Ecclesiastical History, whose children
 
 9 6 
 
 DRUMMOXD OF HAWTHORN DEN. 
 
 are now beggars, [is the best book in English] for Church 
 matters." 
 
 Southwell the Jesuit. — " That Southwell was hanged; yet, 
 so he [Ben Jonson] had written that piece of his, The Bartiing 
 Babe, he would have been content to destroy many of his." 
 
 Shakespeare. — " That Shakespeare wanted art. . . . 
 Shakespeare, in a play, brought in a number of men saying 
 they had suffered shipwrack in Bohemia, where there is no sea 
 near by some hundred miles." 
 
 Lord Bacon. — " My Lord-Chancellor of England wringeth 
 his speeches from the strings of his band, and other counsellors 
 from the picking of their teeth." 
 
 Sir Thomas Overbury. — " Overbury was first his friend; 
 then turned his mortal enemy." 
 
 Daniel. — " Samuel Daniel was a good, honest man, had no 
 children; but no poet. . . . Daniel was at jealousies with 
 him." 
 
 Drayton. — "That Michael Drayton's Polyolbion, if he had 
 performed what he promised to write (the deeds of all the 
 worthies), had been excellent: his long verses pleased him 
 not. . . . Drayton feared him, and he esteemed not of 
 him." 
 
 Chapman and Fletcher. — " That the translations of Homer 
 and Virgil in long Alexandrines were but prose. . . . 
 That Chapman and Fletcher were loved of him. . 
 That, next himself, only Fletcher and Chapman could make 
 a masque." 
 
 Sylvester, Fairfax, and Harrington. — " That Sylvester's 
 translation of Du Bartas was not well done, and that he [Ben 
 Jonson] wrote his verses before it [an epigram of high commen- 
 dation by Jonson, prefixed, among others, to Sylvester's book] 
 ere he understood to confer [i.e., compare with the original]. 
 Nor that of Fairfax's [the translation of Tasso]. 
 That Sir John Harrington's Ariosto, under all translations, 
 was the worst." . . . 
 
 Francis Beaumont. — " That Francis Beaumont loved too 
 much himself and his own verses. . . . Francis Beau- 
 mont died ere he was 30 years of age."
 
 Mtat. 33-34. THE HAWTHORNDEN CONVERSATIONS. 97 
 
 Marston. — " He beat Marston, and took his pistol from 
 him. Marston wrote his father-in-law's preachings, and his 
 father-in-law his [Marston's] Comedies." 
 
 Dr. Donne. — " That Donne's Anniversary was profane and 
 full of blasphemies : that he told Mr. Donne if he had written 
 of the Virgin Mary it had been something; to which he an- 
 swered that he described the idea of a woman, and not as she 
 was. That Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hang- 
 ing. . . . He esteemeth John Donne the first poet in 
 the world in some things. Affirmeth Donne to have written 
 all his best pieces ere he was 25 years old. . . . The 
 conceit of Donne's Transformation, or Metempsychosis, was that 
 he sought the soul of that apple which Eva pulled, and there- 
 after made it the soul of a bitch, then of a she-wolf, and so of a 
 woman. His general purpose was to have brought in all the 
 bodies of the Heretics from the soul of Cain, and at last left it 
 in the body of Calvin. Of this he never wrote but one sheet ; 
 and now, since he was made Doctor, repenteth highly, and 
 seeketh to destroy all his Poems. . . . Donne's grand- 
 father, on the mother side, was Heywood the Epigrammatist. 
 That Donne himself, from not being understood, would perish." 
 
 Sir William Alexander and Sir Robert Aytoun. — " Sir 
 W. Alexander was not half kind to him, and neglected him, 
 because [he, Sir \V., was] a friend to Drayton. . . . That 
 Sir R. Aytoun loved him dearly." 
 
 Selden. — " [Among important books] Selden's Titles of 
 Honour, for antiquities; and ane book of The Gods of the 
 Gentiles whose names are in Scripture. ... J. Selden 
 liveth on his own ; is the law-book of the Judges of England ; 
 the bravest man in all languages." 
 
 Nat Field. — " Nat Field was his [Jonson's] scholar, and he 
 had read to him the Satires of Horace and some Epigrams of 
 Martial." 
 
 A Pack of Rogues and Fools. — " That Sharpham, Day, 
 Dekker, were all rogues, and that Minshew was one. . . . 
 That Abraham Fraunce, in his English Hexameters, was a fool. 
 . . . That Markham was not of the faithful, i.e. Poets, and 
 but a base fellow. That such were Day and Middleton." 
 
 G
 
 9 8 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 ben's opinions of classical authors. 
 
 " That Petronius, Plinius Secundus, Tacitus, spoke best 
 Latin; that Quintilian's 6th, 7th, and 8th Books were not only 
 to be read, but altogether digested. Juvenal, Persius, Horace, 
 Martial, for delight ; and so Pindar. . . . Lucan, taken in parts, 
 excellent ; altogether, naught. . . . Tacitus, he said, wrote the 
 secrets of the Council and Senate, as Suetonius did those of the 
 Cabinet and Courts." 
 
 ben's opinions of foreign authors. 
 
 " He thought not Bartas a poet, but a verser, because he 
 wrote not fiction. He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to 
 sonnets ; which he said were like that tyrant's bed, where some 
 who were too short were racked, others too long cut short. 
 That Guarini, in his Pastor Fido, kept not decorum, in making 
 shepherds speak as well as himself could. . . . That Bonne- 
 fonius' Vigilium Veneris was excellent. . . . That the best 
 pieces of Ronsard were his odes." 
 
 [Note by Drummond here — " All this was to no purpose, for 
 he neither doth understand French nor Italians."] 
 
 ben's talk about himself and his own writings. 
 
 " His Grandfather came from Carlisle, and, he thought, from 
 Annandale to it ; he served King Henry VIII., and was a 
 gentleman. His Father lost all his estate under Queen Mary, 
 having been cast in prison and forfeited; at last turned minister; 
 so he [Ben] was a minister's son. He himself was posthumous- 
 born, a month after his father's decease ; brought up poorly ; 
 put to school by a friend (his master Camden) ; after taken 
 from it, and put to another craft, which he could not endure ; 
 then he went to the Low Countries; but, returning soon, he 
 betook himself to his wonted studies. 
 
 " In his service in the Low Countries, he had, in the face of 
 both the camps, killed ane enemy, and taken opiina sfiolia from 
 him ; and since his coming to England, being appealed to the 
 fields, he had killed his adversary [a player named Gabriel 
 Spencer, in 1598], who had hurt him in the arm, and whose 
 sword was ten inches longer than his ; for the which he was 
 imprisoned and almost at the gallows. Then took his religion 
 by trust, of a priest who visited him in prison. Thereafter he 
 was twelve years a Papist. ... In the time of his close
 
 „£iirf. 33-34- THE HAWTHORNDEN CONVERSATIONS. 99 
 
 imprisonment, under Queen Elizabeth, his judges could get 
 nothing of him to all their demands but Ay and No. They 
 placed two damned villains, to catch advantage of him, with 
 him ; but he was advertised by his keeper : of the spies he hath 
 ane epigram. [No LIX. of Ben's ' Epigrams.'] 
 
 " He married a wife who was a shrew, yet honest. Five years 
 he had not been with her, but remained with my Lord Aubigny. 
 
 " When the King came in England at that time the pest was 
 in London, he [Ben], being in the country at Sir Robert 
 Cotton's house with old Camden, saw in a vision his eldest son, 
 then a child and at London, appear unto him with the mark of 
 a bloody cross on his forehead, as if it had been cutted with a 
 sword ; at which amazed he prayed unto God, and on the 
 morning he came to Mr. Camden's chamber to tell him ; who 
 persuaded him it was but ane apprehension of his phantasy, at 
 which he should not be disjected: in the meantime comes there 
 letters from his wife of the death of that boy in the plague. 
 He appeared to him, he said, of a manly shape, and of that 
 growth that he thinks he shall be at the Resurrection. 
 
 " He was delated by Sir James Murray to the King for writing 
 something against the Scots in a play Eastward Ho ! and volun- 
 tarily imprisoned himself with Chapman and Marston, who had 
 written it amongst them. The report was that they should 
 then have had their ears cut and noses. After their delivery he 
 banqueted all his friends ; there was Camden, Selden, and 
 others. At the midst of the feast his old Mother drank to 
 him, and showed him a paper which she had, if the sentence 
 had taken execution, to have mixed in the prison among his 
 drink, which was full of lusty strong poison ; and, that she was 
 no churl, she told she minded first to have drunk of it herself. 
 
 " He had many quarrels with Marston ; beat him, and took 
 his pistol from him ; wrote his Poetaster on him. . . . 
 
 " Sir W. Raleigh sent him governor with his son, anno 1613, to 
 France. This youth, being knavishly inclined, among other 
 pastimes . . . caused him [Ben] to be drunken, and dead 
 drunk, so that he knew not where he was ; thereafter laid him 
 on a car, which he made to be drawn by pioneers through the 
 streets, at every corner showing his governor stretched out, and 
 telling them that was a more lively image of the crucifix than 
 any they had : at which sport young Raleigh's mother delighted 
 much, saying his father young was so inclined; though the father 
 abhorred it. . . .
 
 ioo DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 "He was Master of Arts in both the Universities, by their 
 favour, not his study. . . . He can set horoscopes, but trusts 
 not in them. He, with the consent of a friend, cozened a lady, 
 with whom he had made appointment to meet ane old Astrologer 
 in the suburbs ; which she keeped, and it was himself dis- 
 guised in a long gown and a white beard, at the light of dim- 
 burning candles, up in a little cabinet reached unto by a ladder. 
 . . . Every first day of the new year he had ^20 sent him 
 by the Earl of Pembroke to buy books. . . . One day being at 
 table with my Lady Rutland [Sidney's daughter and a poetess], 
 her husband, coming in, accused her that she kept table to 
 poets ; of which she wrote a letter to him [Ben], which he 
 answered. My Lord intercepted the letter, but never challenged 
 him. . . . After he was reconciled with the Church, and left 
 off to be a Recusant, at his first communion, in token of true 
 reconciliation, he drank out all the full cup of wine. . . . He 
 hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, 
 about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Car- 
 thaginians, fight in his imagination. . . . Northampton was his 
 mortal enemy, for beating, on a St. George's day, one of his 
 attenders : he was called before the Council for his Sejanus, and 
 accused both of Popery and Treason by him. . . . Sundry 
 times he hath devoured his books, i.e., sold them all for 
 necessity. . . . He hath a mind to be a churchman ; and, so 
 he might have favour to make one sermon to the King, he 
 careth not what thereafter should befall him, for he would not 
 flatter though he saw death. . . . He never esteemed of a man for 
 the name of a Lord. . . . He was better versed and knew 
 more in Greek and Latin than all the poets in England, and 
 quintessence their brains. 
 
 "Of all his Plays he never gained ,£200. . . . The half 
 of his Comedies were not in print. . . . He hath a Pastoral 
 written long ago] entitled The May Lord. His own name 
 "in it] is Alkin, Ethra the Countess of Bedford's, Mogibell 
 Overbury, the old Countess of Suffolk an Enchantress ; other 
 names are given to Somerset's Lady, Pembroke, the Countess 
 of Rutland, Lady Wroth. In his first story Alkin cometh in 
 mending his broken pipe. [This Pastoral is lost]. . . . That 
 Epithalamium that wants a name in his printed works was 
 made at the Earl of Essex's marriage. ... A Play of his 
 upon which he was accused [is called] The Devil is an Ass. 
 According to Comoedia Vetus in England, the Devil was
 
 jEtat. 33-34. THE HAWTHORNDEN CONVERSATIONS. IO i 
 
 brought in either with one Vice or other ; the play done, the 
 Devil carried away the Vice. [But] he brings in the Devil so 
 overcome with the wickedness of the age that he thought 
 himself ane Ass. Uapepyovs [?] is discoursed of the Duke of 
 Drounland [?]. The King desired him to conceal it. [Accord- 
 ingly, though the play was acted in 16 16, it was not printed till 
 long afterwards.] . . . He hath commented and translated 
 Horace's Art of Poesy : it is in dialogue-ways ; by Criticus he 
 understandeth Dr. Donne. The book that goes about, The Art 
 of English Poesy, was done twenty years since, and kept long 
 in writ as a secret. . . . He had written a Discourse of Poesy 
 both against Campion and Daniel, especially this last; where he 
 proves couplets to be the bravest sort of verses, especially when 
 they are broken, like Hexameters, and that cross rhymes and 
 stanzas (because the purpose would lead him beyond eight lines 
 to conclude) were all forced. . . . Pembroke and his lady dis- 
 coursing, the Earl said the women were men's shadows, and 
 she maintained them. Both appealing to Jonson, he affirmed 
 it true ; for which my Lady gave a penance to prove it in verse. 
 Hence his epigram [printed in his Works]. . . . He had ane 
 intention to have made a Play like Plautus's Amphitrio ; but 
 left it off, for that he could never find two [actors] so like others 
 that he could persuade the spectators they were one. . . . 
 That piece of The Pucelle of the Court [the epigram of that 
 name printed among his ' Underwoods '] was stolen out of his 
 pocket by a gentleman who drank him drowsy, and given 
 Mistress Boulstred [the subject of it] ; which brought him great 
 displeasure. . . . 
 
 " He wrote all his [poetry] first in prose, for so his master 
 Camden had learned him. Verses stood by sense without 
 either colours or accent ['which yet other times he denied,' 
 adds Drummond]. ... A great many epigrams were ill because 
 they expressed in the end what should have been understood 
 by what was said. . . . He scorned such verses as could be 
 transponed. . . . He scorned anagrams. . . . His impresa 
 [device for a seal] was a compass with one foot in centre, the 
 other broken ; the word [motto] Deest quod duceret orbem. . . . 
 His arms were three spindles or rhombi ; his own word [motto] 
 about them Percunctabor or Perscrutator. ... Of all styles he 
 loved most to be named ' Honest,' and hath of that ane 
 hundred letters so naming him. ... In his merry humour he 
 was wont to name himself ' The Poet.' . . .
 
 I o 2 DR UMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 "He had ane intention to perfect ane Epic Poem, entitled 
 Heroologia, of the Worthies of this country roused by Fame, 
 and was to dedicate it to his country : it is all in couplets, for he 
 detesteth all other rhymes. . . . He hath intention to write a 
 Fisher or Pastoral Play and set the stage of it in the Lomond 
 Lake. . . . He is to write his foot Pilgrimage hither, and to 
 call it A Discovery. In a Poem [now lost] he calleth Edin- 
 burgh 
 
 'The heart of Scotland, Britain's other eye.'" 
 
 ben's readings to drummond, and his favourite 
 quotations from himself and others. 
 
 " He read his translation of that ode of Horace, Beatus ille 
 qui firocul negotiis, and admired it. . . . He read the Preface of 
 his Art of Poesy, upon Horace's Art of Poesy, where he hath 
 ane apology of a play of his, St. Bartholomew's Fair. . . . The 
 most commonplace of his repetition was a Dialogue Pastoral 
 between a shepherd and a shepherdess about singing [The 
 Musical Strife, now printed among Ben's " Underwoods "] : 
 another Parabostes Pariane, with his letter ; that Epigram of 
 Gout; my Lady Bedford's Buck [No. LXXXIV. of Ben's 
 "Epigrams"] ; his Verses of Drinking, "Drink to me only with 
 thine eyes," "Swell me a bowl" [in The Poetaster], &c. ; his 
 Verses of a Kiss. . . . He read a Satire of a Lady come from 
 the Bath ; Verses on the Pucelle of the Court, Mistress Boul- 
 stred, whose epitaph Donne made ; a satire telling there was no 
 abuses to make a satire of, and in which he repeateth all the 
 abuses in England and the World. . . . [Donne's] verses of 
 The Lost Chain he hath by heart [the piece is printed among 
 Donne's "Elegies," and consists of 114 lines], and that passage 
 of 2'he Calm, " That dust and feathers do not stir, all was so 
 quiet " [these are not the exact words : see the poem among 
 Donne's " Letters "]. ... Sir Henry Wotton's verses of a 
 Happy Life he hath by heart ; and a piece of Chapman's trans- 
 lation of the 13th of the Iliads, which he think eth well done. . . . 
 He hath by heart some verses of Spenser's Calendar, about 
 wine, between Colin and Percy [probably a passage near the 
 end of the 10th Eclogue, where, however, the speakers are 
 Pierce and Cuddie]. . . . He had oft [in his mouth] this 
 verse, though he scorned it : 
 
 " So long as we may, let us enjoy this breath, 
 For nought doth kill a man so soon as Death."
 
 jEtat. 33-34. THE HAWTIJORNDEN CONVERSATIONS. 103 
 
 ben's criticisms of drummond's poetry, and advices 
 
 TO HIM. 
 
 " His censure of my verses was that they were all good, 
 especially my Epitaph of the Prince \M<zliades\ save that they 
 smelled too much of the Schools, and were not after the fancy 
 of the time ; for a child, says he, may write after the fashion of 
 the Greek and Latin verses in running : yet that he wished, to 
 please the King, that piece of Forth Feasting had been his 
 own. . . . He recommended to my reading Quintilian ; who, 
 he said, would tell me the faults of my verses as if he lived 
 with me. . . . He said to me that I was too good and simple, 
 and that oft a man's modesty made a fool of his wit. . . . He 
 dissuaded me from Poetry, for that she had beggared him, 
 when he might have been a rich lawyer, physician, or mer- 
 chant." 
 
 From these specimens (and they are by no means the whole)* 
 
 x In the 1 71 1 edition of Drummond's Works (pp. 224-226) there was 
 printed a very imperfect, though not unfair, compilation of Drummond's 
 Memoranda of Ben's visit, under the title of "Heads of a Conversation 
 betwixt the famous Poet Ben Johnson and William Drummond of Haw- 
 thornden, January 1619." This compilation, which the editors of that 
 edition had thought sufficient, was all that was accessible for more than a 
 hundred years ; and it was on it that Gifford, in his Life of fonson, 
 founded his perverse, and utterly absurd and bulldog-like, attacks on Drum 
 mond for supposed malignity, &c. When Mr. David Laing began, in 1827, 
 his examination of the Hawthornden MSS. in the possession of the Anti- 
 quarian Society of Scotland, he hoped to find the originals of the precious 
 Notes among those MSS. In this he was disappointed, — finding only the 
 empty envelope which had contained the Notes, and which bore the in- 
 scription, "Informations and Manners by Ben fonson to W. D., 1619;" 
 but his further search was rewarded by discovering, in a miscellaneous 
 collection of MSS., entitled Adversaria, in the hand-writing of the Scot- 
 tish antiquary, Sir Robert Sibbald, preserved in the Advocates' Library in 
 Edinburgh, a complete transcript of the missing document, made by that 
 antiquary, apparently between 1700 and 1 7 10. From this transcript, headed 
 " Informations by Ben fonson to W. D., when he came to Scotland upon foot, 
 1619," Mr. Laing edited the long-lost relic, with valuable notes, in a 
 paper read before the Society of Scottish Antiquaries, January 9, 1832, and 
 afterwards published in their Transactions {Arch. Scot., IV., 241-270). A 
 separate edition of the same, with a Preface by Mr. Laing, appeared in 
 1842 as one of the publications of the Shakespeare Society. Altogether, 
 this is one of the most interesting of the many services to Literary History 
 that have been rendered by Mr. Laing in the course of his life -long labours 
 
 and researches. In the text I have taken but the portion of the Notes 
 
 that seemed suitable for this volume, and have given these a systematic 
 arrangement under headings.
 
 io4 
 
 DRUM MO ND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 it will be seen what nodes ccenceque those were in Hawthornden 
 House about Christmas 1 6 18-19, when Ben was Drummond's 
 guest. The morsels of Ben's talk so preserved for us are worth 
 pages of our dry literary histories of that period, and have 
 helped, indeed, to give those histories more flavour than they 
 would otherwise have had. While we are obliged to Drum- 
 mond for so much, it is ungracious to complain of deficiency ; 
 but there is one defect for which we can hardly forgive him. 
 Why have we only that meagre scrap about Shakespeare? 
 Why, when Drummond had beside him the man who could 
 have told more about Shakespeare personally than any other 
 living, did he not tap this particular fountain of gossip in 
 his guest, and keep it flowing for several hours? What 
 a world of trouble to Shakespeare's future biographers might 
 have been saved by one such hour ! The omission is the 
 more remarkable because, as we have seen, Drummond 
 had been one of Shakespeare's earliest admirers in Scotland, 
 and had his well-fingered copies of Shakespeare's Poems 
 and three of his Plays on his book-shelves, in the very room 
 where he and Ben were sitting together. So it chanced, 
 however, that, while Ben poured out so much about himself, 
 and was even a little large upon Dr. Donne, Shakespeare 
 was barely mentioned. Did Shakespeare's elusiveness of 
 publicity while he was alive actuate his disembodied spirit, 
 and was the prayer on his tombstone at Stratford-on-Avon 
 already operative, — 
 
 " Good Friend, for Jesus' sake forbear 
 To dig the dust enclosed here. 
 Blest be the man that spares these stones ; 
 And cursed be he that moves my bones " ? 
 
 Ben had been out of Drummond's house for some time, but 
 the after-relish of his visit was still fresh, when Drummond sent 
 him this note, addressed to him in his lodging in Leith, or 
 wherever else he was staying.
 
 Mtat. 33-34. BEN JON SON AND DRUMMOND. 105 
 
 " To His worthy Friend Mr. Benjamin Johnson. 
 " Sir, 
 
 " Here you have that Epigram which you desired, with 
 another of the like argument. If there be any other thing in 
 this country unto which my power can reach, command it : 
 there is nothing I wish more than to be in the calendar of them 
 who love you. I have heard from Court that the late masque 
 was not so approved of the King as in former times, and that your 
 absence was regretted. Such applause hath true worth, even 
 of those who otherwise are not for it. Thus, to the next 
 occasion, taking my leave, I remain 
 
 " Your loving friend, 
 "January 17, 1649.'"' "W. Drummond. 
 
 Jonson immediately reciprocated with this characteristic 
 missive : — 
 
 "To the Honouring Respect born of the Friendship con- 
 tracted with the Right Virtuous and Learned Mr. William 
 Drummond, and the perpetuating the same by all offices of 
 love hereafter, I, Benjamin Johnson, whom he hath honoured 
 with the leave to be called His, have with mine own hand, to 
 satisfy his request, written this imperfect song : — 
 
 " on a lover's dust made sand for an hour-glass. 
 
 " Do but consider this small dust here running in the glass, 
 By atoms moved ; 
 Could you believe that this the body ever was 
 
 Of one that loved, 
 And in his mistress' flaming playing like the fly 
 Was turned to cinders by her eye ? 
 Yes ! and, in death as life unblest, 
 
 To have't exprest, 
 Even ashes of lovers find no rest. 
 
 "Yet, that love, when it is at full, may admit heaping, re- 
 ceive another ; and this is 
 
 "a picture of myself. 
 
 " I doubt that Love is rather deaf than blind ; 
 
 For else it could not be 
 
 That she 
 Whom I adore so much should so slight me, 
 
 And cast my suit behind.
 
 106 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 I am sure my language to her is as sweet, 
 
 And all my closes meet 
 
 In numbers of as subtle feet, 
 
 As makes the youngest lie 
 That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree. 
 
 ! but my conscious fears, 
 
 That fly my thoughts between, 
 
 Prompt me that she hath seen 
 
 My hundreds of grey hairs, 
 
 Told six and forty years, 
 Read so much waist as she cannot embrace 
 My mountain belly and my rocky face ; 
 And all these though her eyes have stopped her ears." 
 
 "January 19, 1619."* 
 
 What a cracking ol society there would be if all people had 
 learnt the supreme honesty of never saying to a man's face, or 
 writing to him in letters, anything but exactly what they 
 thought of him all in all in their own minds, or might write 
 about him privately ! Precisely two days after Drummond had 
 sent to Jonson in his Leith lodging the little note that has been 
 quoted, and on the very day, it would appear, when he re- 
 ceived Ben's flourishing testimonial of reply, with its poetical 
 enclosures ("January 19, 16 19"), this is what he appended to 
 his Memoranda of Ben's visit by way of summary of the im- 
 pressions which Ben's personal presence and demeanour had 
 made upon him : — " He [Ben Jonson] is a great lover and 
 "praiser of himself; a contemner and scorn er of others ; given 
 "rather to lose a friend than a jest; jealous of every word and 
 " action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one 
 " of the elements in which he liveth); a dissembler of ill parts 
 " which reign in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth ; 
 
 * Both these Poems of Ben, slightly altered, appear in his Works, the 
 first entitled "The Hour-Glass," the second entitled " My Picture, left in 
 Scotland." I print them, with a correction or two, from the copies from 
 Ben's MS. to Drummond given in the 1711 edition of Drummond's Works, 
 pp. 154-155- It would appear, from Mr. David Laing's examination of the 
 Sibbald copy of Drummond's Notes of his Conversations with Ben, that 
 Drummond had copied them out, and appended them to these Notes, pre- 
 fixing to the first, " He sent me this Madrigal," and to the second, "And 
 that which is, as he said, a Picture of Himself." See Arch. Scot., IV. 268-9.
 
 ■^^•33-34- BEN JONSON AND DRUMMOND. IQ y 
 
 " thinketh nothing well but what either he himself or some of 
 " his friends and countrymen hath said or done : he is 
 " passionately kind and angry ; careless either to gain or keep ; 
 " vindictive, but, if he be well answered, at himself. For any 
 " religion, as being versed in both. Interpreteth best sayings 
 " and deeds often to the worst. Oppressed with phantasy, which 
 "hath ever mastered his reason, a general disease in many 
 " poets. His inventions are smooth and easy ; but above all 
 "he excelleth in a Translation." This is, no doubt, a perfectly 
 honest summing-up of Drummond's impressions ; he was quite 
 entitled to put it on paper if he chose ; and Ben Jonson's 
 admirers ought to be the last to object to such frankness. At 
 the same time it does come a little gratingly in the context of 
 the interchanged letters between the two men ; and, with all 
 allowance for any temporary discomfort to Drummond as Ben's 
 host, one cannot but see that his fastidious tastes and his 
 literary predilections disqualified him for admitting to his liking, 
 as fully as another might have done, such a huge creature as Ben, 
 faults and all. Perhaps also one can trace in Drummond's words 
 something of the irritation of a Scot at the spretce injuria patrice. 
 Although he himself acknowledged the literary barrenness of 
 Scotland at that time in comparison with England, and did not 
 over-estimate the exceptions that might be found in Sir William 
 Alexander's poetry and his own, yet Nos etiam colimus Pfuzbum 
 had been a growing feeling with him ; and it may have been a little 
 hard to hear Ben Jonson talk patronizingly of recent Scottish 
 attempts as not bad for a region so far from the London centre, 
 and recommend a course of Quintilian and English Grammar as 
 discipline for something better. 
 
 Leaving his character behind him, as we must all do, Ben 
 set out from Leith on his journey homewards on the 25th of 
 January, 1619. He set out, Drummond tells us, in the same 
 pair of shoes that had brought him from Darlington five months 
 before, and with a resolution that they should carry him as far
 
 i o 8 DR UMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 as Darlington again. Probably Drummond saw him off. At 
 all events, he had promised Drummond that, if he died on the 
 way, he would leave instructions that the papers he had written 
 about Scotland during his visit should be sent to Drummond 
 exactly as they were ; and Drummond, on his side, had under- 
 taken to forward to Ben in London certain descriptions of 
 Edinburgh, the Lomond Country, &c, needed for that more 
 complete narrative of his tour which he meant to write, and 
 for his projected Pastoral on Lochlomond. 
 
 Ben seems to have performed his return journey in a very 
 leisurely manner, breaking it into stages, and quartering himself 
 here and there with his friends and acquaintances along his 
 route. From one of these rests he must have sent a letter to 
 Edinburgh, though not to Drummond himself ; for among the 
 preserved scrolls of Drummond's letters there is the folloAving : — 
 
 " To my good Friend Ben Jonson. 
 "Sir, 
 
 "After even a longing to hear of your happy journey, 
 Mr. Fenton shew me a letter from you, remembering all your 
 friends here, and particularly (such is your kindness) me. If 
 ever prayers and good wishes could have made a voyage 
 easy, yours must have been ; for your acquaintance here in their 
 thoughts did travel along with you. The uncertainty where to 
 direct letters hath made me this time by-past not to write : 
 when I understand of your being at London I shall never, 
 among my worthiest friends, be forgetful of you. I have 
 sent the Oath of our Knights, as it was given me by Herald 
 Drysdale : if I can serve you in any other matter, you shall 
 find me most willing. Thus, wishing that the success of your 
 fortunes may answer our desires, I commit you to the tuition 
 of God. 
 
 "Edinburgh, 30th of April, 1619." 
 
 It seems doubtful whether this letter was sent, or at least in 
 this form (for there is another scroll-copy of it, slightly different) ; 
 but there is no such doubt about the following, written to 
 Drummond by Jonson shortly after his arrival in London : —
 
 ^fttf. 33-34- BEN JONSON AND DRUMMOND. xo ^ 
 
 " To my worthy, honoured, and beloved Friend, Mr. William 
 Drummond, Edinburgh. 
 
 " Most loving and beloved Sir, 
 
 " Against which titles I should most knowingly 
 offend if I made you not at length some account of myself, 
 to come even with your friendship — I am arrived safely ; with 
 a most catholic welcome, and my reports not unacceptable to 
 His Majesty. He professed, I thank God, some joy to see me, 
 and is pleased to hear of the purpose of my Book : to which I 
 most earnestly solicit you for your promise of the Inscriptions 
 at Pinkie, some things concerning the Loch of Lomond, touch- 
 ing the government of Edinburgh to urge Mr. James Scot, and 
 what else you can procure for me with all speed. Especially I 
 make it my request that you will enquire for me whether the 
 students' method at St. Andrews be the same with that at 
 Edinburgh, and so to assure me, or wherein they differ. 
 Though these requests be full of trouble, I hope they shall 
 neither burden nor weary such a friendship, whose commands 
 to me I will ever interpret a pleasure. — News we have none 
 here, but what is making against the Queen's funeral ; whereof 
 I have somewhat in hand, which shall look upon you with the 
 next [Queen Ann died March 2, 16 19]. Salute the beloved 
 Fentons, the Nisbets, the Scots, the Livingstons, and all the 
 honest and honoured names with you ; especially Mr. James 
 Writh, his wife, your sister, &c. ; and, if you forget yourself, you 
 believe not in 
 
 " Your most true friend and lover, 
 
 "Ben Johnson. 
 "London, 10th of May 1619." 
 
 Drummond's reply to this has not been preserved ; but that he 
 did send a reply, enclosing most of the information that Ben 
 Jonson wanted, appears from a subsequent letter. It is a long 
 one and must be abridged: — 
 
 k & v 
 
 To his worthy friend M. Benjamin Jonson. 
 "Sir, 
 
 " The uncertainty of your abode was a cause of my 
 " silence this time past. I have adventured this packet upon 
 " hopes that a man so famous cannot be in any place of the City
 
 no DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " or Court where he shall not be found out. In my last I sent 
 " you a description of Lochlomond, with a map of Inchmeri- 
 " noch, which may by your book be made most famous ; with 
 " the form of the Government of Edinburgh, and the method 
 " of the Colleges of Scotland. For all inscriptions, I have been 
 " curious to find out for you the Impresas and Emblems on a 
 " Bed of State, wrought and embroidered all with gold and 
 " silk by the late Queen Mary, mother to our sacred Sovereign ; 
 " which will embellish greatly some pages of your book, and is 
 " worthy of remembrance." Here accordingly follows a curious 
 and exact list of mottoes and emblems of divers royal and 
 historical personages, all of which had been wrought and em- 
 broidered on the said Bed of State by the hands of Mary, Queen 
 of Scots, during her youth in France. The first was Mary's own 
 emblem or device, " the Loadstone turning to the Pole," with 
 this anagram of her name for motto, Sa vertu m'atire 
 (Marie Stewart) : both having reference, Drummond adds, 
 " to a crucifix before which, with all her royal ornaments, she 
 " is humbled on her knees most lively, with the word Undique" 
 Then come the emblems and mottoes of Mary's mother, Mary 
 of Guise, of her uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, of Henry II. 
 and Francis I. of France, of Henry VIII. of England, and 
 many others, all punctiliously described. The Bed of State, so 
 executed by the ringers of the poor young Queen in her happy 
 youth, seems to have been a very marvel of needlework ; for 
 Drummond says, " I omit the arms of Scotland, England, and 
 " France, severally by themselves, and all quartered in many 
 " places of this bed ; the workmanship is curiously done, and 
 " above all value ; and truly it may be of this piece said, 
 " Mater lam super abcit opus. I have sent you, as you desired, 
 " the oath which the old valiant knights of Scotland gave when 
 " they received the order of knighthood ; which was done with 
 " great solemnity and magnificence. 
 
 " W. Drummond. 
 "July ist, 1 619." 
 
 With this letter the correspondence between Drummond 
 and Ben Jonson, so far as it has been preserved, comes to an 
 abrupt close;* for, though Ben lived to 1637, there is no record 
 
 * The first of the three letters last quoted is given among Mr. Laing's 
 Extracts from the Hawthorne! en MSS. {Arch. Scot., IV. 86) ; the other two 
 are given in the 171 1 edition of Drummond's Works, pp. 154-5, and p. 137.
 
 jEtat. 33-34. DRA YTON AG A IX. Y ! r 
 
 of any farther.intercourse between them. What is worse, the 
 literary fruits of Ben's tour in Scotland, which Drummond took 
 such friendly pains to mature, were never given to the world. 
 The projected Lochlomond Pastoral, which might have been a 
 kind of anticipation of Scott's Lady of the Lake, seems to have 
 remained a mere sketch in Ben's mind ; and, though he did 
 complete, in some poetical form,- the general account of his 
 Scottish Tour, and the King and all London were expecting it 
 with considerable interest, the manuscript perished, with others, 
 in the fire which burnt Ben's lodgings some time in 1620. So 
 we learn from himself in his poem on the accident called An 
 Execration upon Vulcan; where, after saying that, if he had 
 foreseen the fire and its fondness for paper, he would have 
 taken care to cram his lodging with stuff fit for burning, he 
 adds this list of his lost MSS. — 
 
 " But in my desk what was there to accite 
 So ravenous and vast an appetite ? 
 I dare not say a body, but some parts 
 There were of search and mastery in the Arts. 
 All the old Venusine in poetry, 
 And lighted by the Stagirite, could spy 
 Was there made English ; with a Grammar too, 
 To teach some that their nurses could not do, 
 The purity of Language ; and, among 
 The rest, my Journey into Scotland, 'sung 
 With all the adventures; three books not afraid 
 To speak the fate of the Sicilian Maid 
 To our own ladies ; and, in story there 
 Of our fifth Henry eight of his nine year, 
 Wherein was oil, beside the succours spent 
 Which noble Carew, Cotton, Selden lent ; 
 And twice-twelve-years-stored-up Humanity, 
 With humble gleanings in Divinity 
 After the Fathers, and those wiser guides 
 Whom faction had not drawn to study sides." 
 
 What of Drayton all this while ? Drummond's last letter to 
 him, as we saw, was on the 20th of December, 16 18. Ben Jonson 
 had then been for some time in Scotland ; but, as may be inferred 
 from various circumstances, the letter had been written before
 
 H2 DR UMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 Ben and Drummond had had their famous meeting. Hence 
 there had been no mention of Ben in it. But, as we have seen, 
 Drummond and Ben had discoursed about Drayton, among the 
 rest, in their Hawthornden colloquies, and Ben had given 
 Drummond but a so-so character of Drayton on the whole. 
 Drayton and he did not agree well together; Drayton was 
 afraid of him, and he had no esteem for Drayton, though he 
 allowed that his Polyolbion might have been an excellent book, 
 if he had kept to his promise of bringing in all the legends of 
 English heroism into it, and had not written it in such a long 
 unreadable kind of verse ! This may not have been pleasant 
 to Drummond, whose last letters to Drayton had been expressly 
 in praise of the Polyolbion, with hopes that the continuation of 
 it, which the London publishers were declining, might be 
 published from Andro Hart's Edinburgh press. Fortunately, 
 these letters had not been answered while Ben Jonson was in 
 Scotland, so that there had been no opportunity of any farther 
 criticism of Drayton by Ben in connexion with so definite an 
 adoption of the Polyolbion by the Scots. But three months 
 after Ben had left Scotland, though before he was back in 
 London, Drummond received this letter of explanation from 
 Drayton — 
 
 " To my noble friend, Mr. William Drummond of 
 Hawthornden. 
 
 " My noble Friend, 
 
 " I have at last received both your letters [that of 
 December 20, 1618, and its predecessor], and the last in a 
 letter of Sir William Alexander's enclosed, sent to me into 
 the country, where I have been all this winter, and came 
 up to London not above four days before the date of these 
 my letters to you. I thank you, my dear, sweet Drummond, 
 for your good opinion of Polyolbion. I have doue twelve 
 Books more; that is, from the 18th Book (which was 
 Kent, if you note it), all the east parts, and north to the 
 River Tweed ; but it lieth by me, for the Booksellers and 
 I are in terms. They are a company of base knaves, whom I
 
 &tot. 33-34. DRA YTON A GA IN. 
 
 113 
 
 both scorn and kick at. Your love, worthy friend, I do heartily 
 embrace and cherish; and the ofter your letters come the 
 better shall they be welcome. And so, wishing you all happi- 
 ness, I commit you to God's tuition, and rest ever 
 
 " Your assured friend, 
 
 "Michael Drayton. 
 "London, 14th April, 1619. 
 
 "I have written to Mr. Hart a letter, which comes with this."* 
 
 Nothing, after all, came of Drayton's incipient negotiation 
 with Andro Hart. That Edinburgh worthy, who had been in 
 business as far back as 1596, and had then been in trouble for 
 his bookselling and his Presbyterian activity, died in good old 
 age in December, 1621, leaving the business to John Hart, 
 his son ; and the second part of Drayton's Polyolbion still 
 ran the gauntlet of the proper London booksellers. It did 
 at last see the light, through one of these booksellers, in 1622, 
 when the addition of the twelve new " Songs " or Books which 
 Drayton had composed to the eighteen which had been 
 published in 1613, and which had meanwhile been enriched by 
 Selden's learned annotations, completed the work to its present 
 size of thirty Books. About the same time, or a little before 
 (161 9 and 1620), Drayton had been successful in obtaining a 
 London publisher for a new collection of his miscellaneous 
 Poems. But, though thus independent at length of that 
 expected Scottish rescue from the London book-trade in which 
 Drummond had been willing to assist, the English veteran 
 retained an affection for Drummond to the end of his days. 
 They were never to meet ; but letters continued occasionally to 
 pass between them. Nay more, in an interesting metrical Epistle 
 of Drayton's to one of his English friends On Poets and Poesy, 
 both Drummond and Sir William Alexander were handsomely 
 commemorated. In that Epistle, which gives a critical and 
 really pleasant sketch of the History of English Poetry, begin- 
 
 * Drummond 's Works, p. 153. 
 H
 
 ii4 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 ning with Chaucer and Gower, and descending through Surrey, 
 Wyatt, Gascoigne, and Churchyard, all punctually named and 
 characterized, to Spenser, Sidney, Warner, Marlowe, Nash, 
 Shakespeare, Daniel, Ben Jonson, Chapman, Sylvester, Sandys, 
 and the rest of the Elizabethan group, and so to the two 
 Beaumonts and William Browne, as the latest English comers, 
 Drayton devotes a special paragraph to the only two Scottish 
 poets whom he cared to include in so glorious a company : — 
 
 " So Scotland sent us hither for our own 
 That man whose name I ever would have known 
 To stand by mine, that most ingenious knight 
 My Alexander, to whom in his right 
 I want extremely. Yet, in speaking thus, 
 I do but show the love that was 'twixt us, 
 And not his numbers ; which were brave and high, 
 So like his mind was his clear poesy. 
 And my dear Drummond, to whom much I owe, 
 For his much love, and proud was I to know 
 His poesy. For which two worthy men, 
 I Menstrie still shall love, and Hawthornden."
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 LAST SIX YEARS OF KING JAMES'S REIGN: KERR OF ANCRAM'S 
 BANISHMENT: AFFAIRS OF SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER: VARIOUS 
 LETTERS OF DRUMMOND : HIS FLOWERS OF SION AND CYPRESS 
 GROVE. 
 
 1619 — 1625. 
 
 ""* HE six years of Drummond's life immediately succeeding 
 those rich ones of Drayton and Ben Jonson reminiscence 
 are years of comparative dearth. Living on at Hawthornden, 
 with Edinburgh by way of near variety, and now and then an 
 excursion within moderate limits, Drummond persevered quietly 
 among his books and papers, receiving tidings of the wide world 
 around him, ruminating these tidings in his philosophic 
 melancholy, and distributing more or less of his thoughts in his 
 correspondence with friends. 
 
 The year 1620 opened with an incident of some interest to 
 him on grounds of private friendship. His friend Sir Robert 
 Kerr of Ancram, Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the King, 
 had got into serious trouble. Though past forty years of age, 
 he had had a quarrel at Newmarket, where the Court then was, 
 with a gigantic young bully, called Charles Maxwell, and had 
 killed him in a duel. Fortunately, the dead man was only a 
 Scotchman too, and even his relatives were in no great agony 
 about losing him. Still it was an awkward affair ; and, for the
 
 n6 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 sake of appearances, Kerr had to go for a while into exile in 
 Holland. 
 
 His friends were naturally concerned. The affair is 
 mentioned, with much sympathy for Kerr, in a brief note from 
 Sir William Alexander to Drummond, dated " Newmarket, 7 
 February," in which the recent death of Samuel Daniel the Poet 
 (Oct., 16 19) is also mentioned. Drummond, however, had 
 already heard of Kerr's trouble; and there are three friendly letters 
 of his to Kerr in relation to it. In the first, dated Feb. 10, 
 1620, he takes Kerr gently to task for his rashness. " It was too 
 " much hazarded in a point of honour. Why should true valour 
 " have answered fierce barbarity, nobleness arrogancy, religion 
 "impiety, innocence malice, the disparagement being so vast? 
 "... The lives of twenty such as his who hath fallen, in 
 " honour's balance, would not counterpoise your one." The 
 other two letters are undated in the preserved copies, but must 
 have followed in the same year at a little interval. In one 
 Drummond seeks to amuse Kerr by sending him some anagrams 
 on his name which he had found in turning over his uncle 
 Fowler's papers. That old gentleman and poet, as we know, 
 had been an inveterate maker of anagrams ; and, in twisting 
 and retwisting Kerr of Ancram's name amongst others, in its 
 Latinized form, Robertus Carus Ancramus, he had hit upon 
 these three combinations of the letters — Curans Recturus 
 Amabor (" Taking care and coming to rule, I shall be loved "), 
 which Drummond properly passes by as rubbish ; At Sum 
 Arcens Robur Arcus ("But I am a bow resisting violence"), 
 of which Drummond thinks something relevant might be made; 
 and Cur Arma Robuste Curans ("Why robustly managing 
 arms?"), which Drummond thinks prophetical of Kerr's mishap. 
 "Why should ye be so strong in arms in this clime of Sybarites?" 
 he adds; and the rest of the letter is taken up with a tirade against 
 anagrams. "They are the most idle study in the world of 
 learning"; and any devotee to them must be homo miserrimcB 
 patkntice, as his good uncle Fowler had found to his cost !
 
 Mtat. 34-40. KERR OF ANCRAM. II7 
 
 "Of all the Anagrammatists, and with least pain, he was the best 
 "who out of his own name, being 'Jacques de la Chambre,' 
 "found 'La Chambre de Jacques,' and rested there; and next 
 "to him here at home a gentleman who, his mistress's name 
 " being 'Anna Graeme,' found it an Anagram already." The 
 next letter, addressed to Kerr in his temporary banishment, is 
 more serious, and begins thus : — 
 
 " However Fortune turn her wheel, I find you still yourself, 
 and so ballasted with your own worth that you may outdare 
 any storm. This is that jewel which neither change of court 
 nor climates can rob you of; of what is yours you have lost 
 nothing. By this quadrant I have ever measured your height; 
 neither here could the vapours of Court make me err. Long 
 since I learnt not to esteem of any golden butterflies there but 
 as of counters whose places give them only worth. You are 
 born to act brave parts on this theatre of the world : as your 
 Prince is wise, so I am assured he is well read in man, and knows 
 you are not one to be lost. What know you to what end that 
 Sovereign Wisdom who hath hitherto been so strong a defence 
 with you hath removed you from your own country? By this 
 means you may return more welcome, more beloved, and with 
 greater honour, than when you left her. ..." * 
 
 The Court of King James, whether it was at Newmarket or 
 in London, was not the most comfortable of places for sensitive 
 people. You did not need to kill a man; it was enough if you 
 interfered with his Majesty's monopoly in the translation of King 
 David's Psalms. Even while in Scotland, King James had felt 
 that the translation of these Psalms might be a fit work for him- 
 self, as uniting the two capacities of King and Poet, so rarely 
 combined since the days of the Hebrew original. But, since 
 his accession to the English throne, the work had engaged him 
 more definitely. Setting his bishops and divines to work, he 
 had at length, in 161 1, provided his subjects with an authorized 
 
 * The Letters here quoted or described will be found, in their order, as 
 follows: — Drummond's Works, p. 1 5 1 and p. 138, An Jural. Scot. (Extracts 
 from Hawthornden MSS.) pp. 85, 86, Drummond's Works, pp. 141-2.
 
 n8 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEX. 
 
 version of the whole Bible unsurpassed by any European ver- 
 sion ; but he had reserved for himself the task of perfecting such 
 a metrical version of the Psalms for public and private worship 
 as should supersede Sternhold and Hopkins's old version of 
 1563 in England, and the modification of the same which had 
 been in use in Scotland since 1565. Every now and then, 
 accordingly, when the cares of State or of royal swinishness 
 allowed him a pious moment, he had been hammering at the 
 Psalms, revising an old version of one and tuning it to the right 
 pitch, or quite re-versifying another. Naturally, he had taken 
 those of his courtiers into his confidence who had any turn for 
 that kind of work ; and among these had been Sir William 
 Alexander, and perhaps also Sir Robert Kerr and Sir Robert 
 Aytoun. There was, in fact, a little committee at Court for 
 versifying the Psalms, in the centre of which was the King, 
 with Sir William Alexander for his right-hand man. Of course, 
 however, the thing was bruited abroad; and, though a new 
 metrical version of the Psalms was a work on which many 
 people throughout the island might have employed them- 
 selves independently, and indeed attempts at it had been left in 
 manuscript or printed by not a few during the preceding half 
 century, the King's example seems to have given at length a 
 peculiar stimulus to Psalm-translation, and made it a settled 
 amusement for poets in their leisure hours. While his Majesty 
 was so laudably employed, why should not those of his subjects 
 who professed the same craft turn out a version of a Psalm now 
 and then, to lighten his Majesty's labours ? This does not seem 
 to have been what his Majesty wanted. He would do the 
 whole work with his own royal skill ; or, at least, he and his 
 good friend, Sir William Alexander, would manage it between 
 them — Alexander giving him the benefit of his advice, and per- 
 haps occasionally contributing a version of a Psalm to be com- 
 pared with his Majesty's own version, but still all passing 
 through his Majesty's judgment, so as to issue finally as his 
 Majesty's. The peculiar division of labour does not seem to
 
 Mtat. 34-40. KING JAMES AND THE PSALMS. ng 
 
 have been perfectly agreeable to Sir William ; but what could a 
 gentleman-usher do? He may have fumed over the whole 
 business when he was alone; but, when the King said, " Men- 
 strie, we left aff at Psalm twenty-twa : the next's a teuch ane, 
 but fine and short ; lat's hae a try at it" he had to be ready as 
 second violin. 
 
 I do not know whether they were engaged on the Psalm I 
 have mentioned in the beginning of the year 1620; but cer- 
 tainly they were then over some particular Psalm. Apparently 
 also it must have been a " tough " one ; for Alexander had com- 
 municated whereabouts they were to Drummond, probably with 
 a notion that Drummond might come in as a partaker in the 
 whole business, and that this Psalm might be his introduction. 
 Drummond, in any case, had given a day or two to the Psalm 
 in Hawthornden, and sent the result to Alexander. Here was 
 the answer ; which it was perhaps as well for Alexander that the 
 King did not see : — 
 
 " Brother, 
 
 " I received your last letter, with the Psalm you sent ; 
 which I think very well done. I had done the same long 
 before it came ; but He prefers his own to all else, though 
 perchance, when you see it, you will think it the worst of the 
 three. No man must meddle with that subject; and therefore 
 I advise you to take no more pains therein ; but I, as I have 
 ever wished you, would have you to make choice of some new 
 subject, worthy of your pains ; which I should be glad to see. 
 I love the Muses as well as ever I did, but can seldom have 
 the occasion to frequent them. All my Works are written over 
 in one Book, ready for the press ; but I want leisure to print 
 them. So, referring all further to our old friend, Sir Archibald 
 Acheson, who is coming home, I continue 
 
 " Your loving Friend, 
 
 "W, Alexander.* 
 "London, 18th April 1620." 
 
 v From Drummond's Works (171 1), p. 151.
 
 i2o DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 A letter of Drummond's, though undated and without address 
 in the scroll-copy, will at once be recognised as his answer to 
 Alexander on the receipt of this :—" I think Tasso had some 
 " reason of his madness, now in spending such time and labour, 
 " and reaping nothing but ' O, well done ! ' Great men in this 
 '" age either respect not our toys at all ; or, if they do, because 
 " they are toys, esteem them only worthy the kiss of their 
 " hand : but especially Princes who are so inclined themselves. 
 " A Prince becomes jealous of possessors of those excellencies 
 " which he findeth in himself; thence it seldom happens that 
 " learned Princes advance learned men. Herefore Nero killed 
 " Lucan, and opened Seneca's veins ; for, as Tacitus tells, it 
 " was a crime to make verse in that time. We admire those 
 " things we want, and contemn what we possess. Yet I must 
 " call these times abject; in which it is a more worthy exercise 
 " to be a ballader, study to paint the face, or follow some wild 
 " beast, than have the most noble faculties of wit." This must 
 have been written in consolation to Sir William Alexander, of 
 whose worries at Court Drummond had better knowledge than 
 we can have now.* 
 
 Not so certainly of the same year, but very probably so, and 
 most distinctly in continuation of the same strain, are two other 
 letters to Alexander, of which copies remain. Alexander had 
 been dangerously ill with tertian ague ; and the first of the 
 letters is Drummond's congratulation on his recovery. " Ye 
 " may think," he says, " how your letters moved me, when even 
 " yet, at the remembrance of the accident, I am in a horror. 
 " How miserable had the estate of so many been, which all 
 " love your life ; for, none being so well loved, this grief had 
 " been universal." Alexander had replied, entering rather 
 gloomily into particulars as to the state of his fortunes at Court ; 
 and Drummond's next is longer and more intimate ;■ — " That ye 
 "are relieved of your tertian ague," he says, " et tibi et mihi 
 " gratnlor. Ye should not despair of your fortunes. He who 
 * Mr. Laing's Extracts from the Hawthorndcn MSS., Arch. Scot., IV. 88.
 
 sEtat. 34-40. LETTERS TO ALEXANDER. 121 
 
 " drew you there and fixed me here contrary to our resolutions, 
 
 " He only from all danger may vindicate our fortunes, and 
 
 " make us sure. He to this time hath brought me in the world 
 
 " to be, without riches, rich ; and then most happily did it fall 
 
 " out with me when I had no hope in Man left me ; and this 
 
 " came to me because on Him, and not on Man, my hopes 
 
 " relied. And therefore, that now I live, that I enjoy a dear 
 
 " idleness, sweet solitariness, I have it of Him and not from 
 
 " Man. Trust in Him ; prefer not to certainties uncertain 
 
 " hopes. Conspiravit in do/ores nostros htzc cestas: sola Dies 
 
 "poterit taut urn lenire dolorcm : for we have what to plain and 
 
 "regret together; and I what alone I must lament." These 
 
 last words are surely to be noted. Were they not written with 
 
 a sigh, and an arrest of the pen, that the writer might lift his 
 
 eyes, mutter a moment to himself, and look round his solitary 
 
 room ? Four years had passed since his love-bereavement ; but 
 
 the image of his dead betrothed was still continually before 
 
 him, and his heart still haunted the grass that waved above her 
 
 grave.* 
 
 That very year Drummond thought he was to die. There 
 had been a cessation of his letters to Alexander for some time, 
 when, in the close of the year, Alexander received the following, 
 dated Nov., 1620: — "When ye have understood the cause of 
 " my long silence, I hope I shall not only obtain pardon, but 
 " pity: as our Petrarch says, Spero irovar pietd 7101 che perdono. 
 " These months by past, as to some great states, to me too 
 " have been fatal; for these eight weeks I have been languish- 
 " ing in sickness, and that more by the ignorance of physicians 
 " (which, being nowhere good, are here naught) than by any 
 " defect of nature : for, my disease being a pain of the side, 
 " they cannot tell to what to ascribe the cause, nor how to help 
 " me. If it shall happen me now to die, ye have lost a great 
 "admirer of your worth; and the greatest conquest I have 
 
 * The two undated letters quoted from in this paragraph are among Mr. 
 Laing's Extracts from the Hawthornden MSS. : Arch. Scot, IV. 89.
 
 I22 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " made on earth is that I am assured ye love my remembrance." 
 With this letter, or about the same time, there went to Alex- 
 ander a Sonnet of Drummond's, addressed to him in farewell, 
 the pathos of which and its autobiographic precision have made 
 if oftener quoted in sketches of Drummond than any other : — 
 
 " Though I have twice been at the gates of Death, 
 And twice found shut those gates which ever mourn, 
 This but a lightening is, truce ta'en to breath; 
 For late-born sorrows augur fleet return. 
 Amidst thy sacred cares and courtly toils, 
 Alexis, when thou shalt hear wandering Fame 
 Tell Death hath triumphed o'er my mortal spoils, 
 And that on earth 1 am but a sad name, 
 If thou e'er held me dear, by all our love, 
 By all that bliss, those joys, Heaven here us gave, 
 I conjure thee, and by the Maids of Jove, 
 To grave this short remembrance on my grave : — 
 
 Here Damon lies, whose songs did sometime grace 
 The murmuring Esk : may roses shade the place !" 
 
 Had Drummond died then, he would have been but thirty- 
 five years of age, and the inscription on his tombstone would 
 have had to be made by one who was five years his senior. 
 As it happened, however, he was to outlive Alexander, and 
 have the charge for some years of his memory in the world. 
 
 The years 162 1 and 1622 slip away, one hardly knows how. 
 Of dated particulars belonging to these years, one notes only 
 a commendatory sonnet or two of Drummond's prefixed to the 
 book of some scribbling Scottish acquaintance, together with a 
 brief note from Michael Drayton, and Drummond's reply to 
 the same. Letters, it would appear, had passed between 
 Drayton and Drummond subsequent to that one of Drayton's 
 of April, 16 1 9, where we broke off the correspondence: at 
 least, there is an undated copy of one of Drummond's to 
 Drayton which, as it refers to the collection of Drayton's Poems 
 then forthcoming in London, was probably written in answer to 
 that: — "The summer might as well come without flowers,"
 
 Mtat. 34-40. LETTERS TO DRAYTON. 123 
 
 Drummond there says to Drayton, " as Sir William Alexander 
 " without letters. We have oft been inquisitive about your 
 " Poems, wondering they are not come from the press. I long 
 " to hear the progress of your Poems printed: there is no verses 
 " I delight more to read than yours, Shine as the moon among 
 " the lesser stars." — From this we see that Sir William Alex- 
 ander and his lady, in their summer visits to Scotland, generally 
 brought Drummond a packet of remembrances from London 
 friends; and from the same letter we learn that " old Sir William 
 Erskine," Lady Alexander's father, had recently been in London, 
 seen Drayton there, and been charged by him with a scolding 
 to Drummond for not writing oftener. Again, however, there 
 had been remissness, but this time on Drayton's part. On the 
 22nd of November, 1621, however, he again writes "To my 
 dear, noble Friend, Mr. William Drummond, of Hawthornden, 
 in Scotland." There is nothing of the least consequence in the 
 letter, beyond the continued liking for Drummond indicated by 
 this superscription. " I am oft thinking whether this long 
 silence proceeds from you or me :" " my long being in the 
 country this summer:" "Believe me, worthy William, I am 
 more than a fortnight's friend; where I love, I love for years," 
 &c. It is explained that Sir William Alexander is then with 
 the Court at Newmarket, but that Lady Alexander had pro- 
 mised to see the letter conveyed to Drummond. As Lady 
 Alexander probably knew that there was nothing of particular 
 moment in the letter, she forgot her promise; and it did not 
 reach Drummond till April 20, 1622, exactly five months after 
 it had been written, when in fact she brought it herself. Drum- 
 mond's reply, accordingly, is that he and Drayton had best 
 excuse themselves for their long mutual silence, and, like Adam 
 and Eve, agree to lay the blame on a third party. He will 
 undertake to give Lady Alexander the rating she deserves ; 
 even a music-book which she has brought as a present to 
 Drummond shall not save her; and Drayton, having Sir William 
 Alexander all to himself in London, may take vengeance upon
 
 124 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 him in Drummond's name for never having answered enquiries 
 he had made about Drayton regularly for a year past. Still 
 there was cause for regret. " A whole year to have gone, paper 
 being so cheap, and never one letter !"* 
 
 The affairs of Sir William Alexander were in a new flush of 
 prosperity about this time. The first settlement of the Pilgrim 
 Fathers in the American colony of New Plymouth (1620) had 
 led to much speculation as to the future of that " New Eng- 
 land " within the bounds of which the little colony had been 
 planted, and as to the prospects of British colonization in 
 America generally ; and the scheme had been projected of a 
 " New Scotland," or " Nova Scotia," north of New England, 
 to be a field of emigration more especially for Scotchmen, and 
 on Scottish principles, and to include not only the little bit 
 which now retains the name of Nova Scotia, but a vast tract of 
 the lands and islands about the St. Lawrence, extending into 
 the present Canada. The tract, or part of it, had belonged to 
 France, and was occupied thinly by French stragglers ; but it 
 was claimed by Great Britain. Combined with the scheme, 
 and to assist its working, there was to be a new resort to that 
 device of P]aronetcies, or purchaseable hereditary dignities, in- 
 ferior to the Peerage, which James had already found useful in 
 raising funds for the plantation of Ulster. For a sum of ^150 
 sterling any one might be made a Nova Scotia baronet, and have 
 " heritably disponed unto him six thousand good and sufficient 
 " acres of Nova Scotia ground ; which, being but at the rate 
 " of sixpence an acre, could not be thought very dear, consi- 
 " dering how prettily, in the respective parchments of disposi- 
 " tion, they were bounded, and designed fruitful corn-land, 
 
 * Drayton's Letter to Drummond mentioned in this paragraph will be 
 found in Drummond's Works, p. 154; the two of Drummond to Drayton 
 in Mr. Laing's Hawthornden Extracts, Arch. Scot., IV. pp. 90, 91. These 
 two are undated ; but the substance of the earlier, which is printed second 
 by Mr. Laing, dates it approximately, and the other is dated exactly by 
 its reference to Drayton's of Nov. 22, 1621, as received April 20, 1622.
 
 Altai. 34-40. ALEXANDER PROSPERING. 125 
 
 " watered with pleasant rivers, running alongst most excellent 
 " and spacious meadows ; nor did there want abundance of 
 " oaken groves in the midst of very fertile plains, and here and 
 " there most delicious gardens and orchards, with whatever else 
 " could, in matter of delightful ground, best content their 
 " fancies." This is a rather mischievous description of the 
 scheme when it came to its full maturity ; and as yet it was but 
 in its infancy. But already Sir William Alexander was at the 
 head of it. Whether he had suggested it to the king, or the 
 king had suggested it to him, certain it is that on the 21st 
 of September, 162 1, there was made out a Royal Charter, 
 granting. to him and to his heirs all "the continent lands and 
 islands " marked out for the new province, with powers to use 
 their mines and forests, erect cities, hold courts and markets, 
 sub-grant lands, and coin money. These powers as yet existed 
 but on paper; and the baronetcies had yet to be applied for, 
 and the funds and emigrants to be forthcoming, before Sir 
 William could assume the Transatlantic sovereignty vested in 
 him. But it was a splendid outlook for him and his family ; 
 and little wonder that in 1622 his complaints of Court neglect 
 ceased. He was willing now to help the king with the Psalms, 
 or anything else, as much as might be required ; but otherwise 
 he had his attention more and more diverted from Poetry, and 
 turned to the subjects of American colonization and Nova 
 Scotia stock.* 
 
 The year 1623 was a rather remarkable one in Drummond's- 
 life. There remain, indeed, but three letters of his which can 
 be distinctly assigned to this year. One, dated December 6, 
 is a letter to some young cousin, warning him of the dangers of 
 his intimacy with a certain " envious gentleman," and advising 
 him either to break off the intimacy, or else to be "so close and 
 
 * The mischievous description of the Nova Scotia scheme in the text 
 I have taken (at second hand) from a pamphlet of the eccentric Sir 
 Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, published in 1652.
 
 126 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 secret" in his demeanour with him that of his "chief and most 
 sovereign actions he be altogether ignorant." For "all other 
 evils may be remedied, Envy excepted." " Each other vice 
 seemeth human ; Envy the vice and sin of Devils." This 
 moral certainly does not appertain to the year 1623 in par- 
 ticular ■ but the other two letters, both written apparently late 
 in the year, are expressly historical. One is to some unknown 
 friend ; but it is so exactly in the strain of the other, to Sir 
 William Alexander, that quotation from the latter will suffice : — 
 " Though the late sorrows and cares befallen me, by the loss 
 " of my nearest friends, could never make me forgetful of you, 
 " yet have they had the power this long time to silence me. . . . 
 " What the cruelty of wars do elsewhere, [i.e., on the Continent, 
 " then in the beginning of the Thirty Years' War,] a still and 
 " gentle mortality hath done here. For many years funerals 
 " have not been so frequent as in this one, 1623 ; few bands of 
 " kindred, friendship, societies, being which have not now been 
 " broken. This mortality might have the name of Pestilence, 
 " save that the dying are not deprived of the company of their 
 " friends, and accustomed burial. What is recorded of the 
 " 1348, — that churchyards were not ample enough to inter the 
 " dead, but new grounds were digged up, — is fallen true in 
 " this; and, as is told of the n 20, in the time of the Emperor 
 " Henry IV., that the third of mankind was swept off the earth, 
 " we may here say of the 1623 that the Almighty Providence 
 " hath decimate our poor north. This is perhaps a part of that 
 " wrath which the late defects of the great lights above, and a 
 " blazing star, did prognosticate to us : the malignity of this 
 " was about the 9th of July, at what time was an unhappy 
 " commixtion of contrary lights of Jupiter and Saturn with each 
 " other. That affection which was divided before to all them 
 " gone will I gather and set only upon you, for you only are 
 
 " worthy of it; whom may the Heavens long preserve." In 
 
 corroboration of this letter there are various contemporary re- 
 cords, telling of a woful famine throughout Scotland in 1623,
 
 Altai. 34-40. HIS FO URTH PUBLIC A TIOA '. ! 2 7 
 
 and an extraordinary mortality in consequence. Thus we read 
 in Calderwood's History of the Kirk of Scotland this paragraph 
 relating to that year : — " The famine increased daily, till at last 
 " many both in burgh and land died of hunger. Many poor 
 " people came to Edinburgh for succour, of which number 
 " some died in the streets. The Fast was observed in Edin- 
 " burgh the last Sabbath of June and first of July. The causes 
 " of humiliation were the present famine, the fear of idolatry to 
 " creep' in again, the danger the Prince was in for body and 
 " soul [the affair of the Spanish match for Prince Charles then 
 " pending]. But the main sin — to wit, the erecting of the state 
 " of Bishops, the beginning of defection, and ground of farther 
 " defection to follow — was not touched. . . . Immediately 
 " after the Fast was ended, that same night, the 7th of July, 
 " there was such a fire in the heaven, with thunder and fire- 
 " fiaught, that the hearers and beholders thought that verily the 
 " Day of Judgment was come." Among the previous prognos- 
 tics of the dire crisis, on the information of the same authority, 
 may be reckoned an immense fiery dragon seen in the air on 
 the 3rd of June, 1622, and the unaccountable fall of the portrait 
 of King James in the palace of Linlithgow, June 20, 1623, when 
 it was broken to pieces'.* 
 
 Not from Drummond's letters should we have gathered that 
 this year of sadness and mortality in Scotland was the year also 
 of the publication of another book of his. Such, however, is 
 the fact. Flowers of Sion : By William Drummond, of Haw- 
 thorne-dame : to which is adfoyned his Cyprcsse Grove, is the 
 title of the new volume, published at Edinburgh in 1623 by 
 John Hart, the successor of Andro. We must linger a little 
 over this volume of Drummond's, the fourth in the series of his 
 publications. 
 
 * Drummond's Works, p. 144; Mr. Laing's Hawthomden Extracts, 
 Arch. Scot., 92, 93; Calderwood's History (Wodrow Society Edition). 
 VII. 577.
 
 128 &R UMMOND OF HA IVTHORNDEN. 
 
 As the title suggests, the volume consists of a number of 
 poems of a religious character, followed by a kindred prose 
 essay. The Poems are, in the main, a selection from those he 
 had written during the seven years that had elapsed since the 
 publication of his more miscellaneous collection of 1616 ; but 
 several of the later ones in that collection, printed in it under 
 the special title of " Urania, or Spiritual Poems," are reprinted 
 in this with alterations. All the pieces are short, varying from 
 the mere madrigal of a few lines, or the simple sonnet (which 
 was still Drummond's favourite form), to a continuous com- 
 position of nine or fifteen pages in heroic rhyme. Only one 
 piece attains the last-named length, and it is a fragment of a 
 lamer intended Poem which had been left unfinished. Drum- 
 mond used to say of himself that short pieces suited his habits 
 best, and that he had never applied his mind to any great or 
 long subject. 
 
 The most note-worthy thing, however, about the Poems in 
 this new volume is their expressly, and almost monotonously, 
 serious character. If Drummond had meanwhile continued to 
 write such sweet ditties of mere sensuous description, or such 
 occasional epigrams of luxuriant wit, or such Petrarchian love- 
 sonnets, as had composed a considerable part of his former 
 volume, all such pieces are now suppressed and excluded ; nor, 
 what is more remarkable, are there any more of those poems of 
 direct reference to his own love-bereavement, those " mournings 
 for a mistress dead," which had imparted such a final interest 
 of a personal kind to the former volume. That great grief, we can 
 see, still remained ; but he had beaten it down into the roots 
 and secrecies of his own spirit, to be conversed with there by 
 himself alone, and talked of no more between himself and the 
 world. Not the less is this new volume an expression of moods 
 and feelings which had resulted from that rooted sorrow, and 
 were but its re-appearance in a transmuted form. 
 
 In our criticism of Drummond's earlier Poems, we detected 
 a certain intellectual peculiarity, qualifying and ruling the sweet
 
 Mtat. 34-40. HIS " FLOWERS OF SION." 12 q 
 
 general sensuousness, or delight in beauty of colour, sound, 
 form, beauty of grove, landscape, ocean, and of the varied 
 meteorology of cloud and sparkle that overhangs the earth. We 
 detected, amid this, a certain prevalence of what we called the 
 metaphysical element. This Nature, this physical All of form 
 and colour, sea and earth, cloud and clear sky, sun and moon, 
 stars and constellations, time and space, was but a painted 
 show, a vast hanging and wheeling orb or succession of orbs, 
 environed by a boundless unknown, wherein lay the key and 
 reason of the whole manifestation. The constancy of this mode 
 of thinking in Drummond's mind from his youth, the more than 
 usually strong hold it had taken of his musings and imaginings, 
 was proved abundantly by quotation and extract. It was added 
 that, save for the natural piety, the wondering and worshiping 
 melancholy, involved in such a habitual mode of conception, 
 there was nothing specially religious in Drummond's poetry at 
 that time, and that his musings under the sway of his dominant 
 idea might have been recognised as differing from Pagan pre- 
 cedents only by a Christian suffusion. There was an exception, 
 we said, in the few poems, under the title of " Urania or 
 Spiritual Poems," that seem to have been the latest written, and 
 that were inserted into the volume almost avowedly as exer- 
 cises of the author's spirit under the severe teaching of his 
 grief. In these the religiousness, though with little trace of the 
 formal theology of the pulpit, was more markedly Christian in 
 its tone. One or two of them were hymns of Christian sentiment, 
 and the last was an outburst of prayer. 
 
 Now the Flowers of Siou, published in 1623, are a prolonga- 
 tion of this latest mood of 16 16. As if to signalize this fact, 
 the title Spiritual Poems is preserved as an alternative for Flowers 
 of Sion, and the opening piece is one of these, reprinted, with 
 alterations, from the former volume : — 
 
 THE INSTABILITY OF MORTAL GLORY. 
 
 " Triumphant arches, statues crowned with bays, 
 Proud obelisks, tombs of the vastest frame, 
 
 1
 
 130 
 
 DRUMMOXD OF II A IVTIIORNDEN. 
 
 Colosses, brazen Atlases of fame, 
 Fanes vainly builded to vain idols' praise, 
 States which unsatiate minds in blood do raise, 
 From the Cross-Stars unto the Arctic Team, 
 Alas ! and what we write to keep our name, 
 Like spiders' cauls, are made the sport of days. 
 All only constant is in constant change : 
 What done is is undone ; and, when undone, 
 Into some other figure doth it range. 
 Thus moves the restless world beneath the moon : 
 Wherefore, my mind, above Time, Motion, Place, 
 Thee raise, and steps not reached by Nature trace." 
 
 And so on, in the same, or in similar strains, the volume pro- 
 ceeds, containing Sonnets " On Human Frailty," " On the 
 Brevity of Life," " No Trust on Time," " World's Joys are Toys," 
 " Earth and all on it Changeable," " Faith above Reason," &c, 
 but also a series of more expressly Christian and Biblical poems, 
 with such headings as " Nature must yield to Grace," " The 
 Miserable state of the World before the Incarnation of God," 
 " The Angels for the Nativity of our Lord," " Amazement at 
 the Incarnation of God," '' For the Baptist," " For the Mag- 
 dalene," "For the Prodigal," "A Hymn of the Passion," " Upon 
 the Sepulchre of our Lord," " An Hymn of the Resurrection,'' 
 " An Hymn of the Ascension," " An Hymn on the Nature, 
 Attributes, and Works of God," "An Essay on the Great and 
 General Judgment of the World." 
 
 Of the Poems on Scriptural subjects the following may serve 
 as specimens : — 
 
 THE ANGELS FOR THE NATIVITY OF OUR LORD. 
 
 " Run, Shepherds, run where Bethlem blest appears ! 
 We bring the best of news ; be not dismayed : 
 A Saviour there is born, more old than years, 
 Amidst Heaven's rolling heights this Earth who stayed. 
 In a poor cottage inned, a Virgin Maid 
 A weakling did him bear who all upbears ; 
 There is he poorly swadled in manger laid 
 To whom too narrow swadlings are our spheres. 
 Run, Shepherds, run, and solemnize his birth ! 
 This is that night, no, day grown great with bliss,
 
 sEtat. 34-40. HIS "FLOW r ERS ( W SIO. V." ! 3 ! 
 
 In which the power of Satan broken is. 
 
 In Heaven be glory, peace unto the Earth ! 
 
 Thus singing through the air the Angels swam, 
 And cope of stars re-echoed the same." 
 
 FROM "AN HYMN OF THE PASSION." 
 
 " Poor wights, behold His visage pale as lead, 
 
 His head bowed to his breast, locks sadly rent, 
 
 Like a cropt rose that languishing doth fade. 
 Weep, Nature, weep ; astonished World, lament ; 
 
 Lament, ye winds, you heaven that all contains ; 
 
 And thou, my soul, let nought thy grief relent. 
 Those hands, those sacred hands, which hold the reins 
 
 Of this great All, and kept from mutual wars 
 
 The elements, bear rent for thee their veins ; 
 Those feet which once must tread on golden stars 
 
 For thee with nails would be pierced through and torn ; 
 
 For thee Heaven's King from Heaven himself debars. 
 This great heart-quaking dolour wail and mourn, 
 
 Ye that long since Him saw by might of faith, 
 
 Ye now that are, and ye yet to be born. 
 Not to behold his great Creator's death, 
 
 The Sun from sinful eyes hath veiled his light, 
 
 And faintly journeys up Heaven's sapphire path ; 
 And, cutting from her brows her tresses bright, 
 
 The Moon doth keep her Lord's sad obsequies, 
 
 Impearling with her tears this robe of Night. 
 All staggering and lazy lour the skies ; 
 
 The earth and elemental stages quake ; 
 
 The long since dead from bursted graves arise." 
 
 HYMN OF THE ASCENSION." 
 
 " Bright portals of the sky, 
 
 Embossed with sparkling stars, 
 Doors of Eternity 
 With diamantine bars, 
 Your arras rich up-hold, 
 Loose all your bolts and springs, 
 Ope wide your leaves of gold 
 
 That in your roofs may come the King of Kings. 
 Scarfed in a rosy cloud, 
 
 He doth ascend the air ; 
 Straight doth the Moon him shroud 
 With her resplendent hair ; 
 The next encrystalled Light 
 Submits to him its beams ;
 
 132 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 And He doth trace the height 
 
 Of that fair Lamp which flames of beauty streams. 
 He towers those golden bounds 
 
 He did to Sun bequeath; 
 
 The higher wandering rounds 
 
 Are found his feet beneath ; 
 
 The Milky Way comes near ; 
 
 Heaven's axle seems to bend 
 
 Above each burning sphere, 
 
 That robed in glory Heaven's King may ascend. 
 O well-spring of this All, 
 
 Thy Father's image vivc, 
 
 Word, that from nought did call 
 
 What is, doth reason, live, 
 
 The soul's eternal food, 
 
 Earth's joy, delight of Heaven, 
 
 All Truth, Love, Beauty, Good, 
 
 To thee, to thee, be praises ever given ! " 
 
 Even in these poems on strictly Scriptural themes there may 
 be discerned the intensely metaphysical habit of Drummond's 
 mind, and the persistency with which, in the service of this 
 habit, he had always before him that definite optical image of 
 the Cosmos, or physical All, which was taught by the Ptolemaic 
 or pre-Copernican Astronomy. That "All" was a vast hanging 
 phantasmagory of successive spheres of transparent space 
 wheeling round the central Earth, the sphere of the Moon 
 nearest, then that of Mercury, then that of Venus, then that of 
 the Sun, then that of Mars, then that of Jupiter, then that of 
 Saturn, then the sphere of all the Fixed Stars, and then two 
 other hypothetical spheres beyond, the outermost of which 
 bounded all the rest in, and separated, as by a shell of semi- 
 opaque rotundity, the entire Physical Universe it enclosed from- 
 the still engirdling infinitude of the inconceivable. Of this 
 metaphysical habit, and this definite optical conception of the 
 Universe in connexion with it, we had proof in Drummond's 
 earlier poems ; and lo ! they accompany him still, even when 
 he selects a subject from the Evangels, and would write a 
 Christian hymn ! Even his most peculiar Flowers of Sion grow 
 out of this ground of permanent metaphysical meditation. But
 
 Mtat. 34-40. HIS " FLOWERS OF SION." I3 3 
 
 take another passage or two, where he is musing near the 
 precincts of the Church, rather than within her garden : — 
 
 THE WORLD A GAME. 
 
 " This world a hunting is, 
 The prey poor Man ; the Nimrod fierce is Death ; 
 His speedy greyhounds are 
 Lust, Sickness, Envy, Care, 
 Strife that ne'er falls amiss, 
 
 With all those ills that hunt us while we breathe. 
 Now, if by chance we fly 
 Of these the eager chase, 
 Old Age with stealing pace 
 Casts up his nets, and there we panting die." 
 
 THE BOOK OF THE WORLD. 
 
 " Of this fair volume which we World do name 
 If we the sheets and leaves could turn with care, 
 Of Him who it corrects, and did it frame, 
 We clear might read the art and wisdom rare, 
 Find out his power, which wildest powers doth tame, 
 His providence extending everywhere, 
 His justice, which proud rebels doth not spare, — 
 In every page, no, period of the same ! 
 But silly we, like foolish children, rest 
 Well-pleased with coloured vellum, leaves of gold, 
 Fair dangling ribbons ; leaving what is best, 
 Of the great Writer's sense ne'er taking hold : 
 Or, if by chance our minds do muse on aught, 
 It is some picture on the margin wrought." 
 
 THE INVISIBLE WORLD OF GOD AND HIS ANGELS. 
 
 " As far beyond the starry walls of Heaven 
 As is the loftiest of the Planets seven 
 Sequestered from this Earth, in purest light, 
 Outshining ours as ours doth sable Night, 
 Thou, all-sufficient, omnipotent, 
 Thou ever-glorious, most excellent, 
 God various in names, in essence one, 
 High art enstalled on a golden throne, 
 Outreaching Heaven's wide wastes, the bounds of nought, 
 Transcending all the circles of our thought. 
 With diamantine sceptre in thy hand, 
 There thou giv'st laws, and dost this world command, 
 This world of concords, raised unlikely-sweet, 
 Which like a ball lies prostrate at thy feet. . . .
 
 134 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTIIORNDEN. 
 
 All's Architect, Lord of this Universe, 
 
 Wit is engulphed that would thy greatness pierce. . . . 
 
 In those vast fields of light, etherial plains, 
 
 Thou art attended by immortal trains 
 
 Of intellectual Powers, which thou brought forth 
 
 To praise thy goodness and admire thy worth, 
 
 In numbers passing other creatures far, 
 
 Since most in number noblest creatures are ; 
 
 Which do in knowledge us no less outrun 
 
 Than moon doth stars in light, or moon the sun. 
 
 Unlike, in orders ranged and many a band 
 
 (If beauty in disparity doth stand), 
 
 Archangels, Angels, Cherubs, Seraphines, 
 
 And what with name of Thrones amongst them shines, 
 
 Large-ruling Princes, Dominations, Powers, 
 
 All-acting Virtues of those flaming towers : 
 
 These freed of umbrage, these of labour free, 
 
 Rest ravished with still beholding thee ; 
 
 Inflamed with beams which sparkle from thy face, 
 
 They can no more desire, far less embrace. 
 
 Low under them, with slow and staggering pace, 
 
 Thy handmaid Nature thy great steps doth trace." 
 
 THE ASTRONOMICAL WORLD OF MAN. 
 
 " Stars, host of Heaven, ye Firmament's bright flowers, 
 Clear lamps which overhang this stage of ours, 
 Ye turn not there to deck the weeds of Night, 
 Nor pageant-like to please the vulgar sight ; 
 Great causes, sure ye must bring great effects. 
 But who can descant right your grave aspects ? 
 He only who you made decipher can 
 Your notes : Heaven's eyes, ye blind the eyes of Man. 
 Amidst these sapphire far-extending heights 
 The never-twinkling ever-wandering Lights 
 Their fixed motions keep. One, dry and cold, 
 Deep-leaden coloured, slowly there is rolled : 
 With rule and line for time's steps measured even, 
 In twice three lustres he but turns his heaven. 
 With temperate qualities and countenance fair, 
 Still mildly smiling, sweetly debonair, 
 Another cheers the world, and way doth make 
 In twice six autumns through the Zodiack. 
 But hot and dry, with flaming locks and brows 
 Enraged, this in his red pavilion glows. 
 Together running with like speed, if space, 
 Two equally in hands achieve their race : 
 With blushing face this oft doth bring the day,
 
 JEtat. 34-40. HIS " CYPRESS GROVE." I35 
 
 And ushers oft to stately stars the way ; 
 
 That, various in virtue, changing, light, 
 
 With his small flame engems the veil of Night. 
 
 Prince of this court, the Sun in triumph rides, 
 
 With the year snake-like in herself that glides, 
 
 Time's dispensator, fair life-giving source, 
 
 Through sky's twelve posts as he doth run his course, 
 
 Heart of this All, of what is known to sense 
 
 The likest to his Maker's excellence ; 
 
 In whose diurnal motion doth appear 
 
 A shadow, no, true portrait of the year. 
 
 The Moon moves lowest, silver sun of night, 
 
 Dispersing through the world her borrowed light, 
 
 Who in three forms her head abroad doth range, 
 
 And only constant is in constant change. 
 
 Sad Queen of Silence, I ne'er see thy face 
 
 To wax or wane, or shine with a full grace, 
 
 But straight amazed on Man I think, each day 
 
 His state who changeth ; or, if he And stay, 
 
 It is in dreary anguish, cares and pains, 
 
 And of his labours death is all the gains." 
 
 Passing from the Flowers of Sion to the appended little prose 
 Essay entitled A Cypress Grove, the reader finds himself still in 
 the same air of melancholy and metaphysical contemplation. 
 In the language of metaphor suggested by the two titles, it is 
 as if the author, after walking in the garden of the Church or in 
 its close precincts, bent his steps to some thick grove of 
 funereal trees, in the centre of which was a marble tomb, and 
 there, amid the gloomy umbrage, and with the white tomb in 
 sight, pursued his religious musings. The Essay, in fact, is one 
 of the nearest approaches in our language to that definition of 
 philosophy which Plato, I think, has given somewhere in his 
 writings, when he calls philosophy in its simplest form a medi- 
 tation on Death. Here, in a short series of prose pages, we 
 have a meditation on Death by our poet of Hawthornden, which 
 for its pensive beauty, its moral high-mindedness, and the 
 mournful music that rolls through it, surpasses any similar 
 piece of old English prose known to me, unless it be here and 
 there, perhaps, a passage in some of the English Divines at 
 their best, or Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich in the finest parts
 
 I3 6 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORN DEN. 
 
 of his Urn-Burial. It is matter of surprise that such a rare 
 specimen of poetical and musical prose should have dropt out 
 of sight, and should not at least be represented by a passage or 
 two in our books of English Prose Extracts. 
 
 Often, says the Essayist at the outset, when he had given 
 himself to rest in the quiet solitariness of the night, he had 
 found his imagination troubled, and sleep driven off, by a 
 certain confused fear, or sorrow, or horror, or thronging of 
 fears and horrors, amounting to an agony, and which he could 
 only interpret mystically as akin to those signs and prognosti- 
 cations in the natural world which were taken to bode social 
 calamity. Struggling with this weakness of his phantasy, he had 
 tried to school himself by forecasting every possible form of 
 evil accident, and looking it in the face, till at length, after a 
 survey of all the common woes of mankind and inconveniences 
 of life, he was led to fasten his view, with a fixed and persistent 
 studv, on that last and worst of human terrors which was com- 
 prised in the word Death. And here, first, he will yield to 
 the general prejudice, and paint Death in all its supposed 
 dreadfulness. 
 
 " Death is the sad estranger of acquaintance, the eternal 
 divorcer of marriage, the ravisher of children from their parents, 
 the stealer of parents from their children, the interrer of fame, 
 the sole cause of forgetfulness, by which the living talk of those 
 gone away as of so many shadows, or fabulous paladins. All 
 strength by it is enfeebled, beauty turned in deformity and 
 rottenness, honour in contempt, glory into baseness : it is the 
 unreasonable breaker-off of all the actions of virtue, by which 
 we enjoy no more the sweet pleasures on earth, neither con- 
 template the stately revolutions of the heavens; sun perpetually 
 setteth, stars never rise unto us. It in one moment depriveth 
 us of what with so much toil and care in many years we have 
 heaped together : by this are successions of lineage cut short, 
 kingdoms left heirless, and greatest states orphaned. It is not 
 overcome by pride, smoothed by gaudy flattery, tamed by 
 entreaties, bribed by benefits, softened by lamentations, diverted 
 by time. Wisdom, save this, can alter and help anything. By
 
 yEtat. 34-40. HIS "CYPRESS GROVE." 137 
 
 Death we are exiled from this fair city of the World ; it is no 
 more a world to us, nor we any more people unto it. The 
 ruins of fanes, palaces, and other magnificent frames, yield a sad 
 prospect to the soul ; and how should it consider the wrack of 
 such a wonderful masterpiece as is the body without horror?" 
 
 Much of this dread and ghastliness attributed to Death arose, 
 he proceeds to say, from the association therewith of black 
 garments, weeping, funeral pomps, and graveyard ugliness, and 
 might be stripped off by a consideration of the real facts of the 
 case in the merest light of natural reason. In the universality 
 of Death itself reason might find a corrective to over-estimation 
 of Death's importance. 
 
 " If on the theatre of this Earth, amongst the numberless 
 number of men, to die were only proper to thee and thine, then 
 undoubtedly thou hadst reason to grudge at so severe and partial 
 a law. But, since it is a necessity from which never an age by- 
 past hath been exempted, and unto which these that be, and as 
 many as are to come, are thralled, no consequent of life being 
 more familiar, why shouldst thou, with unprofitable and nothing- 
 availing stubbornness, oppose to so unevitable and necessary a 
 condition ? This is the highway of mortality, our general home : 
 behold, what millions have trod it before thee, what multitudes 
 shall follow after thee, with them which at that same instant 
 run ! In so universal a calamity, if Death be one, private com- 
 plaints cannot be heard : with so many royal palaces, it is small 
 loss to see thy poor cabin burn. Shall the Heavens stay their 
 ever-rolling wheels (for what is the motion of them but the 
 motion of a swift and ever-whirling wheel which twineth forth 
 and again upwindeth our life ?) and hold still Time, to prolong 
 thy miserable days, as if the highest of their working were to do 
 homage unto thee ? Thy death is a piece of the order of this 
 All, a part of the life of this World; for, while the World is the 
 World, some creatures must die, and others take life. Eternal 
 things are raised far above this Orb of generation and corrup- 
 tion, where the First Matter, like a still flowing and ebbing sea, 
 with diverse waves, but the same water, keepeth a restless and 
 never-tiring current : what is below in the universality of the 
 kind, not in itself, doth abide; Man a long line of years hath 
 continued, this man every hundredth is swept away. This
 
 138 DRUMMOND OF HAIVTHORNDEN. 
 
 air-encircled globe is the sole region of death, the grave where 
 everything that taketh life must rot; the lists of fortune and 
 change, only glorious in the inconstancy and varying alterations 
 of it; which, though many, seem yet to abide one, and, being a 
 certain entire one, are never many. The never-agreeing bodies 
 of the Elemental Brethren turn one in another; the Earth 
 changeth her countenance with the Seasons, sometimes looking 
 cold and naked, other times hot and flowery; nay, I cannot 
 tell how, but even the lowest of those celestial bodies, that 
 Mother of Months and Empress of Seas and Moisture, as if she 
 were a mirror of our constant mutability, appeareth, by her 
 great nearness to us, to participate of our alterations, never 
 seeing us twice with that same face, now looking black, then 
 pale and wan; sometimes, again, in the perfection of her beauty 
 shining over us. ... If thou dost complain that there 
 shall be a time in the which thou shalt not be, why dost thou 
 not too grieve that there was a time in the which thou wast 
 not, and so that thou art not as old as that enlifening planet of 
 Time? For not to have been a thousand years before this 
 moment is as much to be deplored as not to be a thousand 
 after it, the effect of them both being one : that will be after us 
 which long long ere we were was. . . . Empires, states,, 
 kingdoms, have, by the doom of the Supreme Providence, their 
 fatal periods; great cities lie sadly buried in their dust; arts and 
 sciences have not only their eclipses, but their wanings and 
 deaths; the ghastly wonders of the world, raised by the ambi- 
 tion of ages, are overthrown and trampled; some lights above, 
 deserving to be entitled stars, are lost, and never more seen of 
 us; the excellent fabric of this Universe itself shall one day 
 suffer ruin, or change like a ruin: and poor Earthlings thus to 
 be handled complain!" 
 
 Another corrective of the exaggerated dread of Death is in a 
 strict estimate of the value of all those pleasures and quests of 
 this mortal Life of which Death is to deprive us. At best, 
 what a pitiful trouble human life is, how full of miseries, 
 anxieties, wrongs, spites, scorns, disasters, degradations, shames, 
 contemptibilities, and meannesses ! What high spirit but would 
 sometimes kick the wretched coil from about his feet, and 
 gladly be out of it all ? Take the very noblest of those quests 
 which Life affords : —
 
 .Ktat. 34-40. HIS "CYPRESS GROVE." 139 
 
 " Is it Knowledge ? But we have not yet attained to a perfect 
 understanding of the smallest flower, and why the grass should 
 rather be green than red. The Element of Fire [it would now 
 seem by our latest Science] is quite put out; the Air is but 
 Water rarified; the Earth is found to move, and is no more the 
 centre of the Universe; it is turned into a magnet; Stars arc 
 not fixed, but swim in the celestial spaces ; Comets are mounted 
 above the Planets; some affirm there is another world of men 
 and sensitive creatures, with cities and palaces, in the Moon ; 
 the Sun is lost, for it is but a light made of the conjunction of 
 many shining bodies together, [or] it is a clift in the lower 
 Heavens through which the rays of the highest defuse them- 
 selves; [it] is observed to have spots. Thus Sciences, by the 
 diverse motions of this globe of the brain of man, are become 
 opinions, nay errors, and leave the imagination in a thousand 
 labyrinths. What is all we know compared with what we know 
 not ? We have not yet agreed about the chief good and 
 felicity. It is, perhaps, all artificial cunning." 
 
 But surely to die young, to have all the glorious pageant of 
 the world removed from one in the first excited flush of one's 
 gaze upon it, may be accounted hard ? To this what is the 
 answer ? 
 
 " But number thy years, which are now [a blank space left 
 for the reader to fill in with a number] ; and thou shalt find that, 
 whereas ten have overlived thee, thousands have not attained 
 this age. One year is sufficient to behold all the magnificence 
 of Nature ; nay, even one day and night ; for more is but the 
 same brought round again. This Sun, that Moon, these Stars, 
 the varying dance of the spring, summer, autumn, winter, is that 
 very same which the Golden Age did see. They which have 
 the longest time lent them to live in have almost no part of it 
 at all, measuring it either by that space of time that is past, 
 when they were not, or by that which is to come. Why 
 shouldst thou then care whether thy days be many or few, 
 which, when prolonged to the uttermost, prove, paralleled with 
 Eternity, as a tear is to the ocean ? To die young is to do that 
 soon, and in some fewer days, which once thou must do. . . . 
 The oldest are most unwilling to die. It is hope of long life 
 that maketh life seem short. . . . Life is a journey on a 
 dusty way ; the furthest rest is Death. In this some go more
 
 i 4 o DRUMMOND OF HAWTIIORNDEN. 
 
 heavily burthened than others : swift and active pilgrims come 
 to the end of it in the morning, or at noon, which tortoise-paced 
 wretches, clogged with the fragmentary nibbidge of this world, 
 scarce with great travel crawl unto at midnight. Days are not 
 to be esteemed after the number of them, but after the good- 
 ness. Mere compass maketh not a sphere more complete ; but 
 as round is a little as a large ring." 
 
 Ay ! but is there not a natural desire to do something in this 
 world, the bequest of which to Posterity may keep us in remem- 
 brance ; and to this end is not long life desirable ? 
 
 " O poor ambition ! to what, I pray thee, mayst thou con- 
 credit it? Arches and stately temples, which one age doth 
 raise, doth not another raze ? Tombs and adopted pillars lie 
 buried with those which were in them buried. Hath not avarice 
 defaced what religion did make glorious ? All that the hand of 
 man can uprear is either overturned by the hand of man, or at 
 length by standing and continuing consumed. ... Pos- 
 sessions are not enduring ; children lose their names ; families 
 glorying, like marigolds in the sun, on the highest top of wealth 
 and honour, no better than they which are not yet born, leav- 
 ing off to be. . . . That renown by papers [i.e., by litera- 
 ture] which is thought to make men immortal, and which 
 nearest doth approach the life of those eternal bodies above, 
 how slender it is the veiy word of paper doth import ; and what 
 is it when obtained but a flourish of words which coming times 
 may scorn ? How many millions never hear, the names of the 
 most famous writers ; and amongst them to whom they are 
 known how few turn over their pages ; and of such as do how 
 many sport at their conceits, taking the verity for a fable, and 
 oft a fable for verity, or, as we do pleasants, use all for recrea- 
 tion ? Then the arising of more famous doth darken, put 
 down, and turn ignoble, the glory of the former, being held as 
 garments worn out of fashion. Nay, when thou hast attained 
 what praise thou couldst desire, and thy fame is emblazoned in 
 many stories, never after to be either shadowed or worn out, it 
 is but an echo, a mere sound, a glow-worm, which seen afar 
 casteth some cold beams, but approached is found nothing; an 
 imaginary happiness, where good depends on the opinion of 
 others. Desert and virtue for the most part want monuments 
 and memory, seldom are recorded in the volumes of admira-
 
 .«&/. 34-40- MS "CYPRESS GROVE." 141 
 
 tion, nay, are often branded with infamy, while statues and 
 trophies are erected to those whose names should have been 
 buried in their dust. . . . Consider in what bounds our 
 fame is confined, how narrow the lists are of human glory, and 
 the farthest she can stretch her wings. ... Of this small 
 indivisible thing [the Earth, itself only a point in the general 
 Universe, as he has just explained] how much is covered with 
 waters, how much not at all discovered, how much unin- 
 habited and desert, and how many millions of millions are 
 they which share the remnant amongst them, in languages, 
 customs, divine rites, differing, and all almost to others un- 
 known ! . . . Then imagine me (for what cannot imagina- 
 tion reach unto?) one could be famous in all times to come, 
 and over the whole world present, yet shall he be for ever 
 obscure and ignoble to those mighty ones which were only 
 heretofore esteemed famous amongst the Assyrians, Persians, 
 Romans. Again, the vain affectation of man is so suppressed 
 that, though his works abide more space, the worker is un- 
 known. The- huge Egyptian Pyramids, and that grot in Pau- 
 silipo, though they have wrestled with Time and worn upon the 
 vast of days, yet are their authors no more known than it is 
 known by what strange earthquakes and deluges isles were 
 divided from the continent, or hills bursted forth of the valleys. 
 Days, months, and years are swallowed up in the great gulf of 
 Time, which puts out the eyes of all their glory, and only a 
 fatal oblivion remains." 
 
 At this point the Essayist softly changes the principle of his 
 philosophizing, and proceeds to turn or recast more hopefully 
 the whole speculation. Hitherto he has been assuming, he 
 virtually tells us, the materialistic mode of conception, and 
 following it out, as it ought to be followed out, to its last con- 
 sequences of self-humiliation, contempt of life and its conditions, 
 and spiritual exhaustion and discomfort. But may not the 
 Mind of Man, which has thus resolved all the world of 
 appearances into vanity, fall back on its consciousness of what 
 itself, the feeler and reasoner that has dared the resolution and 
 will not yet recant a jot of it, essentially and independently 
 is. "My soul, what aileth thee '? he asks. "If thou rightly 
 "know thyself, thou hast but small cause of anguish; for, if there
 
 I4 2 DRUMMOND OF HAWTIIORNDEN. 
 
 " be any resemblance of that which is infinite in what is finite 
 " (which yet by an infinite imperfection is from it distant), if thou 
 " be not an image, thou art a shadow, of that unsearchable Trinity, 
 " in thy three essential powers, understanding, will, memory." 
 In other words, the Mind of Man, this faculty of knowing, 
 willing, and remembering, sprung from Deity, and devised in a 
 world transcending Time, Space, and all Appearance, is to con- 
 sider itself the essence, master, interpreter, of that world of 
 Space, Time, and Appearance, into which it has been inserted, 
 and with which it has to hold traffic until the shell of its im- 
 prisonment is broken and it remounts to its native immortality. 
 This notion, expressed in very eloquent language, but in the 
 main very much in that of the Platonic philosophy, and of the 
 systems of Idealism to this day, is offered by the Essayist as 
 the only positive tenet that will undo all the previous negation, 
 and enable the soul to accept its burden. In the course of his 
 exposition of it, however, his language assuming more and more 
 of a theological tinge, though still as with a reluctance to do so, 
 and a desire to remain as generally Platonic and poetical as 
 possible, he suddenly falters, and takes refuge for the rest in a 
 dream : — ■ 
 
 "As these images were limned in my mind, the morning star 
 now almost arising in the East, I found my thoughts in a mild 
 and quiet calm ; and, not long after, my senses, one by one 
 forgetting their uses, began to give themselves over to quiet 
 rest, leaving me in a still and peaceful sleep, if sleep it may be 
 called where the mind awaking is carried with free wings from 
 out fleshly bondage. For heavy lids had not long covered their 
 lights when, methought, nay, sure, I was where I might discern 
 all in this great All — the large compass of the rolling circles ; 
 the brightness and continual motion of those rubies of the 
 Night which, by their distance, here below cannot be perceived ; 
 the silver countenance of the wandering Moon, shining by 
 another's light ; the hanging of the Earth, as environed with a 
 girdle of crystal; the Sun enthronized in the midst of the 
 Planets, eye of the Heavens, gem of this precious ring, the 
 AVorld. But, whilst with wonder and amazement I gazed on
 
 Mtat. 34-40. HIS " CYPRESS GROVE." I43 
 
 those celestial splendours, and the beaming lamps of that 
 glorious temple, like a poor countryman brought from his 
 solitary mountains and flocks to behold the magnificence of 
 some great city, there was presented to my sight a Man, as in 
 the springtime of his years, with that selfsame grace, comely 
 
 feature, majestic look, which the late was wont to 
 
 have." 
 
 The rest, accordingly, consists of the revelations made to the 
 dreamer by this Apparition from the upper world, who came in 
 the guise of some beloved friend recently dead. One speech 
 of the Heavenly Apparition may close this abstract of the 
 Essay : — 
 
 " Death, said he, nor painful is, nor evil, except in contem- 
 plation of the cause, being of itself as indifferent as Birth ; yet 
 can it not be denied but, amidst those dreams of earthly 
 pleasures, the uncouthness of it, with the wrong apprehension of 
 what is unknown in it, are noisome. But the soul, sustained by 
 its Maker, resolved and calmly retired in itself, doth find that 
 Death, sith it is in a moment of time, is but a short, nay 
 sweet, sigh, and is not worthy the remembrance, compared 
 with the smallest dram of the infinite felicity of this place 
 [Heaven]. Here is the Palace-Royal of the Almighty King, in 
 which the Uncomprehensible comprehensibly manifesteth Him- 
 self; in place highest, in substance not subject to any corrup- 
 tion or change, for it is above all motion, and, solid, turneth 
 not ; in quantity greatest, for, if one star, one sphere, be so 
 vast, how large, how huge in exceeding dimension, must 
 those bounds be which do them all contain ! In quality most 
 pure and orient; Heaven here is all but a Sun, or the Sun all 
 but a Heaven. If to Earthlings the footstool of God, and that 
 stage which >He raised for a small course of time, seemeth so 
 glorious and magnificent, how highly would they prize, if they 
 could see, His eternal habitation and throne ! And, if these be 
 so dazzling, what is the sight of Him for whom and by whom 
 all was created, of whose glory to behold the thousand-thou- 
 sandth part the pure Intelligences are fully satiate and with 
 wonder and delight rest amazed? For the beauty of His 
 Light, and the light of His Beauty, are uncomprehensible. 
 Here doth that earnest appetite of the understanding content 
 itself, not seeking to know any more ; for it seeth before it,
 
 1 44 DR UMMOND OF II A I! r THORNDEN. 
 
 in the vision of the Divine Essence (a mirror in the which 
 not images or shadows, but the true and perfect essence 
 of everything created, is shown more clear and conspicuous 
 than in itself), all that is known or understood ; and, whereas 
 on Earth our senses show us the Creator by His creatures, 
 here we see the creatures by the Creator. Here doth the 
 will pause itself, as in the centre of its eternal rest glowing 
 with a fervent affection to that infinite and all-sufficient 
 Good ; which, being fully known, cannot, for the infinite 
 motives and causes of love which are in Him, but be fully 
 and perfectly loved: as He is only essential and true Beauty, 
 deserving alone all love and admiration, by which the 
 creatures are only in so much fair and excellent as they partici- 
 pate of His beauty and excelling excellencies. Here is a 
 blessed company, every one joying as much in another's felicity 
 as in that which is proper, because each seeth another equally 
 loved of God : thus their distinct joys are no fewer than the 
 co-partners of their joy ; and, as the assembly is in number 
 answerable to the large capacity of the place, so are the joys 
 answerable to the numberless number of the assembly. No 
 poor and pitiful mortal, confined on the globe of Earth, who 
 hath never seen but sorrow, or interchangeably some painted 
 superficial pleasures, and had but guesses of contentment, can 
 rightly think on, or be sufficient to conceive, the termless 
 delights of this place. So many feathers move not on birds, 
 so many birds dint not the air, so many leaves tremble not on 
 trees, so many trees grow not in the solitary forests, so many 
 waves turn not in the ocean, and so many grains of sand limit 
 not those waves, as this triumphant Court hath variety of de- 
 lights, and joys exempted from all comparison. . . . But, 
 although this bliss of souls be great, and their joys many, yet 
 shall they admit addition, and be more full and perfect at that 
 long-wished and general reunion with their bodies." 
 
 On the whole, if the reader will add the impressions he may 
 have received from our specimens of Drummond's Flowers of 
 Sion, and our extracts from his Cypress Grove, to the impres- 
 sions already made by his previous poems and letters, he will 
 probably agree with me that there can have been few more 
 interesting persons of the literary and meditative order living 
 in Great Britain about the year 1623 than this Scottish
 
 ALtat. 34-40. A WORD OF CRITICISM. 145 
 
 gentleman, domiciled so quietly in his glen of the Esk near 
 Edinburgh. 
 
 True, one may take exceptions to the substance of the 
 writings in which Drummond had revealed himself. Especially 
 one may feel that, with all their poetical beauty, their musical 
 sweetness, and their pensive metaphysical elevation, there is a 
 certain monotony in the total effect. This incessant thought 
 of the All as a bell of azure space, with Moon, Sun, Planets, 
 and Stars in it, overhanging the Earth — beautiful as it is, im- 
 pressive as it is, and paint it and repaint it as one may with 
 every study of variety, now lightening the blue to dim the 
 golden discs, and again deepening it that they may shine out 
 more lustrously: what is it, after all, but a luxurious intel- 
 lectual tent? Why live for ever in this tent, green-carpeted 
 though it be, the blue folds and cope of silk rustling never so 
 finely, and the fringes, cords, and devices glittering? Come 
 out from it; walk a little in the crowded plain; engage in some- 
 thing there; insult somebody, and let there be a private scuffle, 
 if nothing else offers ; dash into a general uproar, right or wrong, 
 and vociferate like a giant on whichever side ; investigate some- 
 thing with lynx-like pertinacity on and on; take humours thick 
 and fast as they come, and fashion them multifariously into 
 plays and stories ! Or, if you will be at the tent, the tent, see 
 that it is all it might be! See that it is a just reduction in 
 emblem of the All it is intended to represent, and that there is 
 no pressing question about the All to which it cannot give 
 accommodation and suggest figurative response ! Persist even 
 in this perfecting of the tent ! Not ceasing to be a poet, you 
 may then anticipate, but by one stroke farther, the feat of a 
 Berkeley; or, by still harder fortification, and wider building- 
 out, you may convert your poetic shelter into the system of a 
 Kant. 
 
 Really, though one says all this, by Avay of asserting one's 
 right never to be wholly satisfied, it is very unfair to our good 
 and high-minded Drummond. For one thing, it is one of his 
 
 K
 
 146 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 distinctions among his literary contemporaries that he had 
 thought of constructing for himself a permanent intellectual 
 tent, a theory or image of the All, of any sort. For another, 
 his tent is a very good tent, better than most of us live in yet. 
 On the whole, therefore, I repeat, without hesitation, that he is 
 one of the most interesting men of the literary or meditative 
 order in his time in Great Britain. Let the limits of the time 
 be between 1616, when Shakespeare died, and 1634, when 
 Comus was produced. Then, among the somewhat inefficient 
 scattering of wits and poets in England itself in that interval, 
 presided over though they were by a massive Ben Jonson, 1 
 do not think one will be found of purer, clearer, and sweeter 
 genius than Drummond of Hawthornden. Certain it is, at all 
 events, that there was no other such soft, cultured, contem- 
 plative, and musical soul in rugged, dogged, and Kirk-vexed 
 Scotland in the last year of King James the Sixth. 
 
 The last year of King James the Sixth ! Yes, we have now 
 arrived at that epoch ! The big-headed, thick-tongued, sham- 
 bling, shrewd, jocose, scholarly, half-brutal, not unlikeable, but 
 altogether grotesque and disreputable king of the three king- 
 doms was approaching his end. He was leaning now on the 
 last of his favourites, Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. His un- 
 popularity with the English had of late years much increased, 
 in consequence of his prosecution of the Spanish Match for his 
 son Charles, his truckling to the Spanish Court, and his deser- 
 tion of the cause of Continental Protestantism, as represented 
 in his son-in-law, the Elector Palatine. The Spanish Match, 
 however, having been at length broken off, greatly to the de- 
 light of the English, another Parliament had been called (Feb. 
 19, 1624), to declare war against Spain, vote supplies for an 
 expedition to the Palatinate, and give James and his minister 
 Buckingham a chance of retrieving themselves even yet by a 
 thoroughly Protestant policy. The chance was to continue 
 throughout the year 1624. What was made of it needs not be
 
 AZtat 34-40. KERR OF ANCRAM RETURNED. I47 
 
 inquired here. We have but to cull out a particular or two of 
 the Court-life of that year, appertaining to Drummond's bio- 
 graphy. 
 
 Drummond's friend, Sir Robert Kerr of Ancram, had received 
 a formal pardon for his offence before the end of 1620, and had 
 revisited England in 162 1, and married for his second wife the 
 widow of a Somersetshire Knight, named Portman, better known 
 by her own title as Lady Anne Stanley, daughter of the 6th 
 Earl of Derby. He had been again abroad, however; and not 
 till 1624 do we find him permanently back in England and 
 restored to Court-favour. Prince Charles had been his friend 
 throughout his misfortune, and had exerted himself to procure 
 his pardon; and it was to the Prince's service that he was now 
 especially attached. 
 
 To be dated in 1624, if not earlier, is a letter of Drum- 
 mond's to Kerr. " Brave minds, like lamps," he says, " are 
 " discerned when they are canopied with the night of affliction, 
 " and, like rubies, give the fairest lustre when they are rubbed. 
 " The sight of so many stately towns and differing manners 
 " of men, the conquest of such friends abroad and trial of 
 " those at home, the leaving of your remembrance so honour- 
 " able to after times, have made you more happy in your 
 " distress than if, like another Endymion, you had slept away 
 " that swift course of days in the embracements of the Court." 
 Drummond seems to have been so far right. Kerr had 
 brought back with him, if not a generally improved mind, at 
 least a renewed interest in Poetry. He had been struck, while 
 abroad, by " hearing in the Low Countries the Dutchmen and 
 French sing in their several languages to one tune;" and, from 
 the hint so afforded, he had conceived the idea of a special 
 variation of the king's project of a metrical version of the 
 Psalms. Why should there not be a series of " Psalms in 
 English Verse to the measures of the French and Dutch," 
 which differed somewhat from the English common metre of 
 eights and sixes? Accordingly, by the end of April, 1624, he
 
 148 DRUMMOND OF HAWTIIORNDEN. 
 
 had himself done ten of the Psalms in this style, and had sent 
 them to Drummond, whose transcript of them in his own hand 
 still remains. Their merit was not superlative ; but Drummond 
 seems to have taken a friendly interest in them, and to have 
 corresponded further with Kerr about them and about poetry 
 generally. There is a scroll of a letter of Drummond's, without 
 date or address, which was possibly part of this correspondence. 
 It refers to a conversation Drummond had had with the person 
 addressed, in which they had " regretted the want of Christian 
 songs and hymns in our English tongue, the neighbour coun- 
 tries of France and Germany having the advantage of us 
 herein," and had agreed in wishing that the supply of this 
 defect might be " enterprised by some happy wit;" and it 
 encloses a copy of an attempt of Drummond's own of the de- 
 sired kind, which he considers the property of his correspon- 
 dent, as " the first mover" in the business. If this letter was 
 not actually to Kerr, there must have been others to him of a 
 similar kind, stimulating Kerr's poetical vein generally ; for 
 in the close of the year Kerr sent to Drummond the fol- 
 lowing : — 
 
 " To my worthy Friend, Mr. William Drummond 
 of Haze.it/10r71den, 
 
 " Sir, 
 
 " Every wretched creature knows the way to that place 
 where it is most made of; and so do my Verses to you, that 
 was so kind to the last that every thought I think that way 
 hastes to be at you. It is true I get leisure to think few ; not 
 that they are cara because rara, but indeed to declare that my 
 employment and ingine concur to make them, like Jacob's 
 days, few and evil. Withal I can think of no subject which 
 doth not so resolve in a vein so opposite to this world's taste 
 that my verses are twice lost— to be known like Indians among 
 Spaniards for their cross disposition, and as coming from me 
 that can make none without an hammer and the fire ; so as 
 justly they cannot be auribus hujus sceculi accommodata. The 
 best is I care as little for them as their fame ; yet, if you do 
 not dislike them, it is warrant enough for me to let them live
 
 sEtat. 34-40. KERR OF A NCR AM RETURNED. I49 
 
 till they get your doom. In this Sonnet I have sent you an 
 approbation of your own life ; whose character however I have 
 missed, I have let you see how I love it, and would fain praise 
 it, and indeed would fainer practise it. It may be the All-wise 
 God keeps us from that kind of life we would choose in this 
 world, lest we should be the unwillinger to part with it when 
 He calls us from it. I thank God that hath given me a great 
 goodwill to be gone whensoever He calleth ; only I pray, with 
 Ezekias, that He will give me leave to set my poor house in 
 such a moderate order that the wicked world have not occasion 
 altogether to say of me ' There was a foolish courtier, that was 
 in a fair way to make a great fortune, but that he would seek 
 it, forsooth, by the desolate steps of virtue_ and fair dealing,' 
 and [so laugh at me for] loving only such feckless company as, 
 God knoweth, I can neither love nor sooth any other, be they 
 never so powerful : at least their good must exceed their ill, or 
 they must appear so to me. Yet do not think I will repine if 
 I get no part of this desire ; but my utmost thought, when I 
 have done all I should, is ever Fiat voluntas Domini. And 
 thus I commend my Sonnet to you, and myself as 
 
 " Your constantly loving friend to command, 
 
 "Ro. Kerr. 
 
 " Cambridge (where the Court was the week past 
 
 about the making of the French Match), 
 
 1 6th December, 1624. 
 
 "a sonnet in praise of a solitary life. 
 
 Sweet Solitary Life, lovely dumb joy, 
 
 That need'st no warnings how to grow more wise 
 
 By other men's mishaps, nor the annoy 
 
 Which from sore wrongs done to oneself doth rise ; 
 
 The Mornings second mansion, Truth's first friend, 
 
 Never acquainted with the world's vain broils, 
 
 Where the whole day to our own use we spend, 
 
 And our dear time no fierce ambition spoils ; 
 
 Most happy state, that never tak'st revenge 
 
 For injuries received, nor dost fear 
 
 The Court's great earthquake, the grieved truth of change, 
 
 Nor none of Falsehood's savoury lies dost hear, 
 
 Nor know'st Mope's sweet disease that charms our sense, 
 Nor its sad cure, dear-bought Experience ! "
 
 15° 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 " The date of this starved rhyme and the place was the very 
 Bedchamber [of the King], where I could not sleep."* 
 
 With all allowance for the circumstance last mentioned, one 
 can see that Kerr had judged his own Muse quite rightly when 
 he said she required a hammer and fire at any time when she 
 would make verses. It is fair, however, to give the footnote in 
 which he explains why in the fifth line of the Sonnet he had 
 called a solitary life " the Morning's second mansion " and 
 "Truth's first friend," as the reader would hardly guess the 
 reasons for himself. They were " because the next way the 
 Morning goeth from the lap of Thetis is to those that dwell in 
 the country, for at Court and the great palaces of the world 
 they lie abed and miss it," and because " Truth getteth first 
 welcome among those that be at leisure to consider of her 
 excellency." There had been late lying-abed, it seems, and 
 small leisure for considering of the excellency of Truth, at the 
 Court at Cambridge during the preceding week, all being so 
 busy in settling those final arrangements for the French Match, 
 or marriage of Prince Charles with the French Princess 
 Henrietta-Maria, in the midst of which, as Kerr tells us, his 
 Sonnet to Drummond -was written. 
 
 If Kerr could make a Sonnet in the King's Bedchamber, 
 and was also versifying some of the Psalms in a new way of his 
 own, he may again, one fancies, have been on the King's 
 select Committee for the royal work of Psalm-translation. 
 That work was still going on ; and Sir William Alexander, 
 whose Nova Scotia scheme had not yet made much way, was 
 still in this matter the King's adviser-in-chief. Alas ! Psalm- 
 translation, Royal Matchmaking, the championship of Pro- 
 
 * Drummond 's undated letter of congratulation to Ken - on his return to 
 Court is printed at pp. 142-3 of the 1711 Edition of his Works; and 
 Kerr's Letter and Sonnet of Dec. 16, 1624, are given at pp. 152-3 of the 
 same volume. The intermediate letter of Drummond's, cited as possibly, 
 but not certainly, written to Kerr, will be found among Mr. Laing's 
 Extracts from the Hawthornden MSS., Arch. Scot., IV. 92.
 
 /Etat. 34-40. DEATH OF KING JAMES. I5I 
 
 testantism in the Palatinate, carousings and high jinks with 
 the Duke of Buckingham, and all the fun and politics of this 
 world universally, had come to a close for his Majesty. In 
 March, 1625, he lay tossing on his bed at his house of 
 Theobalds in Herts, grievously ill of tertian ague, Buckingham 
 interfering with the treatment of the case by the royal physicians, 
 and insisting on first administering a powder, and then apply- 
 ing a plaster, with his own hands. On Sunday the 27 th of that 
 month he died, in the fifty-ninth year of his age. On the 30th 
 the news reached Edinburgh. A tremendous tempest of wind 
 and rain had been raging there the day before, and it was in 
 the lull after this tempest that it was proclaimed to the Scots 
 that King James was dead and that King Charles reigned in 
 his stead. 
 
 Naturally, in Scotland even more than in England, there was 
 a recollection at that moment (except among the more resolute 
 Presbyterians) of all the good that could be said of the dead 
 king, and of that reputation of his for learning and wisdom, 
 demonstrably of Scottish origin unless in so far as they might 
 be divine, which the greatest of Englishmen for twenty years 
 bygone, Lord Bacon included, had concurred in making 
 proverbial through Europe. It need not surprise us, then, 
 that, among the clouds of poems produced for his obsequies, 
 there was a sonnet by Drummond, who had honoured him so 
 conspicuously in his Forth Feasting eight years before, and who 
 had seen no reason since to adopt the Presbyterian quarrel 
 with him. I would rather omit it if I could ; but to do so 
 would be to tamper with the records. Besides, if Drummond 
 could write it and feel it in any degree to be true, why should 
 the poor king, because we judge differently of him now, lose 
 the benefit of it ? So here it is : — 
 
 " Let holy David, Salomon the wise, 
 That King whose breast Egeria did inflame, 
 Augustus, Helen's son great in all eyes, 
 Do homage low to thy mausolean frame ;
 
 152 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 And bow before thy laurel anadem 
 Let all those sacred swans which to the skies 
 By never-dying lays have raised their name, 
 From north to south, where sun doth set and rise. 
 Religion, orphaned, waileth o'er thine urn ; 
 Out Justice weeps her eyes, now truly blind ; 
 In Niobes the remnant Virtues turn ; 
 Fame, but to blaze thy glories, lives behind. 
 
 The world which late was golden by thy breath 
 Is iron turned and horrid by thy death."
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 FIRST FIVE YEARS OF THE REIGN OF CHARLES I. : DRUMMOND'S 
 PATENT FOR MECHANICAL INVENTIONS, AND HIS GIFT TO 
 EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY : UNCERTAINTY OF HIS WHEREABOUTS 
 DURING THOSE FIVE YEARS : PROBABLY ABROAD FOR THE MOST 
 PART. 
 
 1625 — 1630. 
 
 HP HE accession of Charles L, whatever were to be its effects 
 on the three kingdoms, brought better days than ever for 
 Sir William Alexander of Menstrie. 
 
 One of the first Acts of the new reign was the confirmation 
 and extension of Sir William's Nova Scotia Charter, with a 
 more formal ratification of his title to the Lieutenancy or Vice- 
 royalty of the large Transatlantic territory there defined. Act- 
 ually, in May, 1625, there was the first creation of Nova 
 Scotia baronets, the patent of each baronetcy conferring so 
 much land in the new country on its possessor, and the infeoff- 
 ment taking place on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh, the dust 
 and stones of which were made, by a legal figment, to represent 
 the ideal miles and leagues of American land. By this time some 
 of the Scottish nobles and lairds had gone into partnership with 
 Alexander in his enterprise ; moneys had been subscribed, or 
 were understood to be forthcoming ; and there were contracts 
 for the settlement of emigrants from Sutherlandshire and other 
 parts of Scotland in the new plantations. To aid in the busi- 
 ness, and bring in more partners and subscribers, with pur- 
 chasers of the reserved baronetcies, Sir William published and
 
 r 54 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 circulated, in the same year, a tract called An Encouragement to 
 Colonies, and Sir Robert Gordon of Lochinvar, one of the 
 already created baronets, co-operated with him in another 
 pamphlet, entitled Encouragements for such as shall have inten- 
 tion to be u/idertakcrs in the new plantation of Cape Breton, now 
 
 New Galloway, in America. Nor was this all. On the 28th 
 
 of January, 1626, Sir William was promoted to the high office 
 of Principal Secretary of State for Scotland, the duties of which 
 did not involve residence in Edinburgh (where there was a 
 conjoint or subordinate secretary), but consisted in attending 
 the king in London on all Scottish business, receiving his in- 
 structions thereon, and transmitting the same to the proper 
 Scottish authorities. Thus Sir William was at once Lieutenant 
 or Viceroy of New Scotland and Secretary of State for Old 
 
 Scotland. Nor was this yet all. Those Psalm-translations 
 
 which King James had had so much at heart, and which he 
 meant to dedicate to the United Churches of Great Britain and 
 Ireland, had been left in a rough and unfinished state — not 
 advanced farther than Psalm XXXI. in any complete form, if 
 we may trust the precise statement made by Bishop Williams of 
 Lincoln in the king's funeral sermon ; and Charles felt it to be 
 his filial duty to have this work revised, perfected, and prepared 
 for the press. To whom could such an editorial office be more 
 fitly entrusted than to Sir William Alexander, who had been 
 with the late king all along in the labour, not only as adviser 
 and assistant, but, to a great extent also, unless people are 
 mistaken, as contributor? This editorship of the late king's 
 Psalms, accordingly, was added to Sir William's other honours. 
 He had been already for some time engaged in it when 
 Charles, Aug. 25, 1626, addressed a letter to Spotswood, Arch- 
 bishop of St. Andrews, announcing the fact, and requiring all 
 the assistance the Scottish clergy could give. "Whereas it 
 " pleased our late dear Father, of famous and eternal memory," 
 so runs the letter, "considering how imperfect the Psalms in 
 " metre presently used are, out of his zeal to the glory of God,
 
 Mtat. 40-45. ALEXANDER'S NEW HONOURS. 155 
 
 " and for the good of all the Churches in his dominions, to 
 " translate them anew : therefore, as we have given command- 
 " ment to our trusty and well-beloved Sir William Alexander, 
 " Knight, to consider and review the metre and poesy thereof, 
 " so our pleasure is that you and some of the most learned 
 " divines in that our kingdom confer them with the original 
 '• text, and with the most exact translations, and thereafter cer- 
 " tify back your opinions unto us concerning the same, whether 
 " it be fitting that they be published, and sung in churches, 
 "instead of the old Translation, or not."* One can see that 
 the intention was that the Scottish Bishops should secure suffi- 
 cient accuracy to the original, and that, under that safeguard, 
 Alexander should look after the verse and expression. Within 
 little more than a year it must have been decided by all the 
 referees that the late king's Psalms would do credit to his 
 memory, and were suitable for the intended purpose, or might 
 easily be made so; for, on the 28th of December, 1627, there 
 was granted to Alexander a patent of the entire copyright, or 
 liberty to print and sell the king's Psalms, for a period of 
 thirty-one years, in consideration of " the great pains already 
 taken, and to be taken, in collating and revising the same, 
 and in seeing the first impression thereof to be carefully and 
 well done." As it was expected that the King's Psalms, when 
 published, would be the sole authorised version for use in 
 churches, this was a most substantial gift, and Sir William must 
 have been anxious to get the work to press as soon as possible. 
 For the present, however, his profits from this patent, like those 
 from his Nova Scotia Charter, were rather prospective. 
 
 During the greater part of these three years of rewards and 
 honoraria to Sir William Alexander from the new reign the 
 traces of his friend Drummond are so few and dubious that we 
 
 * Baillie's Letters and Journals, edit. 1842, III. 530 (i.e., part of Ap- 
 pendix by the editor, Mr. David Laing, containing an interesting account of 
 old Metrical Versions of the Psalms).
 
 156 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 are not sure even of his whereabouts. We have seen that he 
 was still at Hawthornden as late as December, 1624, when Sir 
 Robert Kerr wrote to him in praise of his solitary life there, and 
 probably also as far into 1625 as the date of King James's 
 death. But from this last point till late in 1627 there is such a 
 break in the records that we are obliged to suppose him away 
 from Hawthornden, or even out of Scotland altogether, begin- 
 ning that lengthened period of foreign travel which the old 
 biographer of 1 7 1 1 assigns to him at some time in his mature 
 life, but dates confusedly. In 1625, on Charles's accession, 
 Drummond was in his fortieth year, and there were various rea- 
 sons which might make it then agreeable and useful for him to 
 refresh his acquaintance with foreign countries. He may have 
 revisited France, where he had resided some years in his youth; 
 and he may have included in his tour the Low Countries, Ger- 
 many, and Italy. Wherever he went, his means were such as to 
 enable him to live with credit, and his accomplishments in 
 languages such as to make him sufficiently at home. It need 
 be remarked only that he can hardly have been in France after 
 July, 1626. In that month Charles, who had in the previous 
 year married Henrietta Maria, the sister of the reigning French 
 King, Louis XIII., had come to a rupture with the French 
 Government ; and there was a consequent war between the two 
 countries, which lasted till May, 1629. English and Scottish 
 travellers for pleasure would naturally, while this war lasted, 
 keep out of France. 
 
 Our first glimpse of Drummond as again back in England 
 and Scotland is in a Latin document of a business nature. It 
 is so curious, and presents him in such a new and unexpected 
 light, that we shall translate it entire : — 
 
 " LETTER PATENT TO MR. WILLIAM DRUMMOND FOR THE MAKING 
 OF MILITARY MACHINES. 
 
 "Charles, by the grace of God, King of Great Britain, 
 France, and Ireland, and Defender of the Faith, to all his good
 
 .Ktat. 40-45. ROYAL PATENT TO DRUMMOND. 157 
 
 subjects whom the present letters may reach, greeting. — Know 
 that, whereas, from the unexceptionable testimonies of many per- 
 sons, we have been clearly informed that our faithful subject, 
 Mr. William Drummond, of Hawthornden, has expended very 
 much time, labour, and money in the devising and fabricating 
 of various machines, which may be of use and profit to the 
 State in the affairs both of peace and war, and that the same 
 gentleman, by the application of mathematical and physical 
 principles, has invented certain new arms, and perfected some 
 old and imperfect ones, or rescued obsolete ones from oblivion, 
 and especially warlike engines which may be used as arms both 
 of offence and defence, and whether the action should have to 
 be in seafight or landfight : to wit : — 
 
 " 1. A Cavalry Weapon, by which single cavalry soldiers may 
 do as much in battle as five or six can do with the common 
 arms, and which weapon will also suit excellently for foot ser- 
 vice : the same, from the dreadfulness no less than the sudden- 
 ness of its effect, being called BaKrpof3povri](pov, or Thundering 
 Rod; but commonly, with reference to the variety of sizes it 
 may assume without change of nature, known by such different 
 names as the Box Pistol, Box Musket, Box Carabine, or Box 
 Dragoon, 
 
 " 2. A new kind of Pike, by which any foot-soldier, besides his 
 own work, will be able to do also the work of five or six 
 sclopetarii ; which weapon may be called Aoy%aKovTLo--->]s, that 
 is, Shooting Pike or Pikearquebus. 
 
 " 3. A certain machine as of combined sclopi, by the benefit 
 of which one or two soldiers will be made able to* do the work 
 of a hundred sclopetarii ; which machine, from its effects, may 
 be named 'App.aKepa.vvos, or Thundering Chariot, vulgarly The 
 Fiery Waggon. 
 
 " 4. A new kind of larger gun, by which, without fail, in the 
 same space of time in which hitherto one ball has been dis- 
 charged, there may be discharged four or five, and that whether 
 in naval or in land engagement ; of which machine there are 
 varieties both of shape and size, though, from the property com- 
 mon to all, it may be called Avw^ifiakco-Tpov, or Open Gun, 
 vulgarly Open Ordnance. 
 
 " 5 and 6. Instruments of the mortar or siphon kind : whereof 
 the one, on account of its signal use in defending walls and 
 ships, and its truly wonderful speed, is called HXarocrKeSao-TLKov,
 
 i 5 8 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORN DEN. 
 
 vulgarly The Flat-Scourer ; the other, because of its special 
 utility for shattering the masts, sails, rigging, and oars of ships, 
 receives the name 'EvOvT/xrjTLKov, vulgarly The Cutter. 
 
 " 7. A sort of machine, not unlike the Helepolis of the ancients, 
 or rather the Helepolis itself adapted to modern warfare, and 
 that both for storming forts, and defending the same ; by the 
 help of which, in sieges of towns, rapid approaches may be 
 made to an inner fortification or ditch, without any moveable 
 earthwork, and, in the defence of towns, a fort may be so 
 strengthened that by no attacks can it be taken or destroyed, 
 but will afford a free shelter from the enemy. This machine, 
 on account of its likeness to that part of a fortification which is 
 commonly called the Cavalier, and because it carries several 
 soldiers and is moveable, may be named HpoftoXrjKLvrjTos, vul- 
 garly The ElepJiant, or The Cavalier Errant. 
 
 " 9. [So numbered in the Patent, though, unless something is 
 omitted in the copy, it should be 8.] A new kind of vessel, 
 which will be able, without check from any strength of chains, 
 bars, or batteries, to enter any harbours, and either destroy all 
 the shipping by fire, or capture them by force ; which vessel, 
 from its truly stupendous and terrible effect, and its dreadful 
 destructiveness to ships and harbours, deserves to be called 
 ' Aijj.evo\o9pevT7]s, vulgarly Leviathan. 
 
 " 10. An instrument serving for the proportional observation 
 of the strength and slackening of winds ; by which the master 
 of a ship may be instructed for the more certain calculation of 
 the exact length of his voyage, and which, accordingly, is called 
 'AvefjLOjxeTpov, or popularly The Wind- Measure. 
 
 "11. A certain light kind of craft, which shall make very rapid 
 way with sails and oars, at any time, or even with an adverse 
 wind, and shall beat any ordinary vessel in speed : called 
 therefore, 'EvaAioSpo^os, or popularly The Seapostilion. 
 
 "12. An instrument by which the length of a sea-voyage is 
 exactly reckoned, and the difference of the longitude of places 
 determined, whether at sea or in neighbouring shores ; called, 
 accordingly, M^koScikt^s, or popularly Length-Compass. 
 
 " 13. An instrument by which a large quantity of salt water 
 may, at slight expense, be made sweet and drinkable, and every 
 day as much as will suffice for a ship's daily use, so that there 
 need be no fear of putridity from long keeping ; which instal- 
 ment is called HrjyovavriKov, or popularly Ship-Fountain.
 
 JEtat. 40-45. ROYAL PATENT TO DRUMMOND. i5 q 
 
 "14. A set of Burning Glasses of different kinds, by which, at 
 whatever distance, whether on sea or land, any combustible 
 stuffs, out of all reach of shot, may be set on fire. All these, 
 though consisting of glasses shaped of various conic sections, 
 concave and convex, and of other curved surfaces, and these 
 variously combined, and burning by reflection as well as by 
 refraction, have the common name TloppMirvpiirvov, and (not to 
 deprive the illustrious Archimedes of his due honour) will be 
 called Glasses of Archimedes. 
 
 " 15. Certain kinds of telescopes, by means of which, at any 
 distance, any object exposed to light may be seen no less 
 clearly and vividly, in its own dimensions, than if it were 
 placed at a proper distance, which instrument they call Hap-fao- 
 Tzivoirrpov, and popularly Lynxes' Eyes. 
 
 "16. An organic machine, producing, from a natural and 
 never-wearied cause, Perpetual Motion, by the use of which an 
 infinite variety of mechanical operations may have their prin- 
 ciple ; which machine is called Aei/avr/Tos, or vulgarly The 
 Mover : — 
 
 " Inasmuch as the said Mr. William Drummond has, with 
 singular industry, and no common ingenuity, thought out these, 
 and not a few inventions besides, and justice and right demand 
 that each one shall enjoy the rewards of his own virtue, so that 
 persons of excellent genius and high ability may be encouraged 
 to the undertaking of similar labours, and the endeavouring of 
 those things which may be of benefit and use to the State : 
 Therefore We have given and granted, and by the tenor of 
 this our Patent do give and grant, to the said Mr. William 
 Drummond, and his assigns, one or more, for the space of one- 
 and-twenty years next and immediately following the date of 
 these presents, our full power and privilege of making, or grant- 
 ing to others the power of making, throughout our subjects or 
 among foreigners, all the above-named machines, and so that 
 he and they may freely sell, import, and export in and to the 
 same kingdom and from the. same. 
 
 "And, because there are not wanting certain envious and 
 grasping persons, who, from a sordid and base spirit, strive to 
 get for themselves the use and fruits of other people's labours, 
 in such a manner that those who. have deserved well of the 
 State are defrauded of the just reward of their labours, there-
 
 160 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 fore we command, prohibit, and interdict, to the effect that 
 none of our subjects within our kingdom of Scotland make, or 
 cause to make, buy, sell, use, or in any way possess, any of the 
 said instruments during the said space of time, without having 
 first had and obtained the express license. of the aforesaid Mr. 
 William Drummond and his aforesaid agents. And, if it shall 
 happen that any one, on the contrary, makes, or' causes to be 
 made, sells, buys, uses, or in any way possesses, any of the 
 said instruments, without the express license of the aforesaid 
 Mr. William Drummond and his agents, the said instruments 
 shall belong to Mr. William Drummond and his agents, and 
 the culprit shall pay a fine of fifty merks of the usual money of 
 our kingdom of Scotland, half to go to our Treasurer for our use 
 and the other half to the said Mr. William Drummond and his 
 aforesaid heirs, and that as often as there shall be offences to 
 the contrary, of whatever rank or quality the offenders be. 
 And, if the offenders, from poverty, cannot pay the said fine, 
 then they are to be punished in goods and persons, as shall 
 appear fit to our Treasurer, Treasurer-depute, and the said Mr. 
 William Drummond and his said representatives. Moreover, 
 we order and command the Lords of our Council and Session, 
 to the effect that they direct letters of horning, caption, and 
 imprisonment, and all Justices of the Peace, and other officers 
 and judges of whatever rank, that they take, apprehend, and 
 incarcerate offenders, and also appraise their goods for dis- 
 posal as above : — 
 
 " Provided always that, if it shall happen that the aforesaid Mr. 
 William Drummond and his aforesaids fail in reducing to prac- 
 tice the forenamed machines, or one or more of them, within 
 the space of three years next and immediately following the 
 date of these presents, then and in that case these presents 
 shall be of no force, efficacy, or value, to the extent of all or 
 any of the said particulars not put to practice as aforesaid, but 
 without prejudice to such as have been put to practice for the 
 good of the said realm. 
 
 " In witness whereof we have commanded our great seal to be 
 put to these presents. At Hampton Court, the last day but 
 one of the month of September, in the year of our Lord one 
 thousand six hundred and twenty-six, and of our Reign the 
 second.
 
 sElat. 40-45. DRUMMOND'S PATENT 161 
 
 " By the signature in the hand of His Majesty the King above- 
 written. 
 
 "Sealed at Holyrood House, 24th December, 1627. 
 
 " Mr. David Sybbald." * 
 
 What are we to say to this ? It certainly uncovers for us a 
 portion of the life of our Laird of Hawthornden which we 
 should not otherwise have guessed. Lo ! he has not been so 
 exclusively confined as we had supposed in that beautiful intel- 
 lectual tent of his, emblematic of the starry All of Physical 
 Nature underhanging the Metaphysical Mystery ! He has not 
 merely been pursuing his Petrarchian or more miscellaneous 
 readings, penning Sonnets and Poems of his own, ruminating 
 metaphysical questions and their moral significance, and re- 
 creating himself with engravings and music. Amid all this, he 
 has been retaining those tastes in mathematics and in mechani- 
 cal science which he had acquired at College, and has actually 
 been designing or projecting on paper, perhaps even laboriously 
 modelling, a series of instruments and machines to perform all 
 manner of wonders, and revolutionize, among other things, the 
 whole art of warfare. Against one's will, one has to imagine 
 that for some years there had been a litter of gun-barrels, tubes, 
 lenses, and other apparatus of wood, glass, iron, and brass, 
 somewhere on the Hawthornden premises, with a turning-lathe 
 at least, and perhaps even a carpenter's shop and a smithy. 
 
 It adds interest to this new information about Drummond to 
 remember that, in such mechanical projects, he was in the 
 track of his great compatriot, Napier of Merchiston. Had 
 not that strange Apocalyptic and Logarithmic genius devoted 
 a great part of his life to the invention of mechanical engines 
 for warlike and other purposes, including two kinds of burning 
 mirrors for destroying ships, and a peculiar shot for artillery 
 that should, by some zig-zag motion, or other devilish ranging 
 
 * Translated from the original Latin document as given in Drummond's 
 Works, pp. 235-6. 
 
 L
 
 1 62 DRUMMOND OF HAIVTHORNDEN. 
 
 from the rectilinear, sweep off whole battalions at once ? Was 
 he not supposed to have carried some of these tremendous 
 secrets to the grave with him, his Logarithms and other 
 sounder studies having in his later years withdrawn him from 
 such murderous ingenuities? Napier, as has been already 
 mentioned, had lived till 1617, the man of greatest mark 
 by far in or near Edinburgh, honoured by tokens of regard 
 from even the distant Kepler; and Drummond (who had 
 a copy of his treatise on the Apocalypse in his library) must 
 have known him well. The local tradition of him and his in- 
 ventions was, at all events, still fresh and operative, if only 
 through the sight of the old mansion of Merchiston where he 
 had lived and died, and which no one could pass without 
 thinking of him. Moreover, his family had been left of some 
 conspicuous consequence in Scottish society ; and his son 
 and heir, Archibald, in particular, was sustaining the paternal 
 name so creditably by his official and political abilities that his 
 promotion to the peerage, by the title of First Lord Napier of 
 Merchiston, was considered but a fair reward of his own merits, 
 while it was a recognition of his father's. Altogether, it may 
 have been impossible for Drummond, with his time on his 
 hands, and with his fondness for ingenious studies, to have 
 escaped the influence of such a predecessor as Napier, and the 
 impulse he had given to mathematical and physical speculation, 
 and to the quest after new mechanical contrivances. Perhaps, 
 to a greater extent than we now know, Napier had bequeathed 
 among his countrymen that precise form of the quest which had 
 engaged so much of his own time, and which promised the 
 world, if it would wait long enough, revolving pistols, rifled 
 cannon, mitrailleuses, gun-cotton, torpedoes, Archimedean 
 mirrors for burning ships, and turret-ships and iron-clads 
 which would defy even the Archimedean burners. 
 
 So much on the faith of historical coincidences and intrinsic- 
 probabilities. Yet, on the other hand, a study of the patent 
 itself suggests queries and suspicions.
 
 Mtat. 40-45. DRUMMOND'S PATENT. 163 
 
 It is dated at Hampton Court, Sept. 29, 1626, /.<?., just when 
 Charles's rupture with France was decided, and there were pre- 
 parations for the war with that country; and it was registered 
 at Holyrood-house on the 24th of December, 1627, when the 
 war was in full progress, and the Duke of Buckingham, as 
 Admiral and General for England, was directing his wretched 
 expeditions to the French coast, and wasting the lives of his 
 soldiers in the Isle of Rhe and before Rochelle. As war was 
 going on with Spain at the same time, there was, of course, a 
 re-awakened industry throughout Great Britain in all those 
 materials and fabrications of war which had been out of demand 
 during the long preceding peace of James's reign; and hence 
 patents in such materials and fabrications were, more or less, 
 the order of the day. That the Scottish patent-in-chief on the 
 occasion should have fallen to Drummond can hardly but imply 
 some amount of prior qualification on his part. Perhaps, how- 
 ever, the amount of qualification consisted rather in willingness 
 to take the patent than in anxiety to have it. His bosom- 
 friend, Sir William Alexander, it is to be remembered, was then 
 Scottish Secretary of State, and had much to say with the King 
 in the disposal of Scottish patronage of all kinds; and, deep as 
 Sir William already was in patents and charters on his own 
 account, may he not have imagined that it would be a kindness 
 to his retired and studious friend, Hawthornden, to lure him 
 into the same style of business ? While he himself was to be 
 the Cortes of Nova-Scotia and the proprietor of the Authorised 
 Version of the Psalms for the mother-country and the colonies, 
 mia:ht not Drummond make his fortune as a Scottish Archimedes? 
 It may seem a spiteful minuteness of scrutiny into the cir- 
 cumstances to mention that there was a Scotchman already in 
 the field with some practical pretensions to this character. He 
 was a certain Alexander Hamilton, commonly called "Sandy 
 Hamilton" or "Dear Sandy;" and he was the brother of the 
 Earl of Melrose, who had been Alexander's predecessor in the 
 Scottish secretaryship, and had been removed from that office
 
 164 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 to make way for him. This Sandy Hamilton had been in 
 Germany on military service, had studied metallurgy there, had 
 returned home with a reputation for expertness in all mechanical 
 mysteries and war munitions, and had invented, among other 
 things, an improved cart, for which he got a patent in 1624. 
 Why should not Drummond, with his finer genius, eclipse this 
 blacksmith-brother of the Earl of Melrose ? What was an im- 
 proved cart, or even cannon-founding according to the best 
 German lights, in comparison with the inventions which 
 Drummond had been meditating? Well, but had Drum- 
 mond brought his sixteen inventions to any pitch of feasibility? 
 Could he have furnished as distinct specifications of them as 
 could doubtless have been furnished by the long-headed Sandy 
 Hamilton of whatever he undertook? The Patent positively 
 states that Drummond had "thought out" all the fifteen; and we 
 can discern Drummond's own hand in the description of the 
 several inventions, and in the scholarly, and also the picturesque 
 and popular, names adopted for them. At the utmost, however, 
 considering what the fifteen inventions were, and what a task 
 they would have been even for an Archimedes and a James 
 Watt combined, one has to conclude that Drummond had 
 " thought them out" only in the sense of having dreamt over 
 them, with some belief that they might be thought out. In 
 fine, one sees that, at a time when a new social stimulus had 
 been given to speculations and schemes of this nature, he had 
 allowed himself to be persuaded that he was a fit person to 
 contract for the immediate application of all the engineering 
 talent of Scotland, with as much of foreign help as might be 
 necessary, to the mechanical problems of which he had drawn 
 out a programme. 
 
 The Political Economy of King Charles's days, it is very 
 clear, was awfully aristocratic and barbarous. With our present 
 notions, such an enormous leasing-out of the possibilities of 
 mechanical invention in a whole nation to one man would 
 appear monstrous. Not an ingenious Scot, anywhere from
 
 Mtat. 40-45 . PR OB A BL V A BR OA D. 165 
 
 Wigton to Wick, could have invented a new boat, or a new- 
 fire-arm, or devised an improved telescope, but the Laird of 
 Hawthornden, by the splendidly vague terms of his patent, 
 would have had the right to pounce upon it as infringing on 
 his property in Sea Postilions, Box Carabines, and Lynxes Eyes. 
 There does not seem, however, to have been any complaint, 
 even from Sandy Hamilton. The Patent was for twenty-one 
 years; but there was the less harm in it because it was to be 
 null and void in three years in all particulars except those 
 which Drummond should in the meantime have succeeded in 
 reducing to practice. Now, Sandy Hamilton knew what was 
 meant by " reducing to practice " as well as any man, and was 
 quite willing that Drummond should enjoy his three years of 
 such exercise in his sixteen projects without disturbance. He 
 may have had his qualms about the Box-Pistol and the Flat 
 Scourer, both of them feasible enough notions if one were to 
 give one's mind to them ; but what cared Sandy about such 
 Greek and poetical "buff" as the Anoxibalistron, the revived 
 Hclepolis, the Glasses of Archimedes, and the Perpetual Mover ? 
 Mr. Drummond was welcome to his monopoly in these, and 
 would be a wiser man about them three years hence ! 
 
 The three years, if dated from the day of the original draft of 
 the patent, would expire on the 29th of September, 1629, or, 
 if from the entry of the patent in the Scottish records, on the 
 24th of December, 1630. Unless we are to suppose the whole 
 matter to have been mere moonshine, Drummond's movements 
 and occupations during those three years must have been 
 determined considerably by his patent. He had been out of 
 Scotland, we have seen reason to think, since 1625 ; and, 
 wherever he had been in the interim, he may have been in 
 England and at Hampton Court in September 1626, when 
 the patent was drawn out. It is worth observing that 
 there is a dash of French here and there in the Latin 
 of the patent: " Le Box Pistol," "Be Pike-arquebus," " Be
 
 1 66 DRUMMOND OF IIAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Flat-scourer," &c. Had Drummond been availing himself of 
 the advice of French and Belgian artificers in the definition 
 of his designs? Be that as it may, he must have looked 
 forward to a considerable use of foreign experience and foreign 
 metallurgic skill during the three years allowed him for 
 realizing his patent. Hence, if he was back in Edinburgh 
 in 1627, we need not be surprised if it was but on a flying visit, 
 and to make preparations for a longer term of absence. 
 
 Such seems to have been the fact. In the same year, 1627, 
 in which the Patent for Military Machines was registered at 
 Holyrood-house, Drummond bestowed a gift on the University 
 of Edinburgh which has caused him to be remembered in the 
 annals of that University not only as one of the most famous of 
 her early alumni, but also as one of her earliest benefactors. 
 
 The beginnings of a Library for the University had been 
 established by the bequest of a number of books by a citizen 
 named Clement Little, and by other donations from individuals. 
 The Library, however, was still meagre ; and, when Drummond 
 proposed to enrich it by adding to it part of his own collection 
 of books, the authorities could not thank him sufficiently. No 
 sooner was the offer accepted than it was carried out in the 
 most handsome manner. About 500 volumes in various 
 languages, with some MSS., most of them with Drummond's 
 name written on them, and some of them with his marginal 
 markings and underlinings of passages as he had read them, 
 were at once brought from Hawthornden to the University, 
 to be deposited on the library shelves. A careful Latin 
 catalogue of them was made out and printed, with an elegant 
 preface by Drummond himself. " Auctarium Bibliothcaz Edin- 
 burgencE, sive Catalogns Librorum quos Gulielmus Drummond ab 
 Hawthornden Bibliotheca D.D.Q. Anno 1627" ("Addition to 
 the Edinburgh Library, or Catalogue of the Books presented 
 to the Library by William Drummond of Hawthornden in the 
 year 1627") is the title of this interesting little volume of
 
 . Ktat. 40-45. GIFT TO EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY. 167 
 
 48 pages, printed at Edinburgh that year by the successors of 
 Andro Hart. Drummond's Latin preface may be given in 
 translation : — 
 
 " On man alone, His most excellent work, has the all-excel- 
 ling Maker of the world bestowed, along with the craving for 
 knowledge, reason, speech, and a spirit of intelligence; nor 
 this surely with any other end than that he should investigate 
 the causes of things, collect consequences, observe likenesses, 
 distinguish differences, remember the past, connect the present 
 with the past, and, in fine, weigh the whole condition of life 
 in the scales of right judgment, and fortify himself with the 
 guards necessary for fulfilling this present course of pilgrimage 
 well and happily. Although, however, men aspiring after some 
 proficiency of science have, with much effort, found out many 
 aids to knowledge, yet, as life is so short, as experience requires 
 such continuous observation, as memory also is so slippery that 
 not even by constant pains and watching can it retain the 
 knowledge that has been acquired, small though that may be, 
 on these grounds it would appear that no implements are 
 better adapted for promoting that high aim of intelligent nature 
 than Literary Monuments. By these past things are set before 
 the eyes as if present, in spite of oblivion the illustrious actions 
 of men are represented in vivid colours, in spite of the Prince 
 of Darkness divine discourses are preserved intact from the 
 claws of night-harpies. Wherefore the human race seems to be 
 no less indebted to the Inventors of Letters than to the 
 Founders of Republics, who led men forth from the caves 
 where they were lurking like beasts, congregated the stragglers, 
 and brought them into this human and civil mode of life. 
 And in Republics that have attained to the height of power 
 and glory there has always been a proportional growth and 
 flourishing of Arts and Letters. 
 
 '•With no greater care have arsenals and storehouses been 
 founded with all equipments for war than Libraries have been 
 founded for the studies both of war and peace. Wits, howsoever 
 pregnant and great, without books, are but as valiant soldiers 
 without arms, and artisans destitute of tools. Of these did 
 arise the many schools in the world, and mostly in Europe, 
 which by the bounty of so many renowned Princes have been 
 so amply privileged. And those great men were not so much 
 beholden to arms and their conquests whilst they lived as after
 
 l(>g DRUMMOXD OF IIAWTJ10RNDEN. 
 
 their deaths to Letters ; for neither their monuments of marble, 
 nor brass, nor gold, no not the diamond itself, are able so to 
 preserve the glory of their actions as are some few sheets of paper. 
 States and Republics owe much to those who, like torches, 
 waste themselves to shine and give light to others ; but without 
 those Fathers of their countries, who endeavour to preserve 
 and communicate to posterity what these ingeniously have 
 done, their works would be little better than spiders' webs. 
 For what availeth the writing of books, if they be not preserved; 
 and how many excellent pieces, by the barbarity and negligence 
 of ages, have perished ? 
 
 " To omit ancient times, and the mention of Ptolemseus 
 Philadelphus, who erected that famous Library in Alexandria, of 
 the Ulpian Library of Trajan, and that of Pisistratus in Athens, 
 how much is Florence indebted to the noble Laurentius of Medici 
 for his Library, and to Bessarion, once Bishop of Nice, who 
 at his death devoted to it a Library valued at thirty thousand 
 crowns ? And what oweth Oxford, nay, this Isle, to the most 
 worthy Bodley, whose Library, perhaps, containeth more excel- 
 lent books than the ancients by all their curious search could 
 find ? Our [Scottish] Academies in former times were much 
 beholden to their founders and benefactors for many goodly 
 books ; but, by the nonage of our Princes and the fury of civil 
 wars, they, with many other monuments, had their fatal period : 
 which loss, by the liberality of our most gracious Prince Charles 
 (when we shall be so happy as to be remembered), may be 
 repaired ; under whom the rising and growth of 1 libraries may 
 prove as fortunate, portending good success, as the burning of 
 the Library of Antioch was counted and proved ominous to 
 the Emperor Jovian. 
 
 " To such a worthy work all the lovers of learning should con- 
 spire and contribute; and of small beginnings who is ignorant 
 what great effects may follow ? If perhaps we will consider the 
 beginnings of the greatest Libraries of Europe (as Democritus 
 said of the world, that it was made up of atoms), we shall find 
 them but small ; for, how great soever in their present per- 
 fection they are now, these Cartilages were once Magalia 
 [mere Numidian cottages]. 
 
 " Libraries are as forests, in which not only tall cedars and 
 oaks are to be found, but bushes too, and dwarfish shrubs ; 
 and, as in apothecaries' shops all sorts of drugs are permitted 
 to be, so may all sorts of books be in a Library : and, as they
 
 sEtat. 40-45. GIFT TO EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY. 169 
 
 out of vipers, and scorpions, and poisoning vegetables, extract 
 often wholesome medicaments for the life of mankind, so out 
 of whatsoever book good instructions and examples may be 
 acquired. In sundry parts of the earth there are but seven 
 Wonders dispersed ; in one noble Library many more, worthy 
 of greater admiration, and of greater excellency, are together to 
 be found. As good husbandmen plant trees in their times, of 
 which the after-age may reap the fruit, so should we, and what 
 Antiquity hath done for us do for Posterity, that letters and 
 learning do not decay, but ever flourish to the honour of God, 
 the public utility, and the conservation of human society. 
 
 "One said of good princes, that all their names might be 
 drawn within the gem of one ring ; but we hope, by time, a 
 volume may be compiled of the names of such who, conspiring 
 against barbarity and the roughness of the former age, have 
 thought it no dishonour to make the Muses beholden to their 
 liberality. In order, however, that those who may in future 
 imitate the example of our benefactors, may know that they 
 have not bestowed their gifts on oblivion, leaving their due 
 honour to be given to them by God and after-times, we have 
 thought fit to register their names here, as in a temple of 
 memory; which, as it can be no disadvantage to the living, 
 may serve to the dead as a kind of epitaph, by which the report 
 of their munificence may be transmitted to posterity [Here 
 follows a list of ten benefactors of the Edinburgh Library, 
 beginning with Clement Little and ending with William 
 Drummond]." * 
 
 Drummond's gift to the University seems to have been a 
 matter of some public ceremony in Edinburgh, and he appears 
 himself to have aided and abetted this, with a view to call 
 
 * Except in the first paragraph and the closing sentence, which I have 
 translated from the Latin, I have adopted Drummond's own English in a 
 paper printed in his Works (p. 223) under the title Of Libraries. Though 
 not with absolute literality the same as the Latin Preface prefixed to the 
 Catalogue of Drummond's Books presented to the University Library, it is, 
 to all intents and purposes, the same document, sentence for sentence ; and 
 it is perhaps the English draft furnished by Drummond to the University 
 officials, and translated by them into Latin. Of course they are supposed 
 to speak throughout, and especially in the last sentence, where I note, they 
 make their Latin much more emphatic than Drummond's English. He 
 rather huddles up that sentence, as if, though there must be something of 
 the kind at the end of the document, it was hardly for him to write it.
 
 170 
 
 DRUMMOND OF IIAWTIIOKNDEN. 
 
 attention to the needs of the University, and bring in, if pos- 
 sible, other gifts and endowments from wealthier people. For 
 example, there is another paper of his, called Bibliotheca Edin- 
 burgetia Lectori ("The Edinburgh Library to the Reader"), 
 which he seems to have circulated about this time, as an 
 appeal for additional benefactions. The Library itself is sup- 
 posed to speak ; and, after dilating on the value and virtue of 
 Books, very much as in the document just quoted, it is made 
 to put this stinging rebuke to some people into its plea : — 
 "All is not gold which glittereth. Some, personating virtues 
 " which they had not, have boldly intruded themselves here, 
 " and would, undeservedly, in the temple of Memory erect 
 " to themselves altars, covering baseness under a mask of 
 " virtue ; being really covetous, would seem and appear to be 
 " liberal, or at least would be liberal at other men's charges, 
 " not their own. Neither will I search into age-worn monu- 
 " ments, but relate what I have suffered myself. There are 
 " who, to acquire some piece of fame, would lately have 
 " adorned me with portraits, statues, medals, maps, books of 
 " all sciences, languages, characters (which they had collected 
 " from the liberality of others to this use), but at so high a rate 
 " to my founders, and with such blown ambition, that the want of 
 '' such stuff was a great deal more tolerable than the enjoying 
 " could either bring profit or ornament. Such a bargain is 
 " even as if some stationers, who had sold dearly their books, 
 " should desire to be enrolled amongst my benefactors, having 
 " perpetual panegyrics, solemn remembrances, and anniversaries, 
 " offered to their names for their 'great and boundless liberality. 
 " Let such men go to the Americans, and there barter their 
 " glasses, feathers, whistles, and puppets, with gold and precious 
 " stones ; for I had rather attend Time and Providence than 
 " remain thus obliged. In the mean time live, ye ever gene- 
 " rous spirits who, out of your own, have been beneficial to me, 
 
 " who," &c. Clearly Drummond must have been at very 
 
 considerable pains at this time in helping on a movement for
 
 /Etat. 40-45. BLANK OF TWO YEARS. 171 
 
 the better endowment of his ^/wz Mala; and especially in 
 trying to induce others to imitate his own example by donations 
 to the University Library.* 
 
 What we have to notice specially, however, is the coincidence 
 in time between Drummond's gift to the University and the 
 registration of his Patent for Military Machines. If he was to 
 be abroad on the business of his Patent, there might be an 
 additional motive for his donation of books to the University 
 at that particular time. May he not have been breaking up 
 housekeeping? That he did so sometime after December 1627 
 seems, at any rate, a necessary supposition. From that date we 
 do not hear of him again as certainly in Scotland till 1630. t For 
 these additional two years, we seem bound to suppose, he con- 
 tinued, with whatever reluctance, that absence from Hawthorn- 
 den which had begun in 1625, though it had been broken by a 
 temporary return. Where he went, or what he did, we have no 
 means of knowing ; only, in conformity with the tradition from 
 his first biographers, we have to imagine him on the Continent. 
 Let those years, from 1627 to 1630, therefore, be skipped as a 
 
 * Drummond's Collection of Books, consisting of his catalogued donation 
 of 1627, with subsequent additions in 1628 and 1630, is still carefully pre- 
 served in a separate cabinet as part of the now extensive Library of the 
 University of Edinburgh. It is a most interesting collection, characteristic 
 of the collector, and valuable from the number of rare and curious books 
 of his time— Latin, French, Italian, and English— that are included in it. 
 li contains, I think, most of the books mentioned in a previous chapter 
 as among Drummond's readings and purchases from 1606 onwards, and, at 
 all events, early editions of some or other of the works of the following 
 English writers: — Bacon, Chapman, Churchyard, Daniel, Dekker, Donne, 
 Drayton, Hey wood, Ben Jonson, Marston, May, the Countess of Pembroke, 
 Quarks, Seidell, Shakespeare [Love's Labour Lost, 1598, Romeo and Juliet, 
 1599), Sidney, Spenser, Sylvester, and George Wither. Alexander's 
 Works are, of course, in it, and a complete set of Drummond's own ; also 
 some of King James's, Murray of Gorthy's, &c. 
 
 t Prefixed to The True Crucifixefor True Catholicizes, or the Way for the 
 Catholickes to have the true Crucifixe, by Sir William Mure, the younger, of 
 Rowallan, published at Edinburgh in 1629, there is a commendatory Sonnet 
 by Drummond ; but it need not have been written that year or in Scotland. 
 With this exception, I have not detected any documentary trace of Drum- 
 mond referring him to Scotland between 1627 and 1630.
 
 172 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 blank, and let us pass on to his re-appearance within the distinct 
 grasp of records, only first flinging into the blank, for lack of 
 anything else, a small satirical distich which he wrote before 
 leaving Edinburgh. 
 
 The reader understands, of course, that the Duke of Buck- 
 ingham had managed so miserably the first expedition to 
 Rochelle and the landing on the Isle of Rhe' (June-Nov., 1627) 
 that all faith in his generalship and admiralship for the rest of 
 the war had been lost. He must also understand, however, 
 that in Scotch the name of the aquatic bird duck is pro- 
 nounced exactly like the title duke; and he must understand 
 yet further that, until Drummond should have provided his 
 tremendous new artillery, the most serviceable field-piece was 
 still the small kind of cannon called a drake (quasi dragon, or 
 fire-spitter.) With this elaborate explanation the meaning of 
 Drummond's distich will be made out. It may be taken as 
 significant that, with such designs for new artillery in his pocket, 
 he should say nothing about them, but should still speak of the 
 poor ordinary drake with respect : — 
 
 "ON THE ISLE OF RHE\ 
 
 Charles ! would ye quail your foes, have better luck, 
 Send forth some Drakes, and keep at home the Duck."
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 DRUMMOND BACK IN HAWTHORNDEN : MORE LETTERS OF HIS : 
 DEATH OF DRAYTON : THE STRATHERNE-MENTEITH SCANDAL : 
 DRUMMOND'S INTERFERENCE IN IT : HIS MARRIAGE. 
 
 1630—1633. 
 
 Drummond was certainly back in Hawthornden in May, 1630 ; 
 on the 1 2th of which month he wrote as follows to a kinsman 
 of his, Sir Maurice Drummond, one of the gentlemen-ushers of 
 Queen Henrietta -Maria: — "It is much argued, amongst 
 " those men who will have a reason of everything, why good 
 " men ordinarily are deserted of fortune and many evil arise 
 '• to preferments. The first answer is that lewd and bold men 
 " have strong fantasies, and attempt upon many divers matters 
 " which good men, by their bashfulness and towardness, never 
 " essay to reach. The next answer is that lewd men suffer 
 " themselves to be guided by nature, or the starry influences, or 
 " rather, being fools, give themselves over, like beasts, to be 
 " carried by their appetites, and the virtuous are led by reason, 
 " which often counterchecketh itself, and, by long meditation 
 " and advice what to do, leave off all doing, and suffer others 
 " in the interim to carry the garland. You have spent now 
 " many years at court, and yet that clock which hath struck ten 
 " to others is still pointing at one or two to you. Have you not 
 " yet taken a distaste and satiety of that old mistress of yours, 
 " the Court? Her long delay in preferring you tells you are too-
 
 i?4 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " honest. Methinks you should have a desire to recreate your- 
 " self at last in your native country with the remembrances of 
 " past contentments at Court, as your kinsmen here have a long- 
 " ing after so long a time to see you, and unanimously now 
 " salute you." * 
 
 Why, Mr. Drummond, this is the old Hawthorn den strain 
 once more ! You are not changed at all ; one might think you 
 had never been away from Scotland yourself all this time ! But 
 how about your wanderings and occupations since we saw you 
 last ? How, more particularly, about the success of your Patent 
 in Military Machines, the probationary three years of which 
 were to expire about this time? Which of the sixteen inventions 
 of the Patent have you brought to practical perfection — the 
 Box-Pistol, the Flat Scourer, the Archimedean Burning Glasses, 
 
 or the Perpetual Mover ? "No more of that, Hal, an thou 
 
 lovest me," we seem to hear Drummond replying, with a sigh and 
 a blush. Whether the Patent had really engrossed him during 
 the two or three past years, or whether he had only been per- 
 suaded into the enterprise by his friend Sir William Alexander, 
 and had let it drift out of his thoughts after the first month or 
 two of assumed complacence, certain it is that it had by this 
 time been thrown into the limbo of vanities as far as he was 
 concerned, and does not appear again in his life to trouble him- 
 self or us. As we expected, Sandy Hamilton, with only his 
 improved cart, and his orthodox metallurgical sagacity, had 
 remained master of the field in Scotland in the department of 
 practical mechanics. 
 
 It was of the less immediate consequence to Drummond 
 because the War with France had been ended by a Peace 
 (April, 1629) and the War with Spain was about to be con- 
 cluded in the same easy manner (Nov., 1630). Buckingham 
 had been assassinated two years ago ; and Charles, with new 
 ministers about him, had settled unto his fathers unpopular 
 policy of pusillanimous peace with foreign powers and arbitrary 
 * The letter is printed at pp. 145-6 of Drummond's Works.
 
 JEtat. 45-48. ALEXANDER'S PROMOTIONS. 175 
 
 rule at home. Military and naval machines were not so much 
 wanted as racks, pillories, and gibbets. 
 
 Meanwhile Sir William Alexander had been flourishing like a 
 green bay-tree. It had decidedly struck ten for him in the 
 clock of Court-favour. The Peace with France had, indeed, 
 destroyed Sir William's hopes of being the Cortes of Nova 
 Scotia to the full extent of his Charter of Viceroyalty; for, 
 though Scottish colonists had gone out, under his auspices and 
 those of the Nova Scotia baronets to whom he had sub-granted 
 lands, the territory, or most of it, claimed by the French on 
 older rights, and made a scene of some fighting while the war 
 lasted, had to be ceded back to France by the Articles of the 
 Peace. By way of compensation, however, Sir William re- 
 ceived, or was promised, a large sum of money; and, as he had 
 already obtained several posts of emolument in Scotland in 
 addition to his Secretaryship, and still kept some hold on 
 British American ground north of New England, the popular 
 impression was that it was not he who had suffered by the 
 cession to the French, but rather his baronets and other poorer 
 holders of Nova Scotia stock. So, at least, we are told by Sir 
 Thomas Urquhart. " When he had enrolled," says this satirical 
 critic, " some two or three hundred knights, who, for their 
 " hundred and fifty pieces each, had purchased amongst them 
 " several millions of New Caledonian acres, confirmed to them 
 " and theirs for ever under the Creat Seal, the affixing whereof 
 " was to cost each of them but thirty pieces more, finding that 
 " the society was not likely to become more numerous, and 
 " that the ancient gentry of Scotland esteemed of such a whim- 
 " sical dignity [the baronetcies] as of a disparagement rather 
 " than addition to their former honours, he bethought himself 
 " of a source more profitable to himself and the future estab- 
 lishment of his own state; in prosecuting whereof he, without 
 " the advice of his knights (who represented both his Houses 
 " of Parliament, clergy and all), like an absolute monarch in-
 
 ! y 6 DR UMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 " deed, disposed heritably to the French, for a matter of ^5000 
 " or ^"6000 English money, both the dominion and property 
 " of the whole continent of that kingdom of Nova Scotia, 
 " leaving the new baronets to search for land among the 
 " selenites in the moon, or turn knights of the sun, so dearly 
 '•' have they bought their orange ribbon." Alexander, it seems, 
 was not thought to be so badly off himself. His Charter still 
 gave him rights and claims to Transatlantic territory, which he 
 might yet work to advantage, if not in the original Nova Scotia 
 form. Besides which, his edition of King James's Psalms was 
 now ready, and actually in course of being printed at the 
 Oxford University Press ; and the profits from that important 
 copyright were in near prospect. Was there anything more 
 that could be done for a man that the king delighted to hon- 
 our? Yes, he could be raised to the Peerage. This too was 
 done; for, on the 4th of September, 1630, he ceased to be 
 merely Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, and became Lord 
 Alexander of Tullibody and Viscount Stirling. Menstrie, 
 Tullibody, and Stirling are all in the same Scottish neighbour- 
 hood of the upper Forth ; but, of course, Stirling, as giving the 
 new peer his chief title, had acquired the chief claim to him. 
 Accordingly, he began building for himself a fine new family 
 mansion in that noble old town. 
 
 Whatever pleasure Drummond may have had in contemplat- 
 ing the public splendours of his friend Viscount Stirling, he 
 himself was contented with his restoration to his own simpler 
 lot and his life of leisure in his well-loved glen. His experi- 
 ence of locomotion, and especially of locomotion by sea, had 
 been sufficient ; and it was now a trouble to him to think of 
 leaving Hawthornden and the vicinity of Edinburgh, even for 
 an excursion across the Forth. This we learn, rather inter- 
 estingly, from a letter of his, dated December, 1630, and ad- 
 dressed " To his loving Friend A. Cunningham, Laird of 
 Barns."
 
 Mtat 45-48. TO THE LAIRD OF BARNS. I77 
 
 That gentleman, a brother or other near relative of his 
 long-dead betrothed, had invited him to stay a while with 
 him in Fifeshire ; and we may suppose that, if there was any 
 excursion that could lure Drummond away from home, though 
 by a melancholy power, it would be one bringing back such fond 
 scenes and memories. The invitation, accordingly, is accepted, 
 but in this curious fashion : — "This is no small misery of us Islan- 
 " ders that, as exiled, we cannot take a view of God's fair 
 " and spacious earth without crossing the stormy and deceitful 
 " seas ; and it is no less a misery in this part of our Island 
 " that we can hardly repair unto you demi-islanders [the people 
 " of Fifeshire] without dancing and tossing on your arm of sea. 
 " Of all pastimes and exercises I like sailing worst, and had 
 " rather attend the hunters and falconers many days ere I 
 
 " sailed one half-day. It is a part of Noah's judgment. If 
 
 " it shall be my good fortune to arrive in your Island, prepare 
 " no games of strength for our recreation ; and, after a satiety 
 " of discourse and reading, let us not trouble ourselves with 
 " any sedentary pastimes. The dice are for the end of a drum 
 " amongst soldiers ; the tables for goutish and apoplectic per- 
 " sons, to make them move their joints ; the cards for women, 
 " to observe their discretion. But, if we shall have a desire of 
 " change of thoughts, let us not refuse the Chess, the only 
 " princely game, next government, in the world, — nay, the true 
 " image and portrait of it, and training of kings. Here is a 
 " King, defended by a Lady, two Bishops, two Knights, at the 
 " end of the lists, with two Rooks, Fortresses, or Castles. 
 " Before these, to prepare and make plain the passages, march 
 " eight Pawns, enfans perdus, exposed to all desperate services, 
 " every one standing for their monarch." Here follows, at 
 some length, a moralizing of the whole game of chess, by an 
 interpretation of the moves of the various pieces, and of the 
 main laws of the game, into their equivalents in social life. 
 The moves and duties of the Bishops are first moralized, — 
 " ecclesiastical, grave men, who by oblique, traverse, and mys- 
 
 M
 
 1 78 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " tical ways, should effectuate their master's designs and safety;" 
 then those of the Knights ; then those of the Castles ; then the 
 limitations of the King, especially in always " marching but 
 one pace, whilst all the other pieces on the chess-board put 
 themselves now on the offensive, then on the defensive, for his 
 safety ;" next the considerable privileges of the Lady, with the 
 peculiar proprieties required in her demeanour towards the 
 Bishops and Castles, but especially towards the forward and 
 skipping Knights ; and so to the mating of the King, in which 
 a deep political meaning is found, with a glance at "the recom- 
 pense of the Pawns " when, by great skill and daring, they can 
 " win, and ascend the furthest part of the chess-board on the 
 sunny side," and thus be ennobled. " The game ended, 
 " Kings, Queens, Bishops, Knights, Pawns, pell-melled, are 
 " confusedly thrown into the box, — the conclusion of all 
 " earthly actions and greatness ! " After all this ingenious 
 moralizing, Drummond adds: "If Hieronymus Vida can be 
 " found, with Baptista Marino his Adone, we shall not spare 
 " some hours of the night and day at their chess, for I affect 
 " that above the other." In other words, fond as Drummond 
 was of chess, he preferred reading ; and, if the Laird of Barns 
 had a copy of the Works of the Italian poet Vida, who had 
 written a Latin poem on Chess, or a copy of Marini's Adone, 
 there would be amusement enough for him in his coming visit* 
 On the assumption that the visit was duly paid, we are to 
 suppose that, some time or other about the Christmas of 1630, 
 Drummond did cross the Firth of Forth, and present himself 
 once more at the mansion of the Cunninghams of Bams, near 
 the stormy " East Neuk of Fife." There are no Cunninghams 
 of Barns now, nor have there been for many a day ; but the 
 name Barns, or New Barns, or West Barns, still exists, and the 
 once extensive mansion of the family is represented, or was 
 
 * The letter is given at pp. 146-7 of Drummond's Works, but -without 
 date. That is supplied by Mr. David Laing from the scroll among the 
 Hawthornden MSS.
 
 JEtat. 45-48. VISIT TO BARNS. 179 
 
 recently represented, by an old fragment of a house, with 
 vaulted cellars, occupied by farm servants, at the southern 
 extremity of the parish of Crail, and between the towns of 
 Crail and Kilrenny. One of the last of the family seems to 
 have been that Alexander Cunningham, Laird of Barns, whom 
 Drummond now visited, and who is remembered indepen- 
 dently as a man of some enterprise in his day, and the builder 
 of a light-house, still extant, on the Isle of May, a conspicuous 
 little grassy island in the opening of the Firth, about six miles 
 off the Fifeshire coast. A near neighbour of his was Drum- 
 mond's brother-in-law, Scot of Scotstarvet ; for, though Tarvet 
 or Scotstarvet proper is in the heart of Fifeshire, near Cupar, 
 that acquisitive worthy had extended his Fifeshire estates east- 
 wards to the sea, and had for one of his country residences, if 
 not now for his chief country residence, the house of Thirdpart, 
 in Kilrenny parish, quite close to Barns. In a visit to the 
 Laird of Barns, Drummond might therefore include a visit to 
 his sister, his brother-in-law, and his nephews and nieces, at 
 Thirdpart. The old house of Thirdpart has also disappeared, 
 so that whoever visits the East Neuk of Fifeshire now must not 
 look for either of the mansions in which Drummond actually 
 lodged, but must be content with the knolly Fifeshire scenery 
 inland, remaining very much as Drummond saw it, and with 
 the unalterable outlook seawards of the same expanse of beach 
 and breakers. They were rough days those, no doubt, but 
 perhaps not so very rough as we flatter ourselves they were in 
 comparison with the present. It may be doubted whether any 
 gentleman now living in or near Edinburgh, in writing to a 
 Laird resident about the East Neuk of Fifeshire, would assume 
 as much and as varied culture in his correspondent as Drum- 
 mond could assume, in 1630, in his friend Cunningham of Barns. 
 He was the builder, it appears, of a light-house on the Isle of 
 May ; and yet Drummond could expect him to understand a 
 philosophical comment on the game of Chess, and perhaps to 
 have in his library, for the recreation of a guest, the works of
 
 i So DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 the Italian poets Vida and Marini. What is the present Fife- 
 shire equivalent? 
 
 To be quoted here, if anywhere, is another letter of Drum- 
 mond's, undated in the preserved copy, but so exactly in his re- 
 vived mood of Hawthornden philosophizing that it may go with 
 the last. It is addressed to some unknown " M. A. G.," who seems 
 to have asked his opinion on the subject of Astrology : — " I have 
 " never found any greater folly in the actions of men," Drummond 
 replies, " than to see some busy themselves to understand the 
 " future accidents of their lives. This knowledge of things to 
 " come, not revealed to us, is noways needful for us. Where- 
 " soever this superstition is once received, men are driven mad, 
 " and, as it were, haunted by Furies, and are deprived of all 
 " calmness, quietness, and rest. I never knew any who had 
 " recourse to those unlawful curiosities who lived the ordinary 
 "age of man. . . . The mistakings and uncertainties of these 
 " predictions should make us contemn them : Astrologi fingunt, 
 " non docent. The truth of [some] astrological predictions is 
 " not to be referred to the constellations of heaven. The 
 " Genethliatics have other observations than the stars : they 
 " conjecture by the disposition, temper, complexion of the 
 " person, by the physiognomy, age, parents, education, ac- 
 " quaintance, familiarity, and conversation. . . . How can a 
 " Chaldsean, by that short minute, instant, or moment of time 
 " in which a man is born, set down the divers changes, muta- 
 " tions, and accidents of his life? ... If that moment of the 
 " time of birth be of such moment, whence proceedeth the 
 "great differences of the constitution of twins; which, though 
 " together bom, have strange, diverse, and contrary fortunes in 
 " the progress of their lives." Then, after a farther ex- 
 position of the intrinsic absurdity of the pretended science of 
 the Astrologers, he concludes : — " Trust in the First Cause, 
 " God Almighty, and scorn vain predictions. That infinite, 
 " eternal Essence, though the stars should incline, yea neces- 
 " sitate, and be averse, can countermand, and turn them
 
 jEtat. 45 -48. DRA YTON AGAIN. 181 
 
 " propitious. All things turn into the best unto such as rely 
 " on His eternal goodness."* 
 
 We have not heard of Drayton for a good while; but on the 
 14th of July, 1 63 1, we find the veteran again remembering 
 Drummond, and writing to him : — 
 
 " To my Most Worthy and Ever Honoured Friend, 
 Mr. William Drummond, of Hawthorndcn, in Scotland. 
 
 " Sir, — It was my chance to meet with this bearer, Mr. 
 Wilson, at a Knight's house in Gloucestershire ; to which place 
 I yearly use to come in the summer time, to recreate myself, 
 and to spend some two or three months in the country; and, 
 understanding by him that he was your countryman, and after 
 some enquiries of some few things, I asked him if he had 
 heard of such a gentleman (meaning yourself), who told me he 
 was of your inward acquaintance, and spake much good to me 
 of you. My happiness of having so convenient a messenger 
 gave me the means to write to you, and to assure you that I 
 am your perfect faithful friend, in spite of destiny and time. 
 Not above three days before I came from London (and I had 
 not been there above four days) I was with your noble friend 
 and mine, Sir William Alexander, when we talked of you. I 
 left him, his lady, and family, in good health. The messenger 
 is going from hence, and I am called upon to do an earnest 
 business for a friend of mine; and so I leave you to God's pro- 
 tection, and rest ever 
 
 " Your faithful Friend, 
 
 " Clifford in Gloucestershire : " Michael Drayton. 
 
 14th July, 1 63 1 : in haste." t 
 
 Although Drayton here, in his summer-holiday in Gloucester- 
 shire, forgets that Sir William Alexander was now known, in 
 Scotland at least, by his higher title of Viscount Stirling, we 
 must not make the same mistake. We have even particularly 
 to note that, in the same year, 1631, he received, in addition to 
 his previous honours, the appointment to a Judgeship Extraor- 
 
 * Works, pp. 147-8. t Printed in Drummond's Works, p. 154.
 
 ^2 DRUMMOND OF IIAWTHORNDEX. 
 
 dinary in the Court of Session, the supreme Law-Court in Scot- 
 land, and had also the satisfaction of seeing his edition of King 
 James's Psalms at length out in print. The Psalms of King 
 David, translated by King James : cum Privilegio Regiiz Majes- 
 tatis, was the title of the duodecimo volume, of 329 pages, 
 issued at Oxford, "printed by William Turner, printer to the 
 famous University, 1631," and adorned with the royal arms, 
 and a royal warrant allowing the Psalms "to be sung in all the 
 churches of our dominions." Viscount Stirling's thirty-one 
 years' copyright in the Royal Metrical Version might now, at 
 length, yield its fruits. 
 
 For the good Drayton these and all other worldly matters 
 were to be of no interest any longer. He had paid his last 
 visit to Gloucestershire, and to the rest of those rich central 
 parts of England, his native region, whence he and Shakespeare 
 had come, some five-and-forty years before, to begin their 
 London lives as youths together. Not long after the foregoing 
 little letter to Drummond was written he had returned to Lon- 
 don — I suppose to his lodging " at the bay-window house, next 
 the east end of St. Dunstan's church, in Fleet Street"; and 
 there, on the 23rd of December, 1631, he died. They buried 
 him in Westminster Abbey (an honour then, though not nearly 
 so great an honour as it would be now) ; and there was much 
 talk in the London world of wits, with the laureate Ben Jonson 
 in their midst, over the loss of this long-known Elizabethan. It 
 is pleasant, remembering as we do the wall of mutual coolness, 
 if not of mutual antipathy, there had been between Ben and 
 Drayton, to be able to add that this wall had been completely 
 broken down before Drayton's death, and the two had pub- 
 licly made amends to each other. Which had made the first 
 advance it might be difficult to ascertain. Perhaps it had been 
 Drayton in his metrical essay or elegy on Poets and Poesy, 
 published in 1627. In that Elegy (the very same in which we 
 have seen Drayton mentioning Sir William Alexander and 
 Drummond so handsomely) he had inserted this passage on
 
 ^/W. 45-4& DEATH OF DRAYTON. 183 
 
 Ben Jonson, in immediate connexion with Shakespeare and 
 Samuel Daniel — 
 
 " Next these learn'd Jonson in this list I bring, 
 Who had drunk deep of the Pierian spring ; 
 Whose knowledge did him worthily prefer, 
 And long was lord here of the theatre ; 
 Who in opinion made our learn'dst to stick 
 Whether in poems rightly dramatic 
 Strong Seneca or Plautus, he or they, 
 Should bear the buskin or the sock away." 
 
 With this challenge to generosity before him, or perhaps with- 
 out any such challenge, and merely in some burst of his own 
 surly magnanimity, Ben had shown what he could do in the 
 same forgiving vein : — 
 
 " It hath been questioned, Michael, if I be 
 A friend at all, or, if at all, to thee ; 
 Because who make the question have not seen 
 Those ambling visits pass in verse between 
 Thy muse and mine, as they expect. 'Tis true, 
 You have not writ to me, nor I to you. 
 And, though I now begin, 'tis not to rub 
 Haunch against haunch, or raise a rhyming club 
 About the town. This reckoning I will pay 
 Without conferring symbols : this's my day." 
 
 It was a tavern image, but perhaps all the heartier, for Ben had 
 made it his day for paying the reckoning. Never the man to 
 do anything by halves, whether as friend or as foe, he had pro- 
 tracted the epistle so begun into a review of Drayton's poetry, 
 extending over nearly a hundred lines, and mentioning in suc- 
 cession all Drayton's chief works, with a fit eulogy on each, and 
 this retractation of all his previous sneers about the Polyolbion : 
 
 " Thou scorn'st to stay 
 Under one title : thou hast made thy way 
 And flight about this Isle well near, by this, 
 In thy admired Periegesis 
 Or universal circumduction 
 Of all that read thy Polyolbion. 
 That read it ! That are ravished ! Such was I 
 With every song, I swear, and so would die."
 
 184 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 O Ben, Ben ! vide ante, p. 96. Never mind ! One likes even 
 your boisterous inconsistency, and forgetfulness to-day of what 
 you said yesterday ; and, though, if you were living now, those 
 rough-and-ready verses of yours ("admired Periegesis," "uni- 
 versal circumduction," &c.) would not pass muster in our 
 poorest magazine, we accept them gladly, and Drayton's too, 
 with the dates for their vouchers, and call them the large utter- 
 ance of the early gods. Very far from gods ye were, both of 
 you ; but ye were a memorable pair of contemporary mortals, 
 and it is pleasant to know that the wall of coolness between you 
 had been abolished, and ye had fraternised publicly before 
 Drayton died. He sleeps in the Abbey, Ben, and you are 
 drafting the epitaph for his monument to be erected there ; but 
 very soon your place is to be under the same pavement. Five 
 years and a half, Ben ; only five years and a half ! 
 
 Drayton's death was heard of by Drummond with real con- 
 cern. It is the chief topic of a letter written by him to Vis- 
 count Stirling early in 1632. 
 
 " The death of M.D., your great friend," he says, " hath been 
 " very grievous to all those which love the muses here ; chiefly 
 " that he should have left this world before he had perfected 
 " the Northern [intended Scottish] part of his Polyolbion, which 
 " had been no little honour to our country. All we can do to 
 " him is to honour his memory. If your Lordship can get those 
 " fragments of his work which concern Scotland, we shall 
 " endeavour to put them in this country to the press, with a 
 " dedication, if it shall be thought expedient, to your Lordship, 
 " [and] with the best remembrances his love to this country did 
 " deserve. Of all the race of poets who wrote in the time of 
 " Queen Elizabeth your Lordship now alone remains. Daniel, 
 " Sylvester, King James, Donne [are gone], and now Drayton ; 
 " who, besides his love and kindly observance of your Lordship, 
 " hath made twice honourable mention in his Works of your 
 " Lordship — long since in his Odes, and lately in his Elegies, 
 " 1627." [Drummond here extracts, from Drayton's metrical 
 Epistle on Poets and Poesy, the lines about Alexander already 
 quoted by us, p. 114, but omits the sequent lines about himself.] 
 " If the date of a picture of his be just, he hath lived three score
 
 &tat. 45-48. THE MENTEITH SCANDAL. 185 
 
 " and eight years, but shall live, by all likelihood, so long as 
 " men speak English, after his death. I, who never saw him, 
 " save by his letters and poesy, scarce believe he is dead, and 
 " would fain misbelieve verity if it were possible. — The town of 
 " Edinburgh busy themselves very much for erecting of pageants 
 "for the King's Majesty's Entry. Some have written to us 
 " from Court, notwithstanding of his Highness's good intention 
 " to receive his crown in Scotland, it is impossible this year he 
 " can see us, considering the great affairs of Germany. Now, 
 " I have continued my letter too long, considering the many 
 " other papers your Lordship" hath to read. From your Lord- 
 " ship's most affectionate Servant, * W. D." 
 
 The expected Coronation Visit of Charles to Scotland, about 
 which Edinburgh was then astir, did not, after all, take place 
 that year. It had been spoken of for some time; and there 
 had been a good deal of disappointment at its having been so 
 long postponed. The disappointment had even been raised to 
 furious anger by the rumour of a proposal by Charles that 
 the Scottish Regalia should be taken to Westminster, to save 
 him the trouble of a journey to the North. That had been 
 explained away; and the visit, though still postponed, was 
 certainly to be. 
 
 Among Drummond's miscellaneous papers is one dated 
 "December, 1632," and entitled Considerations to the King. 
 The paper refers to a matter now forgotten, but which was of 
 considerable interest at the time, and even of some political 
 importance. 
 
 Among the Scottish noblemen of that day was a William 
 Graham, Earl of Menteith, a man of reputed ability, and 
 holding the offices of Justice- General and President of the 
 Scottish Privy Council. Not content with his Earldom of 
 Menteith, he had served himself heir to an older Earldom, 
 called the Earldom of Stratherne, which had been in his family 
 
 * Mr. David Laing's Extracts from the Hawthornden MSS., Arch. Scot., 
 
 IV. 93-94.
 
 1 86 DRUM MO ND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 some two hundred years before, when it had been resumed 
 by the Crown and the Menteith title given in compensation. 
 Having made out his claim at law, by the help of the King's 
 advocate, Sir Thomas Hope, he had applied to the King for a 
 restitution of the Stratherne dignity, and the King, seeing no 
 objection, had given him the necessary patent. But his Majesty, 
 it soon appeared, had been too hasty. 
 
 If the Earl of Menteith was Earl of Stratherne, it was by 
 descent from David, Earl of Stratherne, one of the sons of 
 Robert II. of Scotland (1371-1390), the first of the Stuart line. 
 Now that King's matrimonial relations had been rather complex. 
 He was fifty-five years of age when he came to the throne, as 
 successor to David II., the last of the Bruce line; and all his 
 children of royal rank (not, by any means, all of every rank) 
 had been born to him before that event. But these children 
 of royal rank and pretensions were of two sets, born to him by 
 two wives — four sons and six daughters by one wife, the beau- 
 tiful Elizabeth Mure; and two sons and four daughters by 
 another wife, Euphemia Ross, daughter of the Earl of Ross, 
 and widow of John Randolph, Earl of Moray. Worse still, all 
 the children of the first set had been born while their mother 
 was not actually the wife of Robert Stuart, but only his con- 
 cubine; and, though there had been a subsequent marriage, 
 which, by the law and practice of Scotland, would, in ordinary 
 circumstances, have legitimated the offspring born before the 
 marriage, the circumstances in this case were by no means 
 ordinary. The question was about succession to the Scottish 
 throne; and, though a legitimation /<?r subsequcns matrimonium 
 might be good for ordinary purposes, could it be held good for 
 that? Granted that it might, there was a yet deeper difficulty. 
 Robert and Elizabeth Mure were related to each other within 
 the forbidden degrees, and Robert had had a previous mistress 
 who was related to Elizabeth Mure within the forbidden de- 
 grees; and, though the marriage with Elizabeth Mure and the 
 legitimation of her children had been expressly allowed by a
 
 jEtat. 45-48. THE MENTEITH SCANDAL. 187 
 
 Papal Dispensation, it was observed that the complicated cousin- 
 ship, which by Church-rule barred the union, had been slurred 
 over in the Dispensation, and it was doubted whether his 
 Holiness himself had the power to condone all the ecclesias- 
 tical offences involved in the connexion. With such an en- 
 tanglement of family claims about him had the jovial Robert 
 Stuart come to the throne. He had done his best to clear the 
 entanglement. He had procured an Act of his States settling 
 the succession to the Crown first on his eldest son by Elizabeth 
 Mure (afterwards Robert III.), and then another Act entailing 
 the Crown farther on the next heirs-male of both his families, 
 and, in the event of failure of such, on his heirs whatsoever. 
 By this arrangement, consequently, the Crown had been trans- 
 mitted, through Robert HI., to the five successive Jameses, but 
 not without a smouldering of the question whether these reign- 
 ing descendants of Elizabeth Mure were the legitimate Stuarts, 
 and whether the progeny of the lawfully-married Euphemia Ross 
 had not the truer royalty in their veins. If they had, then the 
 successor to Robert II. in 1390 ought to have been not Robert 
 III., but his half-brother, David Stuart, Earl of Stratherne, the 
 eldest son of Robert II. by Euphemia Ross; and his rights 
 would have descended to his daughter Euphemia Stuart, who 
 had married a Sir Patrick Graham, and so carried the Earldom 
 of Stratherne into the Graham family. It had been to obliterate 
 as much as possible these royal associations with the Stratherne 
 Earldom that the poet-king James I. had cancelled the Earl- 
 dom in 1428, and made Malise Graham, the son of Sir 
 Patrick Graham and Euphemia Stuart, accept the Earldom 
 of Menteith instead. 
 
 Even if the question between the reigning Stuarts and the 
 excluded descendants of Euphemia Ross had been more effec- 
 tively put to sleep than it was, an incident had at length 
 occurred which was calculated to revive it. On the death of 
 James V., in 1542, leaving only a daughter, Mary, the descent 
 of the crown in the heirs-male of the first Stuart by Elizabeth
 
 1 88 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Mure was broken. The question of the legitimacy of Eliza- 
 beth Mure's marriage might then have been re-opened in con- 
 nexion with the question who was the next heir-general. Had 
 the decision, even then, been against the legitimacy of the 
 Mure line, Mary ought to have been set aside, and the crown 
 ought to have gone to the Graham, Earl of Menteith, of that 
 date, as the heir-general from the other line. Nothing of the 
 kind had happened ; and poor Mary, Queen of Scots, had had 
 her reign, such as it was, and had handed on the Scottish crown, 
 with the English addition, to James VI. and Charles I. But, 
 in consequence, first, of Mary's Roman Catholic obstinacy and 
 unpopularity with her Reformed Scottish subjects on that 
 account, and, next, of James's Episcopal proclivities and un- 
 popularity on that account, there had been a good deal of sup- 
 pressed re-inquiry into the far-back muddle of Robert II. and 
 his two marriages. Some genealogists and historians, including 
 Buchanan, had even persuaded themselves that Elizabeth Mure 
 was not legally the first wife of Robert II., but that he had 
 married her, by way of a return to his old love, after the death 
 of Euphemia Ross, and therefore that any rights which her pos- 
 terity had acquired by legitimation were subject to the prior 
 rights of the descendants of Euphemia Ross, as the first legal 
 wife. In short, for eighty years before the accession of 
 Charles to the two kingdoms, there had been, here and there, 
 in one of the kingdoms, a persistent questioning of those here- 
 ditary rights of his race on which his accession depended. Yet 
 Charles, reigning as the descendant of Robert II. and Elizabeth 
 Mure, had allowed his Scottish Privy Councillor and Chief- 
 Justice, William Graham, Earl of Menteith, the descendant of 
 the same Robert II. and Euphemia Ross, to re-assume that 
 Earldom of Stratherne which was the most distinct memorial of 
 his co-equal relatedness with himself to the old Stuart bigamist. 
 If Charles was aware of all the speculation on the subject that 
 was lying dormant in the Scottish genealogical noddle, he pro- 
 bably thought it too absurd to be worth a moment's notice.
 
 Mtat. 45-48. THE MENTE1T1I SCANDAL. 189 
 
 Not so absurd, it seems, as his Majesty thought ! He him- 
 self was not pleasing his Scottish subjects so well as to be able 
 to laugh at a speculation which might have been troublesome, 
 in imaginable circumstances, to his father and grandmother. 
 Vast offence had been given to the Scots by his dilatoriness 
 in the matter of his coronation visit, and by the rumour of his 
 insulting proposal to have the Scottish Regalia taken south, so 
 that he might be crowned King of Scotland in Westminster ; 
 and this, in co-operation with other causes, had bred a danger- 
 ous amount of gossip in some Scottish quarters, if not of secret 
 treason. If Charles did not think the Crown of Scotland 
 worth a journey, might not some native be found quite as fit to 
 wear it? There is proof that this question was put and an- 
 swered, in a hushed and grumbling way, to a greater extent 
 than the ordinary histories of the time reveal. When the 
 king's young cousin, the Marquis of Hamilton, went abroad in 
 1 63 1, with his 6000 Scottish Volunteers, to assist Gustavus 
 Adolphus in the German Protestant war, had there not been 
 some wild talk about the possibility of his returning from that 
 expedition as a candidate for coronation instead of Charles ? 
 The Marquis had indignantly cleared himself of that imputa- 
 tion, and quite to Charles's satisfaction ; but the mere scandal 
 was symptomatic. Scottish statesmanship was then in a very 
 staggering state. They were a strange, quarrelling, unscrupulous 
 knot of men, for the most part, who then constituted 
 Charles's Privy Council, governing Scotland in his name, but 
 very much at their own discretion, with but a distant cognis- 
 ance of their proceedings on his part, and such weak control 
 as could be exercised by his letters and instructions from 
 London through Secretary Stirling. George Hay, Earl of 
 Kinnoull, was Chancellor of Scotland ; William Douglas, Earl 
 of Morton, was Treasurer; John Stuart, Lord Traquair, a 
 man of real talent, was Treasurer-Depute ; Thomas Hamilton, 
 Earl of Haddington, (the metallurgical Sandy Hamilton's 
 brother, who had exchanged his Melrose title for that of
 
 too 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 Haddington) was now Lord Privy Seal ; Sir John Hay was 
 Clerk-Register and a Lord of Session ; William Graham, 
 Earl of Menteith, and now of Stratherne, as we have said, 
 was Chief Justice and President of the Council ; Sir James 
 Carmichael was Justice-Clerk ; Sir Thomas Hope of Craig- 
 hall, already mentioned, was King's Advocate ; and the 
 resident Secretary of State, Viscount Stirling's colleague or 
 subordinate in that office, was Sir Archibald Acheson of Glen- 
 cairn. Among these, and other officials round about them, 
 what intrigues might there not be — what secret ambitions, or 
 willingness to foster secret ambitions, whether for mischief or 
 for personal advantage ? At all events, what was to hinder the 
 Earl of Menteith, now that his title to the Earldom of Strath- 
 erne and his lineal descent from Robert II. had been openly 
 acknowledged by Charles himself, from swaggering a little 
 among his colleagues in all his new-blown distinction ? Actu- 
 ally this had happened ; and probably the ill-natured provoca- 
 tions of his colleagues on the subject had conspired with his 
 own vanity to make it a common occurrence. He had been 
 heard making very bragging and imprudent speeches. Not 
 that he wanted to revive any question of his title to the throne 
 so worthily held by his cousin Charles ! No, God forbid that 
 there should be any ripping-up of that old story ! So far as he 
 was concerned, it should be obsolete ! Providence, for the last 
 two hundred years and more, had settled the track of the royal 
 succession, and it should never be disturbed by him, as his 
 cousin Charles well knew ! But blood, Sirs, blood ! that was 
 the honour he cared about ; and that he would not renounce ! 
 And, if it came to that question, and he were driven to speak 
 
 out, what were the reigning Stuarts but Elizabeth Mure's ? 
 
 Whether he went quite so far as this last impoliteness may be 
 doubted ; but he went very near it. " I have the reddest blood 
 in Scotland " he had been heard to say. 
 
 We now understand the reason of Drummond's Considerations 
 to the King, penned in December, 1632. Menteith 's braggings
 
 -4B«/. 45-4& THE MENTEITH SCANDAL. I9I 
 
 had really come to be a matter of some consequence in the 
 opinion of those who felt the excitable national pulse in Scot- 
 land; and Drummond, of his own accord, or induced by 
 Viscount Stirling and others, had written the memorial, in 
 order to bring before the King, in a grave and reasoned form, 
 a business which was sure to reach him, if it had not already 
 reached him, in some more exasperating form. The last sen- 
 tence of the memorial is the most emphatic. " It is notoriously 
 " known," says Drummond, " that, these two hundred years, 
 " the race of Euphemia Ross, in her children, David, Earl of 
 " Stratherne, and Walter, Earl of Athole, and all their succes- 
 " sion, by all the Kings of Scotland since have been ever 
 " suppressed and kept under, and for reasons of state should 
 " still be kept low and under, unless a Prince would, for 
 " greater reason of state, advance them, to give them a more 
 " horrible blow, and, by suborning mercenary men, make them 
 " aim above their reach, to their last extirpation." Drummond 
 cannot suppose that Charles has been actuated by any such 
 dreadful Machiavellian policy in his concession to Menteith 
 of the Stratherne Earldom ; and therefore all through the paper 
 he has argued on the supposition that the act has been one of 
 mere inadvertence, an injury unintentionally done to Menteith 
 himself by misplaced kindness. What he evidently desired 
 was to disabuse Charles of the idea that the affair was a trifle. 
 For this purpose, he goes back on the Stuart genealogy with a 
 frankness which Charles may have hardly liked, actually adopt- 
 ing that view of the case which represented the rights of the 
 Ross-Stuart branch as prior to those of the Mure-Stuart branch, 
 and calling upon Charles to consider what might be the con- 
 sequences if, in order to abolish that difficulty, the reigning 
 House were to rest its claims on the Acts of an old Scottish 
 Parliament. " If one Parliament hath power to entail a Crown, 
 whether may not another Parliament, upon the like consider- 
 ations, restore the same to the righteous heirs ? " The 
 more effectively to rouse the King, he cites various historical
 
 192 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN, 
 
 instances of the smart dealing of Kings with rival claimants, 
 and forecasts several contingencies in Scotland in which the 
 Menteith claims might be really perilous. 
 
 Altogether, the document is so bold, and would have been 
 so unpalatable to Charles, that one doubts whether it was 
 actually submitted to him, or only remained in Drummond's 
 cabinet as a draft of what might have been submitted to his 
 Majesty, if Viscount Stirling had thought fit. That there was 
 considerable danger in such communications to his Majesty 
 was proved by what happened to a poor fellow, of much 
 humbler rank than Drummond, who ventured to meddle in the 
 same affair. A certain George Nicol, the son of a tailor in 
 Edinburgh, who had been in the office of Secretary Sir Archi- 
 bald Acheson, and had there acquired more knowledge of the 
 proceedings of his superiors than was good for him, had thought 
 it his duty to go to London and exhibit charges against the 
 Chancellor, Treasurer, Treasurer-Depute, &c, for misuse of the 
 public moneys, including also charges against Stratherne on the 
 grounds more peculiar to him. These officials had been 
 summoned to London; and, as Nicol could by no means make 
 good his main charges, but broke down in his evidence, he was 
 remitted to Edinburgh, to take his trial before the very persons 
 he had accused, or their colleagues of the Council, for the 
 crime of leasing-making, i.e., the attempt to raise animosities be- 
 tween the King and his subjects. Having been found guilty, 
 he had to stand two hours at the Cross in the High Street, on 
 the 5th of March, 1633, with a placard over him, "Here stands 
 Mr. George Nicol, who is tried, found, and declared to be a false 
 calumnious liar," and at the end of that time to receive six 
 stripes on his bare back from the whip of the hangman. This, 
 says Scotstarvet, " made the poor young man fly the country, 
 and terrified all other persons from informing his Majesty of 
 anything that was done to his prejudice in this kingdom." 
 Evidently Scotstarvet thought there was truth in Nicol's charges ; 
 and this, also, was the popular belief.
 
 /Eiat 45 -48. DR UMMOND'S MA RR1A GE. j g 3 
 
 Although Charles thought it fit to take no notice of the 
 charges against Kinnoull, Morton, Traquair, and his Scottish 
 Councillors generally, and to continue them in their offices till 
 he should look into matters for himself, he did make an imme- 
 diate example of the unlucky Stratherne or Menteith. Orders 
 were sent down for a " decreet of reduction " of his title to the 
 Stratherne Earldom, and of his title to the Menteith Earldom 
 as well; Lord Advocate Hope was rebuked for his former 
 activity in the Stratherne suit, and had to promise that he 
 would never move in it again ; and the poor nobleman, stripped 
 of his Chief Justiceship and all his other offices, was sent into 
 retirement on his estates. After a little while, Charles re-ad- 
 mitted him into the Scottish Peerage as the Earl of Airth ; and, 
 with this new title, but with a haze of the Menteith title still 
 attached to him, he seems to have lived quietly enough to the 
 end of his days. * 
 
 Drummond has been so long an unmarried man in our nar- 
 rative that the reader has probably given up the expectation of 
 ever seeing him in the other character. No one knows, how- 
 ever, what may happen in that capricious order of accidents ; 
 and the truth is that in 1632, and probably some little time 
 before the Considerations to the King were written, Drummond 
 had ceased to be a bachelor. 
 
 The account given in the Memoir prefixed to Drummond's 
 Works in 171 1 is that he had "lived the most part of his life in 
 "an unmarried state, but by accident he saw one Elizabeth 
 " Logan, grandchild of Sir Robert Logan of Restalrig, a great 
 " and ancient family in this place, and, fancying she had a 
 
 * Sir Walter Scott took a liberty with the facts of Scottish History when 
 he introduced into his Legend of Montrose an Earl of Menteith, as the com- 
 panion of the great Marquis of Montrose in his Royalist enterprise of 
 I0 44"5- So far as there was an Earl of Menteith then in existence, it was 
 this superannuated Earl of Airth and Menteith ; and the real companion of 
 Montrose was not he, but his eldest son, Lord Kilpont, who was killed in 
 Sept., 1644, by the Highlander, Stewart of Ardvoirlich. 
 
 N
 
 i94 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " great resemblance of his first mistress (whose idea had been 
 " deeply impressed, and stuck long in his mind), he fell in 
 " love with her, and married her after he was forty-five years 
 " of age." The exact date is given in Douglas's Baronage of 
 Scotland (1798), where, on the faith of the preserved papers of 
 the family, the words are, "He married, anno 1632, Elizabeth 
 " Logan, sister to James Logan of Mountlothian, and grand- 
 " child, it is said, to Sir Robert Logan of Restalrig." The par- 
 ish and village of Restalrig, with the old church, are at the foot 
 of Arthur Seat, close to Edinburgh, on the side of Leith and 
 the sea ; and the Sir Robert Logan mentioned as the grand- 
 father of Drummond's wife had also been proprietor of the 
 lonely keep of Fastcastle on the Berwickshire coast, and a 
 man of most turbulent and robber-like reputation in King 
 James's reign, mixed up with the Gowrie conspiracy and other 
 mysteries. Napier of Merchiston, in his earlier necromantic 
 days, before he took to Logarithms, had had dealings with him. 
 There is still extant the original contract, dated July, 1594, by 
 which Napier agreed to go to Fastcastle, on the invitation of 
 Logan, to " do his utter and exact diligence to search and seek 
 out, and by all craft and ingine that he dow to tempt, try, and 
 find out," a treasure of gold which was believed, on old report, 
 to be buried somewhere about Fastcastle, " or else to mak sure 
 that nae sic thing has been there" — the bargain being that 
 Napier, in case of success, was to have a third of the find for his 
 pains, and also (what was essential in dealing with a man like 
 Logan) " sure return and safe back-coming therewith to Edin- 
 bruch, on beand spulzied [without being robbed] of his said third 
 part, or otherwise harmed in body or gear." If Drummond 
 really married a grand-daughter of this darksome old Logan of 
 Restalrig, he must himself have been interested in the fact, and 
 we should be interested in it now. Another old tradition, how- 
 ever, is quite positive that the Elizabeth Logan whom Drum- 
 mond married was not of the ancient family of the Logans of 
 Restalrig, but was the daughter of a plain Mr. Logan, the parish
 
 yfi/rt/. 45-48. DRUMMOND' S MARRIAGE. 195 
 
 minister of Eddleston, in Peeblesshire, about ten miles south 
 from Hawthornden. The same account says that he married 
 her " unexpectedly." Enough that Drummond was married, 
 at the age of forty-six, to an Elizabeth Logan, who was to 
 be his wife all his days, and the mother of his five sons 
 and four daughters.* 
 
 * Sage's Memoir of Drummond, prefixed to the 171 1 Edition of his 
 Works ; Douglas's Baronage of Scotland, Article Drummond of Hawthorn- 
 den ; Life of Napier of Merchiston, by Mark Napier, Esq. (pp. 220-221) ; 
 and Mr. David Laing's Paper in Arch. Scot., IV. 66.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 CHARLES'S CORONATION VISIT TO SCOTLAND, WITH LAUD IN 
 HIS TRAIN: LAUD'S PROJECTS FOR SCOTLAND: DRUMMOND'S 
 REFLECTIONS ON THE SAME. 
 
 o 
 
 1633- 
 
 WHAT a commotion there was when Charles did make 
 his long-deferred coronation journey into Scotland ! He 
 left London on the nth of May, 1633, with studiously arranged 
 pomp, and a great attendance of English noblemen, officials, 
 household servants, and yeomen of the guard; he was at 
 Berwick on the 8th of June, and remained there till the 1 2th ; 
 and thence, by gradual approaches, he reached Edinburgh, into 
 which he made his triumphal entry on Saturday, the 15th. 
 There had been the most extensive and costly preparations, the 
 roads and streets all railed and sanded from the point of entry 
 at the West Port to the terminus at Holyrood Palace, with 
 arches, obelisks, paintings, flags, loyal mottoes, artificial moun- 
 tains, and bands of music at every possible point, and especially 
 wherever the procession might make a ceremonial stoppage. 
 The arrangements had been made by a committee of the chief 
 citizens ; but Jamesone the portrait-painter had been brought 
 from Aberdeen to superintend the pictorial portions of the 
 pageantry, and the speeches and poetry had been furnished by 
 Drummond in due consultation with Jamesone. From the con- 
 temporary accounts, including copies of the speeches and poems,
 
 sEtat. 48. CHARLES'S CORONATION VISIT. l() y 
 
 as they were then printed, and are now inserted in Drummond's 
 Works (under the title of The Entertainment of the High and 
 Mighty Monarch Charles, King of Great Britain, France, and 
 Ireland, into his ancient and royal City of Edinburgh), we can 
 pretty well imagine the whole affair. 
 
 The procession was a very long one. All the nobles and 
 officials in it were on horseback; and his Majesty came near 
 the middle, riding on a splendid Barbary horse, with a caparison 
 and footcloth of crimson velvet, embroidered with gold and 
 pearls, the bosses of the bridle and other parts of the harness 
 set with emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. When he came to 
 the West Port, where the street ascended to Heriot's Hospital, 
 he encountered a great arch, square with the battlements and 
 inside of the town-wall, the face of it towards him representing 
 a city on a rock, which was declared, by various devices, and 
 by several inscriptions, in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, to 
 be indubitably Edinburgh. Under the arch was a theatre, 
 shaped like a mountain, on which appeared the Genius of the 
 City, in the shape of a nymph, attired in sea-green velvet, with 
 sleeves, under-robe, and buskins of blue, and other adornments 
 and painted accompaniments ; and, as the King approached, 
 the mountain trembled, and the Nymph addressed him in a 
 speech (ornate prose and of Drummond's composition), the 
 Magistrates at the same time presenting him with the Keys of 
 the City in a silver basin, into which there were showered a 
 thousand gold coins. Thence the procession moved onwards, 
 through the Grassmarket, till, in the West Bow, they came to 
 another arch and theatre, representing the Grampian Mountains, 
 with their wild scenery and animals, and Romans fighting with 
 Picts. Here another nymph, personating Caledonia, with an 
 olive-coloured American-looking damsel in attendance, to pass 
 for Nova Scotia, made a longish speech to his Majesty (also 
 Drummond's) in verse, beginning thus : — 
 
 " The Heavens have heard our vows. Our just desires 
 Obtained are ; no higher now aspires
 
 io8 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Our wishing thought, since to his native clime 
 The Flower of Princes, honour of his time, 
 Encheering all our dales, hills, forests, streams, 
 As Phcebus doth the summer with his beams, 
 Is come." 
 
 Again the procession moved on, climbing the West Bow to the 
 High Street, and beginning to descend that street, through flags 
 and other decorations, till they came to a third arch, with a 
 collection of mottoes and devices of indescribable complexity. 
 Here Jamesone had lavished his utmost ; for, when the curtain 
 of the theatre before the arch was drawn, Mercury was seen, 
 with his feathered hat, his caduceus, and a hundred and seven 
 Kings, the Scottish progenitors of Charles, from Fergus the 
 First downwards, all brought on purpose from the Elysian fields. 
 King Fergus was overjoyed at seeing his 108th descendant, and 
 expressed his feelings in a Latin speech. Next there came in 
 sight figures of Bacchus, Silenus, Sylvanus, Pomona, Venus, and 
 Ceres; and still further down the street there was Mount Parnas- 
 sus, with Apollo and the Muses on it, and a proper sprinkling of 
 thistles, in the shape of portraits of the chief literary celebrities 
 of Scotland, from Sedulius and Joannes Scotus down to Sir David 
 Lindsay and George Buchanan. Apollo and the Muses were 
 very fine, the Muses all with appropriate mottoes, and Apollo 
 in the midst of them in crimson taffeta, and crowned with 
 laurel, presenting the King with a book, while the Muses 
 addressed him in a song of four stanzas (Drummond's), 
 beginning : — 
 
 " At length we see those eyes 
 Which cheer both earth and skies : 
 Now, ancient Caledon, 
 
 Thy beauties heighten, richest robes put on, 
 And let young joys to all thy parts arise." 
 
 The King could not expect these first splendours of the High 
 Street to be beaten; but yet further down the street, at the Nether 
 Bow, there was a new and still more poetical wonder. There was 
 another arch, with stage, mottoes, canvasses and what not, repre-
 
 Mtat. 48. CHARLES'S CORONATION VISIT. 199 
 
 senting Heaven itself, with stars of all magnitudes, the Earth 
 beneath and the Titans prostrate on it, the Fates, and the 
 Seven Planets, each sitting on a throne, and Endymion among 
 them. The poetry here was profuse, and took the form of a 
 Horoscopal Pageant by the Planets (all Drummond's). 
 Endymion opened it with a prologue, beginning : — 
 
 " Roused from the Latmian cave, where many years 
 That empress of the lowest of the spheres 
 Who cheers the night has kept me hid apart 
 From mortal wights to ease her love-sick heart, 
 As young as when she did me first enclose, 
 As fresh in beauty as the Maying rose, 
 Endymion, that whilom kept my flocks 
 Upon Iona's flowery hills and rocks, 
 And, warbling sweet lays to my Cynthia's beams, 
 Outsang the swannets of Meander's streams, 
 To whom for guerdon she heaven's secret bars 
 Made open, taught the paths and powers of stars, 
 By this dear lady's strict commandement, 
 To celebrate this day I here am sent." 
 
 This prologue ended, poetical speeches followed, from the seven 
 planets in succession, viz : Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, 
 Venus, Mercury, and the Moon ; and Endymion wound up the 
 whole with an epilogue. After which one becomes dizzy; and, 
 though there was more decoration, and perhaps more poetry, 
 down the Canongate, and to the very gates of Holyrood, one 
 is glad when the King arrives there. Amid the last huzzas of 
 the people, he and his train entered, the horses were stabled, 
 the Magistrates turned back, and the triumph was at an end. 
 There was banqueting, doubtless, within the Palace, and a dis- 
 persed hubbub without it, protracting the excitement on the 
 skirts of Arthur Seat, and up its slopes, through the long sum- 
 mer evening. 
 
 His Majesty having had two days to refresh himself, the grand 
 ceremony of his coronation in the Abbey Church of Holyrood 
 took place on Tuesday the 18th, and was followed on the 20th 
 by the hardly less impressive ceremony of his riding in state
 
 200 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 from Holyrood to the old Parliament-House above St. Giles's 
 Church, to open the session of the first Scottish Parliament in 
 which he was personally present. Of the pageantry on these 
 occasions, surpassing though it did anything that Scotland 
 had witnessed before, we shall say nothing. Pageantry was 
 pageantry, but Charles had come to Scotland for real business. 
 
 He had been king now, it is to be remembered, for eight 
 years, and during those eight years the nature of his policy, so 
 far as it concerned England, and collaterally Ireland, had been 
 declared beyond all mistake. He had convoked four English 
 Parliaments in succession, had quarrelled and struggled with 
 each on questions of supply and grievances in Church and 
 State, and had dissolved the last (March, 1628-9) with wrath 
 and contumely, and an avowed determination that he would 
 resort no more to the Parliamentary apparatus for the govern- 
 ment of England or the levying of public moneys, but would 
 rule without Parliaments by his own authority and with the help 
 of his Ministers. For four years this experiment had been 
 going on, Charles acting as an arbitrary monarch, but sur- 
 rounded by a Privy Council of between thirty and forty nobles, 
 ecclesiastics, and state-officers, whom he consulted when he 
 chose, and who carried out his orders in their respective 
 departments. A few of these councillors, the most acquiescent 
 in his policy, or the ablest to advise him, formed his Junto, or 
 Cabinet of Ministers-in-chief. The ablest of them, Viscount 
 Wentworth, afterwards Earl of Strafford, had just been made 
 Viceroy of Ireland ; so that, except in as far as he could still 
 interfere in English affairs by correspondence and occasional 
 visits from Dublin, the conduct of these affairs was in the hands 
 of the colleagues he had left in London — to wit, Laud, Lord 
 Cottington, Secretary Windebank, and two or three great Earls 
 and Law-lords. Above all, the King's adviser in the govern- 
 ment of England, in some respects even his master, was Laud. 
 Appointed Bishop of St. David's in 162 1, while King James
 
 sEtat. 48. CHARLES AND LAUD. 20I 
 
 was alive, transferred thence to the Bishopric of Bath and 
 Wells in 1626, made a Privy Councillor in 1627, and promoted 
 in 162S to the Bishopric of London, this resolute ecclesiastic, 
 now in his sixtieth year, and still only Bishop of London, 
 though he had the Archbishopric of Canterbury in near 
 prospect, had so wound his hands into all the affairs of Church 
 and State that, since Buckingham's death, he had been 
 minister paramount. Part of his power consisted in the 
 extreme defmiteness of the system of ecclesiastical views 
 which he had brought into the councils of the King, and his 
 determination to make these views the regulating principles of 
 the English body-politic throughout its entire fabric. In other 
 respects he was subservient to the King's policy ; but here he 
 was the master, and the King his pupil. Laud's theology being 
 of the kind called Arminian, his theory of Church government 
 being that of the highest and most absolute jure divino 
 Episcopacy, and these motives and his private tastes inclining 
 him to the utmost sacerdotalism in forms and garb for the 
 clergy, and to a ceremonial of public worship as florid as it 
 could be on this side of what was distinctively Popish, the tasks 
 he had prescribed for himself were to correspond. They were 
 the uprooting of the Calvinistic doctrines that had hitherto 
 been prevalent in England, the subjection of the whole life of 
 the laity to a tight priestly and episcopal supervision, and the 
 beating down, whether among laity or among clergy, of all those 
 questionings of Episcopal power, those demands for a simplifi- 
 cation of Church-forms, and those cravings for a teaching 
 ministry rather than a priesthood, which had come down in the 
 English mind under the name of Puritanism. He had so 
 thoroughly indoctrinated Charles with these purposes that 
 Charles's policy had come to be not a mere continuation of his 
 father's, but a continuation of it with the new element of Laudism 
 superadded. And already England had been feeling the effects 
 of Laud's political supremacy. Not only was the whole 
 country writhing under the torture of monopolies, illegal taxes,
 
 202 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 and all the ways and means employed to raise revenues for the 
 Crown ; but there had begun, under Laud's influence, those 
 persecutions and punishments of Puritan ministers and laymen, 
 throughout all the dioceses, in comparison with which James's 
 proceedings to the same effect seemed mild, and which were 
 driving into exile, on the Continent or in America, hundreds 
 and thousands of England's most forward spirits. For four 
 years England had been prostrate in a dumb agony of dis- 
 content, with no Parliament to speak out or wrestle for it, but 
 with Laud, Bishop of London, squat on its very breast, proud 
 of the results of his doctoring, and meditating what he could 
 further. 
 
 Part of Charles's business in his Coronation Visit to Scotland 
 was to study that country with a view to the extension to it of 
 the system in force in England. He was fond, indeed, of dis- 
 tinguishing between his Scottish realm and his English, and of 
 keeping up the tradition of a governing apparatus for Scotland 
 separate from that' of England. It was noted that he was 
 rather punctilious in keeping Scottish affairs from the cog- 
 nisance of his English Council, reserving those affairs for him- 
 self and one or two Scottish Councillors specially about him, 
 such as the Marquis of Hamilton and Secretary Stirling, and 
 deputing, for the rest, the practical management under him to 
 his Scottish Privy Council and Ministry in Edinburgh. There 
 had not even been roused in him so much dread or hatred of 
 Scottish Parliaments as he had conceived of English ones, 
 probably because Scottish Parliaments for a long tract of years 
 had been found sufficiently manageable. With all this, how- 
 ever, there were things to be rectified in the machinery of the 
 Scottish Government; and he had come to look after these. 
 But especially and pre-eminently he had come to look after the 
 ecclesiastical condition of Scotland. Here he did not make 
 the distinction between the two nations. Here, conscientiously 
 a Laudian himself, he was willing that Laud, though a Prelate 
 only in the English Church, with no official rights in Scotland,
 
 ^Etat. 48. LAUD'S SURVEY OF SCOTLAND. 203 
 
 and no more knowledge of Scotland than he had of Norway, 
 should yet be his adviser equally for both countries. There 
 was but one right system of Theology and Church-government, 
 and the man who was the best authority for England in that 
 matter was also the best authority for Scotland ! Now, Laud 
 had for some time had his eye upon Scotland, as not only 
 an outlandish bit of religious savagery which it would be an 
 exercise of missionary benevolence to reclaim and reduce to 
 proper sacerdotal order, but also a most convenient field, or 
 corpus vile, in which to try more recondite experiments of 
 ecclesiasticism than he had yet ventured on in England itself. 
 Accordingly, it was as good as agreed on between him and 
 Charles that the Coronation Visit to Scotland should be made 
 an opportunity for a survey of the state of the Scottish Kirk as 
 it had been left by James, and for a beginning of the necessary 
 improvements. For this purpose it was that Laud had accom- 
 panied Charles to Edinburgh, and that, wherever Charles went 
 among his Scottish subjects, the red-faced little English bishop 
 was seen trotting at his tail. 
 
 The state of the Kirk of Scotland, as Laud found it, must 
 have seemed to him very woeful. It was certainly Episcopalian 
 in name and in general organization. James's persistent efforts, 
 or intermittent Parthian shots, after he had left his native land, 
 had so far prevailed against its Presbyterian instincts and the 
 traditions of Knox's Reformation as to have brought about that 
 semblance of ecclesiastical conformity between the two king- 
 doms. The old system of kirk-government by Presbyteries, 
 Provincial Synods, and General Assemblies, had been under- 
 mined and disused ; and the country had been mapped out 
 into thirteen Dioceses or Bishoprics, nine of which were in- 
 cluded in the Province or Archbishopric of St. Andrews (the 
 Scottish Canterbury), and four in the Province or Archbishopric 
 of Glasgow (the Scottish York). A Court of High Commission 
 had been set up in each of these provinces, with the Archbishop 
 as President ; and a certain amount of power over the inferior
 
 204 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 clergy had grown up around each Bishop, which die Bishops 
 themselves were more or less resolutely enforcing, and were 
 very willing to extend. Then also a number of ceremonies in 
 worship and other observances of a religious kind, originally 
 most distasteful to the Scots — such as kneeling at the com- 
 munion, confirmation, and feast-days — had been introduced into 
 Kirk-practice, and were pressed by the Bishops. Many of 
 the fiery parish-ministers, of the old Presbyterian school of 
 Knox and Melville, had been crushed into silence, or driven 
 into exile for their resistance to these innovations ; and a new 
 generation of parish-ministers had sprung up, who might be 
 expected to acquiesce in a prelatically-organised Church, on 
 account of the chances of preferment it offered, or for other rea- 
 sons. All this was satisfactory so far, but more in appearance 
 than in reality. Underneath this external texture of an Episco- 
 pal organization, the popular soul of the country was still fer- 
 vidly, and even tumultuously, Presbyterian. That Puritanism 
 which in England was but a contention against the long- 
 established national system was here the national system itself, 
 overthrown for a while, but struggling for repossession ; and the 
 Bishops walked amid the population but as aliens and up- 
 starts, unknown to the genuine custom of Reformed Scotland, 
 and foisted in upon it by mere State-policy since Scotland had 
 been connected with England. The Calvinistic theology re- 
 mained nearly universal among people and clergy, only a few of 
 the Bishops and their immediate clerical adherents having 
 opened their eyes to Arminian lights. And then what a 
 wretched sense among the Bishops themselves, whether Cal- 
 vinistic or with Arminian tendencies, of the true sanctities of 
 their office, its mystic rights, and the duties and possibilities 
 attached to it ! They were themselves content with such garb 
 as they could win by a compromise with the prejudices of their 
 dioceses, and they were careless of the science of clerical cos- 
 tume generally. Of the higher mysteries of postures, changes of 
 surplice, cathedral service, church-upholstery, and the use of
 
 /Etat. 48. LAUD'S SURVEY OF SCOTLAND. 205 
 
 green candles in communication with the Almighty, they were 
 scandalously ignorant. There did not seem to be any notion 
 among them, or anywhere in the Scottish mind, of what Laud 
 called the Beauty of Holiness. That the church-edifices in the 
 towns and the country were often dilapidated and squalid, and 
 always unadorned and ill-furnished, might be owing to the bar- 
 barities of that process of Deformation by hammer and pickaxe 
 which the Scots called their Reformation, and to the sacrilegious 
 rapacity of the nobles who had led it. They had seized for them- 
 selves the bulk of the old church-revenues, and had left but a 
 pittance for the new establishment. That might be remedied 
 in time. Alienated church-revenues, Abbacies, and what not, 
 might be won back in Scotland more easily perhaps than in 
 England. But, even in matters where the Scottish Bishops 
 might have had power, how little they had done ! No proper 
 Church-ritual in Scotland, no strict Liturgy, no Ecclesiastical 
 Canons ; all left, with slight exceptions, to popular use and 
 wont, and Knox's imported higgledy-piddledy of Genevan forms ! 
 There one must begin with one's remonstrances and changes. 
 The Scottish Bishops themselves must receive lessons in the true 
 Beauty of Holiness, and in the duties of the episcopal office. 
 Some of them. already, from the mere effects of their situation, 
 or acted on by recent influences from England, had manifested 
 right perceptions, and a forwardness in the right direction ; and, 
 if put on their mettle by farther informations and stimulants 
 from head-quarters, they would, doubtless, become zealous 
 advocates and propagators among their countrymen of the 
 higher Prelacy yet needed. To strengthen their hands and 
 accustom the Scots to just views of the clerical prerogative, 
 there might be a more frequent promotion than heretofore of 
 bishops and other kirk-dignitaries to offices of political power 
 and trust ; and meanwhile a new Service-Book and a new Book 
 of Canons for the Scottish Church, containing even improve- 
 ments upon the English Liturgy and Canons, might be in pre- 
 paration.
 
 20 6 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 All this, partly in Laud's mind before he came to Scotland, 
 grew more and more distinct in it as he trotted about with the 
 King. He had begun his lessons to the Scottish Clergy in the 
 true Beauty of Holiness at the Coronation ceremony itself. 
 Although the two Scottish Archbishops, and all the Scottish 
 Bishops, save one, were present, and the main act of putting 
 the crown upon the King's head had to be performed, of 
 course, by one of the Scottish bishops, Laud had taken the 
 management into his own hands. It was he that had set up 
 the " four-nuikit table," with the books, candlesticks, and empty 
 basin upon it, and the crucifix behind it, which the Scots were 
 told to consider an "altar"; it was he that instructed the 
 Bishops employed in the service to " bow the knee and beck " 
 as they passed the crucifix; and when, according to the natural 
 arrangement, the Archbishop of St. Andrews had placed him- 
 self at the King's right hand, and the Archbishop of Glasgow 
 was placing himself on the left, it was Laud that actually shoved 
 this latter Prelate aside because he was not properly dressed, 
 and substituted Maxwell, Bishop of Ross. These first lessons, 
 given at the Coronation itself, produced marked effects. On 
 the very next Sunday, when the King attended service in St. 
 Giles's Church, the people were surprised to see Maxwell, 
 Bishop of Ross, displace the Scottish minister who was con- 
 ducting service in the ordinary Scottish fashion, and substitute 
 two English chaplains and the use of the English Liturgy ; and 
 they were still more surprised to see another of their own 
 bishops, Guthrie of Moray, ascend the pulpit in a rochet, and 
 preach in it unabashed. Such things had not been seen in an 
 Edinburgh church since the Reformation; and they occasioned 
 much talk, and no little fear that they were but a prelude to an 
 intended restoration of Popery. 
 
 While some little beginning was made in this way at once, 
 by mere private instructions to the Scottish bishops, there 
 was farther hope for Laud in what Charles might be able 
 to manage more publicly through the agency of the Scottish
 
 MtaU 48. A SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT. 207 
 
 Parliament. And here Charles, with Laud to prompt him, did 
 his best. 
 
 An old Scottish Parliament was an assembly of a peculiar 
 kind, with many queer forms. Not only did all the Estates sit 
 together in one House, but there was a kind of inner or central 
 authority within that House, charged with the greatest amount 
 of the work. Bills or measures were not regularly and indi- 
 vidually discussed by the whole House, but were first drafted 
 by a committee of delegates from the various Estates, called 
 the Lords of the Articles, and then submitted all together to 
 the general body for approval or rejection. 
 
 Such, at least, was the old tradition, and Charles took care 
 that on this occasion it should be revived in full strictness. 
 Accordingly, though the Parliament which he met on the 20th 
 of June consisted of 155 persons in all (12 prelates, 47 nobles, 
 45 lairds, and 51 burgesses), the business of drafting the Bills 
 was at once vested in a committee of 40, of whom 8 were Pre- 
 lates (elected by the nobles), 9 were State-officials (nominated 
 by the King), 8 were Nobles (elected by the prelates), 8 were 
 Lairds (elected by the prelates and nobles), and 9 were Burgesses 
 (elected by the prelates, nobles, and lairds). This convenient 
 body having done its work, and prepared Acts of one kind or 
 another to the number of nearly two hundred in all, though 
 only thirty-one were of much public consequence, the general 
 Parliament re-assembled on the 28th of June, to hear the Acts 
 read over and convert them into laws. Charles was again 
 present in person, interested in seeing the Acts all carried, and 
 particularly two of them, on which, if on any, there might be 
 opposition. One was An Act anent his Majesty's Prerogative 
 and the Apparel of Kirkmen, in which there was not only a 
 general assertion of the King's supremacy, but also a specific 
 acknowledgment of his right at any time by a mere Royal 
 Letter to regulate the garb to be worn by the Scottish clergy. 
 The other was a Ratification of Acts touching Religion, intended 
 to confirm all the acts of the preceding generation by which
 
 2o8 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 the Kirk had been so far de-Presbyterianized. On these two 
 Acts there was opposition. The Earl of Rothes,- backed by a 
 little phalanx of other nobles, and a larger number of lairds and 
 burgesses, made a bold fight against them to his Majesty's face, 
 so that his Majesty had to resort to the high-handed style he 
 had learnt to use with his English Parliaments. He had a 
 complete list of the members, he said, exhibiting a paper from 
 his pocket ; and he would take care to note the names of those 
 that voted against him. Nor would he have any breaking up 
 of the obnoxious Acts into parts, this to be accepted and that 
 rejected; they must be voted on bodily Ay or No. Rothes, 
 and those of his adherents who were not frightened, then man- 
 fully voted No on both. Rothes further contested that, if the 
 votes, as actually given, were fairly counted, it would be found 
 that the Acts had been rejected; but. as the Clerk-Register 
 declared them carried by a majority, and a charge against 
 that functionary for falsifying the vote was a life-and-death 
 risk, the Acts passed, with the others, as the will of the whole 
 Estates. 
 
 Charles was excessively irritated by this opposition in Par- 
 liament, and by a memorial of similar Presbyterian significance 
 by a number of parish-ministers, which had been lodged with 
 his Clerk-Register, for formal presentation to him. To this 
 memorial he vouchsafed no public notice; but it was observed 
 that, during the rest of his stay in Scotland, he took especial 
 pains, wherever he went, to frown on every person or thing that 
 was conspicuously Presbyterian. Altogether, people were per- 
 turbed by his behaviour, and thought it very ungracious. This 
 and that in his demeanour and habits were noted as peevish 
 and unprincely. It w r as even observed that he walked too fast. 
 Returning on foot, instead of in his coach, one day from the 
 Parliament House to Holyrood, he went at such a pace down 
 the Canongate that his guards were quite in a heat with keeping 
 up with him, and were seen wiping their faces when they came 
 to the Palace.
 
 sEtat. 48. SCOTLAND AS CHARLES LEFT LT. 209 
 
 After a ten days' circuit into parts north of Edinburgh, which 
 took him successively to Linlithgow, Stirling, Dunfermline (his 
 native place), Falkland, Perth, and thence back to Falkland, 
 Charles returned to Edinburgh on the 10th of July, losing one 
 of his plate-chests and eight of his domestics by the sinking of 
 one of the boats in the passage from Burntisland to Leith. He 
 remained in Edinburgh till the 18th, when he took his depar- 
 ture southwards. 
 
 Whatever may have been the impressions he left among his 
 countrymen generally, he had made a good many individuals 
 among them happy by his visit. To grace his coronation, he 
 had created one Marquis, ten Earls, two Viscounts, and eight 
 Lords, besides dubbing, at various times and places, fifty-four 
 Knights. Among the persons so honoured we need take note 
 only of our old friends of the Drummond connexion, Alexander 
 and Kerr. From being Viscount Stirling, Alexander became 
 (June 14, 1633) Earl of Stirling and Viscount Canada; and 
 Sir Robert Kerr of Ancram, too long kept back at Court 
 with that mere title, became, at one leap (June 24, 1633), 
 
 Earl of Ancram. From Charles's coronation-visit also may 
 
 be dated the erection of Edinburgh into a bishopric, making 
 the total number of Scottish bishoprics fourteen, though the 
 first Bishop of Edinburgh was not actually appointed till the 
 following year. From the same time may be dated that more 
 systematic promotion of Kirkmen to civil and judicial offices in 
 Scotland to which, as has already been said, Laud meant to 
 trust so much, both for the reconciliation of the Scottish clergy 
 to his system, and also for the conversion of the Scottish people 
 to right views of the powers of the priesthood. While the 
 inferior clergy might become Justices of the Peace almost for 
 the asking, the Prelates, at an unprecedented rate, were 
 to be brought into the central government, in high state offices, 
 
 or as Councillors and Extraordinary Lords of Session. In 
 
 short, here is the state in which Charles left the working Govern- 
 ment of Scotland (/. e., the resident and acting portion of his 
 
 o
 
 210 DR. UMMOND OF HA WTIIORNDEN. 
 
 Scottish Privy Council) in 1633, or which it assumed shortly 
 afterwards, when he had leisure to adjust it to his mind : — 
 
 LAY COUNCILLORS WITH OFFICE. 
 
 Lord High ChaJicellor (the chief State Dignitary) — George Hay, Earl of 
 
 Kinnoull. He died December 16, 1634. 
 Chief Treasurer — William Douglas, Earl of Morton. He resigned the office 
 
 in 1635. 
 Treasurer Depute — John Stewart, Earl of Traquair. He succeeded Morton 
 
 as Chief Treasurer in 1635. 
 
 Lord Privy Seal — Thomas Hamilton, Earl of Haddington. He died in 1637. 
 
 Secretary of State (as Colleague in Edinburgh to the Earl of Stirling in 
 London) — Sir Archibald Acheson of Glencairn. 
 
 Clerk- Register — Sir John Hay of Lands. 
 
 Jtistice- General (as successor to the cashiered Earl of Menteith) — Sir William 
 
 Elphinstone. 
 Justice-Clerk — Sir James Carmichael. He succeeded Traquair in 1635 as 
 
 Treasurer Depute ; and Sir John Hamilton of Orbiston then succeeded 
 
 him as Justice- Clerk. 
 Master of Requests — Sir James Galloway. 
 King's Advocate — Sir Thomas Hope of Craighall. 
 
 LAY COUNCILLORS WITHOUT OFFICE. 
 
 Robert Kerr, Earl of Roxburgh. He succeeded Haddington as Lord Privy 
 
 Seal in 1637. 
 John Drummond, Earl of Perth. 
 George Seton, Earl of Wintoun. 
 John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale. 
 John Fleming, Earl of Wigton. 
 William Crichton, Earl of Dumfries. 
 John Lyon, Earl of Kinghorn. 
 David Carnegie, Earl of Southesk. 
 Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus (eldest son of the newly-created Marquis 
 
 of Douglas). 
 Archibald Campbell, Lord Lome (afterwards the celebrated Earl and 
 
 Marquis of Argyle). 
 John Stewart, Lord Doune (son of the Earl of Moray). 
 William Alexander, Viscount Canada and Lord Alexander (eldest son of 
 
 the Earl of Stirling). 
 Alexander Elphinstone, Lord Elphinstone. 
 James Ogilvy, Lord Deskford. 
 Archibald Napier, first Lord Napier (son of Napier of the Logarithms).
 
 Mtat. 48. DRUMMOND' S REFLECTIONS. 211 
 
 PRELATES IN THE COUNCIL. 
 
 John Spotswood, Archbishop of St. Andrews. He succeeded Kinnoull as 
 Chancellor, or chief dignitary of the realm, in December 1634, when the 
 promotion of a Kirkman to that post was much noted. 
 
 Patrick Lindsay, Archbishop of Glasgow. 
 
 David Lindsay, Bishop of Edinburgh, after September 1634. 
 
 John Guthrie, Bishop of Moray. 
 
 Walter Whiteford, Bishop of Brechin. 
 
 Adam Bellenden, Bishop of Dunblane till 1635, when he was transferred to 
 Aberdeen, and succeeded in Dunblane by James Wedderburn, a 
 personal friend of Laud's. 
 
 John Maxwell, Bishop of Ross. 
 
 Thomas Sydserf, Bishop of Galloway, from 1634. 
 
 It is rather remarkable that our good Drummond, who was 
 undoubtedly the chief literary celebrity in Scotland at the time 
 of Charles's coronation-visit, whose loyalty to the reigning family 
 had been made proverbial as long ago as 16 17 by his Forth 
 Feasting in honour of King James, who had contributed so 
 much to the pageantry for the welcome of Charles himself, and 
 of whose various merits Charles must have had exact personal 
 cognisance, should yet have emerged from all the bustle 
 of the Royal Visit still only as Mr. Drummond of Hawthorn- 
 den. Such, however, was the fact. Even of the knighthoods 
 that were falling so thick not one descended upon him. 
 Whether he cared very much, or was as glad that it had so 
 turned out, one cannot tell ; but I should not wonder if, with all 
 his readiness to write the poetic speeches for Jamesone's 
 pictorial pageantry on the King's welcome, he had eluded the 
 bustle as much as possible, and hardly presented himself at 
 Holyrood House. 
 
 It is more important to enquire what he thought of the Visit 
 and its results. I believe I must repeat that he saw no 
 objections to the King's Pro-Episcopal policy, and regarded 
 Rothes and the other Parliamentary oppositionists as a set of 
 troublesome Presbyterian Radicals. By temperament and by 
 culture, Drummond was a philosophical conservative, the friend
 
 2i2 DRUMMOXD OF HAWTHORXDEX. 
 
 of prerogative and constituted authority in all things, and adverse 
 to all popular movements and democratic ideas as mere roarings 
 of the Blatant Beast. His own soft vein of religious philoso- 
 phizing, and his liking for quiet, had kept him aloof from the vehe- 
 ment Presbyterian theology of his countrymen, and perhaps from 
 formal and definite theology of any kind. He had decidedly 
 preferred, however, the easy kind of Scottish Kirk which King 
 James had been bringing in, with Bishops and a sprinkling of 
 Anglican ceremonies in it, to the stern, uproarious, Kirk of 
 Melville and David Calderwood, with its eternal Presbyteries, 
 Synods, and General Assemblies, in the midst of which a poor 
 scholarly laird of free opinions could never be at peace, but 
 might be sessioned for catching a trout on his own property on 
 the Lord's Day, or visited by a deputation of gaping clerical 
 blockheads to see what books he had in his library. And so the 
 gradual Prelatizing^>f the Scottish Kirk, and the Arminianizing 
 of the theology of some of the Prelates and their supporters, 
 had been the reverse of disagreeable to Drummond. Whether, 
 if he had been secretly consulted as to the further Prelatic in- 
 tentions of Charles and Laud, he would have advised per- 
 severance in them, may, nevertheless, be doubted. He knew 
 his countrymen well enough to foresee that by these provocations 
 there might be that very rousing of the dormant democratic and 
 Presbyterian spirit of Scotland which it should have been the 
 first care of loyal statesmanship to avoid ; and he knew also that, 
 even among those lay friends of his, of the nobility and the 
 lairds, who approved of a moderate Episcopacy in the Kirk, 
 and were altogether the supporters of established order against 
 the Presbyterian malcontents, there was a deeply-rooted 
 jealousy of the interference of Kirkmen in secular affairs and 
 dislike of their promotion to state-offices. Still, as Charles had 
 acted deliberately and on advice, it was the part of a loyal 
 Scottish conservative to conceal any private doubts, and to hope 
 for the best ! If only the Blatant Beast could be muzzled, all 
 might go well ; and, if Laudism, green candles, white surplices,
 
 /Etat. 48. DRUMMOND'S REFLECTIONS. 213 
 
 choral services, and games and sports on Sundays, could be 
 introduced into Scotland, without too much noise and exacerba- 
 tion in the process, perhaps it might be all the better ! Might 
 not these things be an education for the Scottish mind in those 
 elements of sweet sensuousness, devout decorum, and fine 
 dreamy stupidity, in which, whether from climate or the recent 
 influence of Calvinistic dialectics, it was confessedly deficient ? 
 With such feelings, as I believe, Drummond pondered the 
 probable results of Charles's Coronation Visit, and saw Scotland 
 committed to that government of mixed Prelates, Nobles, and 
 Lawyers, which had to abide the consequences. Probably there 
 was not one member of that government, layman or kirkman, 
 that he was not personally acquainted with, and that had not 
 some reciprocal respect for a man so distinguished.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 POETRY AND VERSE EXCHANGED FOR HISTORY AND PROSE: 
 DRUMMOND'S CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE EARL OF PERTH 
 AND INTEREST IN THE DRUMMOND GENEALOGY: HISTORY OF 
 THE FIVE JAMESES COMMENCED: A GLIMPSE OF SCOT OF 
 SCOTSTARVET. 
 
 1633— 1634. 
 
 TARUMMOND'S vein of poetry proper was by this time 
 worked out. He had continued, indeed, to write son- 
 nets and other occasional pieces since the publication of his 
 Flowers of Sion in 1623 ; he had re-published that volume, with 
 some additions, in 1630 ; he had spurred his reluctant Muse for. 
 some metrical stuff that might serve for Charles's welcome into 
 Edinburgh ; and he retained the habit of elegant and sprightly 
 verse-making to the end of his life. But it may be doubted 
 whether anything he wrote in verse after 1623 comes up to the 
 best that had appeared in his volume of that year, and in its 
 predecessors of 161 7 and 1616. He seems to have been con- 
 scious of this, and of the objection that would have been made to 
 the monotony of his vein if he had published another selection 
 of pieces, descriptive and reflective, hardly differing from those by 
 which he was already known. Hence he let whatever he wrote 
 new in that kind lie about in MS., or only printed a piece now 
 and then for private presentation. He had persuaded himself 
 also that only for brief fancies and lyrics was his genius apt ; 
 and this, or indolence, with that indifference to notoriety which 
 belonged to his peculiar habits of metaphysical musing, had
 
 Aitat. 48-49. A NEW LITERARY VEIN. 215 
 
 prevented him from trying his strength on any continuous and 
 elaborate poem. 
 
 " Here Damon lies, whose songs did sometime grace 
 The murmuring Esk : may roses shade the place !" 
 
 was the epitaph he had written for himself in his thirty-fifth 
 year; and, if he would not have re-proposed it in his forty- 
 eighth, he would not then, on account of anything he had since 
 done in poetry, or yet meant to do, have cancelled it for any- 
 thing stronger. 
 
 But, if the poetical vein were exhausted, or the sameness of 
 that vein were too evidently proved, why not exchange Poetry 
 for Prose ? From the author of a prose-essay so remarkable as 
 the Cypress Grove one might have expected farther prose per- 
 formances equally remarkable. Or, if even in that Essay the 
 thought were too like that of the Sonnets and Poems, or too 
 uniform in itself, to bear much repetition, had there not been 
 signs in Drummond's letters of a certain power of ranging, a 
 certain width of interest in old or current topics, that might 
 exert itself usefully in more extensive and miscellaneous prose- 
 writings, — History and Biography, for example ? 
 
 Well, at the time of Drummond's life at which we have now 
 arrived he did betake himself to History. One is not sur- 
 prised to find that it was Scottish History that attracted him 
 more particularly. He was lured into this line of Literature, 
 however, not by any remonstrances with himself for idleness, 
 or debatings what he should do to fill up his time, but in a 
 much more natural way. 
 
 Drummond, we have said, counted among his acquaintances 
 nearly all the aristocracy of his little country, including the 
 nobles, lairds, and lawyers, who composed the existing Govern- 
 ment. Among his aristocratic correspondents, in addition to 
 those there has been occasion to mention already, we find the 
 Earl of Morton, Lord Chief Treasurer (to whom there is a very
 
 216 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORN DEN. 
 
 early letter of Drummond's, enclosing some madrigals, which he 
 calls " toys of youth and those youthfully handled "), the Earl 
 of Traquair, Treasurer-Depute, the Marquis of Douglas, the 
 Earls of Perth and Lauderdale, the Countess of Lothian 
 (daughter-in-law of the Earl of Ancram, whose eldest son, in 
 consequence of his marriage with this lady, then Countess in 
 her own right, had been created Earl of Lothian in 1631, thus 
 preceding his father in the peerage by two years), Lord Binning, 
 Lord Maitland, and Sir William Douglas of Cavers. His letters 
 to these and to other lords and ladies, not named, are in the 
 style of elaborate politeness then customary, those to ladies 
 with a tinge of stately gallantry, but all on a certain footing of 
 admitted equality, and some of them in the tone of one who 
 might assume the part of critic or adviser. Of all the persons 
 just mentioned, however, the most frequent and intimate cor- 
 respondence was with the Earl of Perth. 
 
 The reason is not far to seek. John Drummond, second Earl 
 of Perth, who had held that title since 161 1, and had married 
 the daughter of his fellow-councillor the Earl of Roxburgh, was 
 the Drummond of his time in the reckoning of heralds and 
 genealogists. For he w r as the representative of the Drummonds 
 of Stobhall, the senior of two branches (the Drummonds of 
 Concraig being the other) into which the family of Scottish 
 Drummonds, tracing themselves back to the reign of Malcolm 
 Canmore (1047-1084), had split a century or two afterwards, 
 itself again to branch into a multiplicity of offshoots, calling 
 themselves Drummonds of Cargill, Drummonds of Carnock 
 (whence those of Hawthornden), Drummonds of Blairdrummond, 
 Drummonds of Riccarton, &c, &c. If a man about the year 
 1633-4 did care about being a Drummond, he could not avoid 
 knowing all this, and thinking with some respect of the Earl of 
 Perth. He would ascend the line of that Earl's family history, 
 noting that, though the Earldom of Perth was a creation only of 
 1605, the antecedent title of Lord Drummond of Stobhall had 
 been in the family since 147 1, and long before that time the
 
 sEtat. 48-49. THE DRU ALMOND GENEALOGY. 217 
 
 Drummonds of Stobhall (Sir John, Sir Malcolm, and so on, in 
 their series) had been energetic Scottish somebodies. Nay, 
 coming to the ganglion where these Drummonds of Stobhall 
 and the other patriarchal Drummonds of Concraig were found 
 united, he would push his inquiries or his dreams still beyond 
 that, till he was in the semi-mythical company of the Drum- 
 monds of the far-back reigns of William the Lion, David I., and 
 the big-headed Malcolm who had extinguished Macbeth. 
 What though he were told that the original Drummond of all in 
 this last reign was not a native Scotchman, but a Hungarian 
 called Maurice, either with no surname or with some outlandish 
 or unascertained one, who had come into Scotland in the train 
 of Edgar Atheling and his sister Margaret, and who, when Mal- 
 colm chose to marry the fair English refugee, had the good 
 sense to remain with her in Scotland, be appointed Seneschal of 
 Lennox, and found a Scottish family ? Few Scottish families of 
 rank but had been imported from some foreign country or other, 
 to manage and qualify the Celtic aborigines ; and, though a 
 Mongolian from Hungary was rather a peculiar ancestor, and a 
 Norman might have been preferable, people did not then dis- 
 tinguish the Hungarians as of non-Aryan descent, but regarded 
 them as a very respectable, though rather distant, European 
 nation. 
 
 So much, I say, any Drummond alive about the year 1633 
 that cared about being a Drummond at all would have 
 made clear to himself by research less or more. Now, our 
 Drummond of Hawthornden was not free from the common 
 Scottish weakness. He did care about being a Drummond, 
 had always been curious on the subject of his ancestry; and, as 
 he was personally acquainted with the Earl of Perth, this 
 subject had been one of conversation, and even of correspon- 
 dence, between them. There are five extant letters of Drum- 
 mond to the Earl, all undated except one. The four undated 
 ones seem all to have been written before the date at which we 
 now are. What appears to be the first is a mere note accom-
 
 2i 8 DRUMMOND OF HAIVTHORNDEN. 
 
 panying some printed things of Drummond's sent to the Earl. 
 " These idle toys " he calls them, " the tokens of my due 
 observing your honour ; " and he speaks of them as " enclosed 
 for handsel's sake," to continue him in his lordship's good 
 graces until he can send "a more rare token" of his service. 
 The note simply proves a friendly acquaintance that had 
 already lasted some time, and the writer's affectionate regard 
 for the Earl as the head of the Drummonds. 
 
 In the other three letters we come upon the subject of common 
 interest to them. The Earl had consulted Drummond about 
 his family device and motto ; and Drummond, whom we 
 already know to have been a dabbler in these ingenuities, 
 replies in a letter which is printed in his Works under 
 the title of A Short Discourse upon Impresas and Anagrams. 
 " My censure of the device which was sent to me by your 
 " Lordship," he begins, " is that by way of emblem it may stand 
 " sufficient, but not by the nature of an impresa. Though 
 " emblems and impresas sometimes seem like each other, what 
 " is a perfection in an emblem is a great fault in an impresa. 
 " The words of the emblem are only placed to declare the 
 " figures of the emblem, whereas in an impresa the figures 
 " express and illustrate the one part of the author's intention, 
 " and the words the other. Emblems serve for demonstration 
 " of some general thing, and for a general rule and teaching 
 " precept to every one, as well for the author and inventor as 
 " for any other ; which is a fault in an impresa. For an 
 " impresa is a demonstration and manifestation of some notable 
 " and excellent thought of him that conceived it and useth it; 
 " and it belongs only to him and is his properly, and so 
 " properly that the successors may not use the impresa of their 
 " predecessor or parents, except the impresas be incorporated 
 " into the arms of their house of which they are descended, or 
 " they would show they have the self-same thought which they 
 " had which went before them. It is quite contrary with the 
 " emblem : emblems of the deceased may be used by others.
 
 /Etat. 48-49. THE DRUMMOND GENEALOGY. 219 
 
 " The figures in the emblem may be one, two, or many; but in 
 " impresas, if the essential figures be more than two, they lose 
 " their grace." Having thus discriminated between the emblem 
 and the impresa, he proceeds to give the minute laws of the 
 impresa proper, whether without words, as was the most ancient 
 custom, or with figures and words together, which he con- 
 siders the perfect form. He discusses first the laws of the 
 figures, entering into curious details, and then the laws of the 
 words or motto ; under which second head he says that two- 
 worded mottoes are the best, and instances "Gang Warily" (the 
 family motto of the Earls of Perth) as a very good one. 
 Altogether he took a great deal of trouble to enlighten his 
 lordship on the important subject on which he had been 
 
 consulted. He reverted to the subject in another letter, 
 
 from which we are able to guess in a general way the nature of 
 the device which had been submitted to him by the Earl. It 
 must have been something like a rock or height rising out of 
 the waves, the device having been got at by the decomposition 
 of the name Drummond into Drum (Celtic for "a height") 
 and Unda or Onde (Latin and French for "a wave"). Drum- 
 mond, thinking over this device, had liked it better and better. 
 " After a long inquiry about the arms of your ancient house, 
 " and the turning of sundry books of Impresas and Heraldry," 
 he accordingly writes, " I found your Ondes famous and very 
 " honourable." He then mentions some half-dozen cases of 
 Italian and other continental families or personages of mark 
 who had had waves in their emblems or impresas, and some- 
 times the word Unda in their mottoes ; and he concludes, " By 
 " reason of your lordship's name and the long continuance in 
 " your house, to none they appertain more rightly than to your 
 " lordship. Drum is, in the old Celtic and British language, an 
 " height, and Onde in all the countries almost of Europe a wave ; 
 " which word is said to have been given in a storm by Mar- 
 " garet, Queen of Scotland, to a gentleman who accompanied 
 " her, the first of your lordship's house. But to make an
 
 220 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEM. 
 
 u inquiry in surnames were now too long."* The third letter 
 
 may be quoted entire. It shows that, either before he had 
 written the two last, or because they had given a direction to 
 his thoughts, he had been occupying himself not merely on 
 the Earl of Perth's impresa, arms, and motto, but, with some 
 care and research, on the whole genealogy of the Drummonds. 
 
 " To the Right Honourable John, Earl of Perth. 
 
 " My Noble Lord, 
 
 " Though, as Glaucus says to Diomed in Homer, 
 ' Like the race of Leaves the race of Man is : that deserves no 
 question, nor receives his being any other breath : the wind in 
 autumn strews the Earth with old leaves; then the spring the 
 woods with new endues :' yet I have ever thought the know- 
 ledge of kindred, and the genealogies of the ancient families of 
 a country, a matter so far from contempt that it deserveth 
 highest praise. Herein consisteth a part of the knowledge of 
 a man's own self. It is a great spur to virtue to look back on 
 the worth of our line. In this is the memory of the dead pre- 
 served with the living, being more firm and honourable than 
 any epitaph ; and the living know that band which tieth them 
 to others. By this man is distinguished from the reasonless, 
 and the noble of men from the baser sort. For it oft falleth 
 out, though we cannot tell how for the most part, that generosity 
 
 folio weth good birth and parentage. This moved me to 
 
 essay this Table of your Lordship's House; which is not in- 
 ferior to the best and greatest in this Isle. It is but roughly, I 
 confess, hewn, nakedly limned, and, after better informations, 
 to be amended. In pieces of this kind, who doth according 
 to such light as he receiveth is beyond reprehension. 
 
 " Your Lordship's 
 
 " Humble Servant and Kinsman, 
 
 " W. DRUMMOND."f 
 
 * The arms of the Earls of Perth were — "Or, three bars wavy, gules, 
 supported by two savages, wreathed about the loins proper : crest, a sleuth- 
 hound standing on a ducal coronet: Motto, Gang Warily." Drummond's 
 own arms were — "Or, three bars waved within a bordure, gules: crest, a 
 Pegasus proper : Motto, Hos gloria reddit honores. " 
 
 t This Letter is from p. 136 of Drummond's Works (Edit. 171 1); the 
 preceding letters to the Earl of Perth will be found, in the order in which
 
 /Etat 48-49. ANNABELLA DRUMMOND. 221 
 
 Drummond, it appears from this letter, had been at the pains 
 to draw out, for the Earl of Perth's satisfaction and his own, as 
 perfect a genealogical tree as he could of the Drummond Family 
 from first to last, beginning with the Hungarian Maurice of 
 Malcolm Canmore's reign, and coming down (doubtless with 
 many gaps and asterisks) to the historical Drummonds of Stob- 
 hall and their branches. In this pedigree, we may be sure, one 
 fact was made to stand out conspicuously by every device of 
 colouring and capital letters. For we have kept to the last the 
 tradition of the Drummond Family of which every Drummond 
 was proudest. 
 
 The reader will remember the two marriages of Robert II., 
 the first Stuart King of Scotland, and the confusions that had 
 arisen in Scottish History from the rivalry between the de- 
 scendants of Elizabeth Mure, his first wife (the afterwards reign- 
 ing Stuarts), and those of his other wife, Euphemia Ross. Now, 
 Drummond, in his Paper of Considerations to the King on that 
 old subject, in connexion with the recent case of the Earl of 
 Menteith and his claim to the Stratherne succession, had not 
 been quite disinterested. For Robert III., who had succeeded 
 Robert II. on the throne, as his eldest son by Elizabeth Mure, 
 had also married a subject, and that subject was Annabella 
 
 we have quoted them, as follows:— (l.) Mr. Laing's Extracts from the 
 Hawthornderi MSS., Arch. Scot., IV. 91; (2.) Works, pp. 228-9; (3-) 
 
 Works, p. 142. In connexion with Letter 2 it may be remarked that, 
 
 though it is headed, in Drummond's Works, "A Short Discourse upon 
 Impresas and Anagrams," there is not a word about Anagrams in it. The 
 reason is that the heading was prefixed by the Editors to cover not only this 
 letter about Impresas to the Earl of Perth, but also a totally distinct little 
 paper on Anagrams, which they print immediately after the letter, though 
 they give it the separate additional title of " Character of a Perfect Ana- 
 gram." The paper is characteristic of Drummond's fondness for such 
 pastimes (caught, perhaps, from his uncle Fowler); but there is nothing in 
 it worth quoting here, unless it be the closing sentence:—" One will say it 
 is a frivolous art and difficult; upon which that of Martial is current, 
 
 " Turpe est difficiles habere nugas, 
 Et stultus labor est ineptiarum."
 
 222 DRUMMOND OF IIAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Drummond, daughter of Sir John Drummond of Stobhall. He 
 had married her in or about 1357, when he was a mere boy, 
 and before his father came to the throne; but the marriage was 
 a legally recognised one all through his father's reign. Two 
 sons, David and John, were born of it during that reign; and, 
 after Robert III. himself came to the throne in 1390, and 
 Annabella Drummond was his crowned queen, a third son was 
 born, called James. Now this James, born at Dunfermline in 
 1394, by the deaths of his two elder brothers, became heir to 
 the throne. He was, in fact, that James I. of Scotland, famous 
 as the poet- King, who was carried away into captivity in Eng- 
 land in 1405, was nominally King of Scotland from 1406, when 
 his father died broken-hearted by his loss and other misfortunes, 
 and actually King from his release and return to Scotland in 
 1424 to his assassination in 1437. From him, in regular suc- 
 cession, had come James II., James III., James IV., and 
 James V. of Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots, James VI. of 
 Scotland and I. of England, and so at length King Charles. 
 All these sovereigns, therefore, and all their offspring, who had 
 intermarried so largely with other Crowned Houses of Europe, 
 were descendants from Annabella Drummond of Stobhall. 
 
 Here was something for the Earl of Perth, the living repre- 
 sentative of the Drummonds of Stobhall, to be proud of; here 
 was something for every cadet of that family, including Drum- 
 mond of Hawthornden, to be proud of also. We see a reason 
 now why our author should have been so keen in his remonstrance 
 with King Charles on his admission of the claims of the poor 
 Earl of Menteith to the Stratherne title. The original wearer 
 of that title had been the half-brother of the Robert III. who 
 married Annabella Drummond. By allowing the title, Charles, 
 the descendant of Annabella Drummond, had revived the ques- 
 tion whether Robert III., her husband, ought, as the son of 
 Elizabeth Mure, to have been King of Scotland at all, or 
 whether the Crown ought not to have gone instead to David, 
 Earl of Stratherne, the son of Euphemia Ross. He had thus
 
 Mtat. 48-49. "HISTORY OF SCOTLAND" BEGUN. 223 
 
 put in possible jeopardy not only his own rights, and those of 
 his ancestors and descendants, to the thrones of Scotland and 
 England, but also the humbler rights of the Drummonds of 
 Stobhall, and all their kin, to boast that the royal Stuarts, and 
 all their European offshoots, had sprung from a lady of their 
 name and house. Hinc Wee lacrymee of Drummond over the 
 Stratherne-Menteith affair. 
 
 It was Annabella Drummond's ghost, not a doubt of it, that 
 beckoned Drummond into the dark backward and abysm 
 of Scottish History. His investigations for the Stratherne- 
 Menteith affair, and his researches in the Genealogy of the Earl 
 of Perth, had been but preparatory peepings and sketches of the 
 track. Now he flung himself bodily into the abysm. It was 
 in the year 1633, as his old biographer believes, and as all the 
 circumstances agree in indicating, that he began what turned 
 out to be a regular and somewhat studied composition from 
 Scottish historical records. His designs may have been vague 
 when he began ; but, by attention to the beckoning of Annabella 
 Drummond, they soon became determinate. He took up, first 
 of all, the Life of Annabella Drummond's royal son, the poet- 
 king James I. ; from that he was drawn on into the Lives of 
 James II., James III., James IV., and James V. ; and so the 
 work, when completed, turned out to be a History of Scotland 
 during the reigns of the Five Jameses (1424-1542). But it seems 
 to have been pursued in a leisurely and intermittent manner ; 
 and, though it was begun in 1633, there is something like proof 
 that it was not finished till a good many years afterwards. We 
 shall, therefore, say no more about it now, but shall wait till it 
 becomes due. 
 
 It is the tradition that Drummond was incited to his histori- 
 cal undertaking by his brother-in-law, Scot of Scotstarvet, and 
 that it was begun during a temporary residence of Drummond, 
 for some reason or other, in Scots tarvet's house. Whether 
 one of Scotstarvet's houses in Fifeshire is meant, or his town-
 
 224 DR UMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 house in Edinburgh, we have no means of saying; but, from 
 all that one knows of Scot's life about this time, one guesses 
 that Edinburgh must have been his head-quarters, and that visits 
 to his Fifeshire or other properties must have been but occa- 
 sional. For, though a busy and public man in King James's 
 reign, he had come to be a busier and a more public in that 
 of Charles. 
 
 Knight and Privy Councillor since 1617, when he had first 
 christened his collective Fifeshire estates in a freak by the scraggy 
 name of Scotstarvet, and retaining always his inherited post 
 of Director of Chancery, Sir John had, in 1629, been appointed 
 an extraordinary Lord of Session. In July 1632, he had passed 
 from that honorary rank to one of the ordinary or regular 
 Judgeships, taking his seat on the Scottish Bench with the terri- 
 torial courtesy-title of Lord Scotstarvet. That, as we have seen, 
 was the year of Drummond's marriage; but Scot, though of 
 exactly Drummond's age, or perhaps a few months younger, had 
 then been the husband of Drummond's sister for three-and- 
 twenty or five-and-twenty years, and was the father of two sons 
 and seven daughters. His eldest son James was, in fact, 
 now of full age, and on the point of marriage with Lady 
 Marjory Carnegie, daughter of the Earl of Northesk; and the 
 careful father had recently obtained from the King a grant 
 whereby, " in consideration of the great and faithful services 
 done to the crown " by the Scot family for three generations in 
 the Directorship of Chancery, -the tenure of that office in the 
 family was extended through the joint-lives of himself and this 
 his eldest son. We hear also of various lands and baronies 
 which Scotstarvet had been acquiring since Charles came to the 
 throne, in addition to his former properties. Altogether, m 
 1634, there can have been few men in Edinburgh with a better 
 grip of lands and money, or a better notion how to get more, 
 than this shrewd Lord of Session, Drummond's brother-in-law. 
 " A busy man in foul weather, and one whose covetousness far 
 exceedit his honesty" is a contemporary character of him ; but
 
 . Etat. 48-49. SCO 7" OF SCO TSTAR VE T. 
 
 225 
 
 it is perhaps only the ill-natured snarl of a personal enemy. A 
 shrewd, sagacious, Scottish lawyer and judge of his peculiar 
 generation, very orthodox in his morals and beliefs, but with a 
 dash of the eccentric and humorist in his ways, and something 
 crabbed and cynical in his temper — systematically acquisitive 
 of lands and gear, it must be admitted, and not more scrupulous 
 as to the means than most Scottish officials of his time, but 
 thrifty in his use of what he had acquired, and with a rough 
 sense of honour and responsibility in him after all — so we would 
 rather picture for ourselves the Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet 
 whose figure in his judicial robes, or in his ordinary town-garb, 
 was familiar to all Edinburgh, while Fifeshire knew him best in 
 his old suit and top-boots, plodding about his farms. 
 
 One fine and generous quality at least all recognised in 
 Scotstarvet. He had himself a liking for learning and literature, 
 and his anxiety for the promotion of learning and literature in 
 Scotland amounted to a passion. For this object he was muni- 
 ficent to an extent that shamed his contemporaries among the 
 Scottish nobility. As long ago as 1620 he had virtually founded 
 and endowed the Professorship of Latin in St. Leonard's College, 
 St. Andrews, where he had himself been educated ; and to this 
 day the patronage of that Professorship in the University of St. 
 Andrews, exercised by the English Dukes of Portland, comes 
 to them by inheritance from Scot of Scotstarvet, through inter- 
 marriage of the Cavendish-Bentincks with the line of his des- 
 cendants. In the main, indeed, in Scotstarvet's view of things, 
 as in that of most of his coevals, Latinity represented Literature 
 generally. He had himself in his youth practised Latin verse, 
 and he had kept up the habit ever since. Less to write himself, 
 however, than to collect what had been written by Scottish 
 Latinists of the last generation or two, and to stimulate the 
 Latin Muse round about him to fresh exertions, was now his 
 ambition. This was known ; and, as his position made him a 
 very conspicuous man in the eyes of his countrymen, there 
 was not one of them with any pretensions to Latin poetry and
 
 22 6 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORN DEN. 
 
 scholarship, from David Wedderburn, master of the Grammar 
 School in Aberdeen, to Arthur Johnston, also an Aberdonian, 
 but settled in London since 1632 as Physician to the King, 
 that did not regard Scotstarvet as a friend and patron. For 
 had he not already in contemplation that work which was to 
 make them all famous, and to prove to the foreign world that 
 Scottish genius was not extinct or barren ? The printer Blaeu 
 of Amsterdam had been issuing, since 1608, selected specimens 
 of the best recent Latin poetry of the different continental 
 nations ; and Scotstarvet had resolved that the series should in- 
 clude a collection of the best recent Latin poems by natives of 
 neglected little Scotland. This was certainly to be done, 
 though it should be at Scotstarvet's expense ; and in 1634 there 
 seems to have been a patriotic flutter of expectation and pre- 
 paration on the subject, with much praise of Scotstarvet for his 
 enterprise and generosity. 
 
 Drummond, as we know, was not likely to be a contributor 
 to his brother-in-law's intended collection of Latin poetry by 
 Scottish authors. The two brothers-in-law, wholly different 
 from each other in character and in ways of thinking, differed 
 notably in their literary tastes. While Sir John still identified 
 literature in the main with Latin and Latinity, Drummond 
 had been a votary all his life to the general English of Great 
 Britain. Even in English their styles were at variance. When 
 Scotstarvet scribbled in English (and he did so a good deal), 
 it was for business purposes, and in the homespun form of 
 English then generally used in his country, with racy Scottish 
 idioms and spellings ; while Drummond, as we have seen, 
 studied the most classical English even in his prose, and was 
 so careful of polish that he would sometimes make several 
 scrolls of an important letter before he sent it off. The two, 
 however, understood each other thoroughly, and got on admir- 
 ably together. Scotstarvet, vernacular and Latin though he 
 was himself, was pleased with Drummond's fame in the walks 
 of Literature he had chosen ; and Drummond could sympathise
 
 <Etal. 48-49. SCOT OF SCOTSTARVKT. 227 
 
 with Scotstarvet in all his hobbies. One feeling which they 
 certainly had in common was their patriotic interest in Scottish 
 History and Antiquities. It is the most conceivable thing in 
 the world that Scotstarvet did encourage Drummond in his 
 researches into Scottish antiquity, with a view to his History oj 
 the Five Jameses. There is even less doubt that, if there was 
 any house where Drummond, when away from Hawthornden, 
 could make himself at home, it was his brother-in-law's house 
 in Edinburgh, or the veritable Tarvet itself in the heart of 
 Fifeshire, or that other house of Thirdpart in the same county 
 where the Scotstarvet estate adjoined that of Barns, and both 
 looked out upon the sea.* 
 
 * Authorities for this glimpse of Scot of Scotstarvet are — Douglas's Bar- 
 onage of Scotland (Art. " Scot of Scotstarvet"); Scot's own Staggering 
 State; "Memoir of Scot" by Dr. Charles Rogers, prefixed to reprint of 
 the Staggering State (187 '2) ; and a MS. volume in the Advocates' Library 
 of Edinburgh, entitled EpistoLe Doctorum Virorum ad Jo. Scotum, and 
 consisting of many Letters in Latin and French, and eulogistic Latin verses, 
 addressed to Scot, between 1618 and 1657, by foreign scholars and con- 
 spicuous Scotsmen. From these Letters and Verses I infer that Scot had 
 visited Holland before 1620, and that from about that time, or at latest 
 from 1627, he had had the project in his mind of a collective publication 
 of recent Scottish Latin Poetry. Among the most interesting and familiar 
 Letters are some from Joannes Leochseus, S.P.D. {i.e., John Leitch, a 
 Scottish scholar of the day), dated 1618 and 1 619. They are from Paris 
 and other foreign towns ; and in every one of them, I think, the writer sends 
 his respects to Drummond.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 PROGRESS OF LAUD'S POLICY IN SCOTLAND : DRUMMOND'S POSI- 
 TION : THE BALMERINO BUSINESS ; DRUMMOND'S MANLY 
 LETTER ABOUT IT : THE EARL OF STIRLING'S UNPOPULARITY : 
 THE NEW SCOTTISH SERVICE-BOOK. 
 
 1634— 1637. 
 
 A I miLE Drummond was writing die Life of Annabella 
 *^ Drummond's son, that son's great-grandson's great- 
 great-grandson was causing Scotland a great deal of trouble. 
 
 Determined to follow out the policy declared in the Coro- 
 nation Visit, Charles had handed over Scotland to Laud 
 absolutely, to be hacked and carved to his ecclesiastical 
 pleasure. Laud, now promoted to the Archbishopric of Can- 
 terbury (Aug. 1633), proceeded as if Scotland were a mere 
 annexe of his Archbishopric ; and the King did all that Laud 
 wanted done, and exactly at the time he was asked. Letters 
 and orders, some from Laud, some from the King himself 
 through the Marquis of Hamilton or Secretary Stirling, came 
 continually to the Scottish Bishops or the Scottish Privy 
 Council, with new directions about the Kirk. In October, 
 1633, for example, there came the King's letter ordaining, by 
 the prerogative accorded to him in the Scottish Parliament, 
 the future apparel of all the Scottish clergy, from the arch- 
 bishops to the parish-ministers — what gowns, tippets, and hats
 
 .Ktat. 49-52. LAUD'S SCOTTISH POLICY. 229 
 
 they were to wear, and of what materials, and when they were 
 to put on their "whites" or surplices. This, with private 
 instructions as to the use of the English Liturgy in the mean- 
 time in the Chapel Royal of Holyrood, seems to have sufficed 
 ostensibly till Oct., 1634, when by a royal warrant a new 
 Court of High Commission was established in Scotland, with 
 much larger powers than had belonged to the previous agency 
 of that name. Then, in May, 1635, came the new Book of 
 Canons, which had meanwhile been in preparation between 
 Laud and some of the Scottish Bishops. It did not come, as 
 these bishops themselves seem to have expected, in the form of 
 a draft to be considered further by the Kirk itself, but in the form 
 of " Canons and Constitutions ordained to be observed by the 
 Clergy" on the King's mere decree — i.e., on Laud's. By these 
 Canons such liberties of meeting for collective deliberation as 
 had yet remained to the clergy were greatly abridged, or 
 totally abrogated, and a vast quantity of new ceremonial was 
 imposed on them and on the laity. By implication even the 
 practice of auricular confession was legalized, and altogether 
 the regulations looked more like an experiment in Popish 
 resuscitation than an extension northwards of anything yet 
 tried in South Britain. The Canons, among other things, 
 enjoined the strict and universal use of a new Scottish Liturgy 
 or Service-Book which they spoke of as ready. As no such 
 Service-Book, however, had yet seen the light, people could 
 only guess what it was likely to be, and judge of the Canons 
 by themselves. 
 
 Yes ! there was one fragment, or intended appendage, of the 
 promised Service-Book with which people were already familiar. 
 King James's Metrical Version of the Psalms, edited by 
 Viscount Stirling, now the Earl of Stirling, had been out from 
 the Oxford University Press, as we know, since 1631, with a 
 permission that it should be used in all the churches of his 
 Majesty's dominions. The permission had not been enough. 
 Copies had been distributed among the Scottish clergy by way
 
 230 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 of trial, with requests to Presbyteries to report their opinions 
 of it to the diocesan assemblies, with a view to its general 
 introduction. The Scots, however, had not liked the Version. 
 Leading ministers of the Presbyterian faction had openly 
 rejected the " Metaphrase " and criticised it severely. It 
 called the Sun " the Lord of Light," and the Moon " the pale 
 Lady of the Night," and how could decent Christians sing 
 stuff like that ? Nor was there any hurry of others to use it. 
 This had been very vexing to Secretary Stirling, who had the 
 patent of the Version for thirty-one years, and whom every 
 year's neglect of it mulcted of so much profit. Accordingly, 
 in December, 1634, there had come a royal order to the 
 Scottish Privy Council that the use of the version should be 
 compulsory throughout Scotland, or, what was the same thing, 
 that "no other Psalms of any edition whatsoever" should 
 thenceforth be either printed in Scotland or imported from 
 abroad. Here was a forerunner of the new Service-Book ; for, 
 doubtless, when the Service-Book was printed, these Psalms 
 would be attached to it by fresh authority. 
 
 Very irritating all this was to the Scots, and to many of 
 them most horrifying. No imagination now can picture 
 sufficiently the disturbance caused by those successive measures 
 of Charles and Laud, the universal muttering of anger in the 
 thousand parishes of the realm, the open clamour in some 
 towns, the passing of jibes and phrases of fury from mouth to 
 mouth, the stirring of old fires from their ashes, the moody re- 
 mustering of Presbyterian humours. It was easy for Charles 
 and Laud, at the distance of London, to frame their enactments 
 and send them down ; the authorities in Scotland itself knew 
 better. However Laudian the Scottish bishops had become, 
 some in the sense of loathsomely profound obeisance to every 
 nod from the little man at Lambeth, others in the sense of 
 frightened acquiescence in what they dared not oppose, they 
 were powerless in the tempest of circumstances. Notwith- 
 standing the King's mandate of October, 1633, about clerical
 
 . Etat. 49-52. LA UD'S SCOTTISH POLICY. 2 X 1 
 
 canonicals, it can have been but a small percentage of the 
 Scottish clergy that ventured to ask their wives to make them a 
 set of " whites," or to appear in them if they were made ; and 
 how could the severest Prelate, if he had any heart or sense 
 left, compel a poor parson to appear in " whites " in a parish 
 where they would have been torn off his back on the first sight 
 of them ? Not to act, therefore, without the whole power of 
 the Privy Council and Government visibly in their support, and 
 to employ their influence to bring this about, was the policy, in 
 the main, of even the most Laudian of the Scottish Prelates. 
 Now, though the Prelates were strong in the Privy Council, 
 both numerically and by their assiduity, and though their 
 power had been increased by the accession of Archbishop 
 Spotswood to the Chancellorship, or, as we should now call it, 
 the Premiership, in Dec. 1634, the Privy Council was a divided 
 body. Not a few of the lay members disliked in their hearts 
 the whole business that was in progress, and wished that Laud 
 were drowned in the Thames, or at least would confine his 
 activity to England. Most of them had a hereditary, or pro- 
 fessional, antipathy to clerical statesmanship ; and, though this 
 sentiment could not be avowed, and all had to go so far with 
 the current, there were means of seeming to do so without 
 yielding the helm entirely to the Prelates. There had come, 
 in fact, by this time, to be two parties in the Council — the 
 Spotswood, or thorough -going clerical party, headed by the 
 Chancellor-Archbishop ; and the Traquair, or lay-and-lawyer 
 party, led by Treasurer Traquair. Rumours of this dissension, 
 or exact information about it from the clerical party, might 
 reach Charles in London ; but what was he to do ? No Govern- 
 ment could be formed in Scotland more to his mind on the 
 whole ; and he could trust to himself and Laud for keeping it 
 sharply to its main duty. Meanwhile all he knew was that he had 
 made several enactments for Scotland with very little success 
 hitherto, and that he had a most perverse population to deal 
 with.
 
 252 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 How did Drummond comport himself in this turmoil? 
 Partly as might have been expected. He was, as we have seen, 
 by temperament and by philosophy, a Conservative, a friend of 
 Authority to the utmost ; he was also, as we have had reason 
 to think, personally inclined to moderate Episcopacy, easy and 
 gentle Theology, and something of rich ceremonial, in the 
 national Kirk, rather than to the stringent, bare, and popular 
 Presbyterianism ; and, on both these grounds, he would have 
 been well pleased, on the whole, whatever were his private 
 opinions of Laud and his theories, to see Charles's measures for 
 the Kirk quietly accepted. As he must, however, have had 
 grave doubts from the first whether they would be quietly 
 accepted, so, now that they had brought the country into tur- 
 moil, his advice, had he been consulted, would have been to 
 stop. Turmoil, in and for itself, was hateful to Drummond. 
 The very word was his deepest definition of a wrong con- 
 dition of things. Whatever brought about turmoil was, by that 
 very fact, to be condemned and discontinued ; the persons, who- 
 ever they were, that had at any time occasioned turmoil were 
 the persons, at that time and in that particular, to be most dis- 
 tinctly blamed. In such a state of feeling and reasoning one 
 may see, if one chooses, the cultured and studious recluse of 
 Hawthornden, indifferent to the complex and struggling world 
 around him, and perturbed only when that surrounding world 
 became too noisy for his comfort. We have seen enough of 
 Drummond by this time, I hope, to know that this would 
 hardly be a fair representation of him. We have seen in him 
 not only a certain high-mindedness and dignity, but also a cer- 
 tain strong-mindedness, a power of flashing out a disagreeable 
 opinion rather sternly when there seemed occasion ; and the 
 philosophy of rest and obedience which such a mind had 
 adopted for itself, and recommended to others in the midst of 
 so much of the contrary, must have been gathered from deeper 
 springs and principles than love of personal ease. 
 
 Fortunately there is at this point a paper of Drummond's
 
 Altat. 49-52. THE BALMERINO BUSINESS. 233 
 
 which will speak for itself. It lies among his printed prose 
 writings, unread, I should suppose, by twenty persons for the 
 last hundred-and-fifty years. If read there, it would not be 
 understood, so vilely were the writings edited; but it is so 
 creditable to Drummond, and records so courageous an inter- 
 ference of his in the affairs of his time, that one has a pleasure 
 in bringing out its purport in the right historical setting. 
 
 We have mentioned the opposition led by the Earl of Rothes 
 in the Scottish Parliament to the King's unpopular Kirk Acts. 
 The King had bitterly resented that opposition at the time ; 
 and Rothes and his adherents, among whom were about a 
 dozen other Scottish nobles, had, on their part, observed this, 
 and especially the fact that his Majesty had taken a note of 
 their names when they voted. They had, accordingly, while 
 his Majesty was yet in Scotland, had several meetings among 
 themselves to consider what was to be done. It had there 
 been proposed to draw up a " Supplication," to be signed by 
 them all and presented to his Majesty, explaining their reasons 
 for having opposed the new Kirk Acts, and the perfect con- 
 sistency of their conduct in that affair with their loyal respect 
 for his Majesty and zeal for his service. Such a statement had 
 been actually drafted for them by Mr. William Haig, an advo- 
 cate or solicitor, who had a good pen for such things, and was 
 a strong sympathizer with the views of the dissenting lords. 
 This document had been looked over privately by some of 
 them, more particularly by Rothes, the Earl of Cassilis, Lord 
 Loudoun, and Lord Balmerino ; and it is uncertain whether 
 they had agreed upon it, or were still modifying it to their 
 satisfaction,. when (either because of a positive intimation from 
 the King that no such document would be received, or from 
 certainty otherwise that this would be the result) the project 
 was abandoned. Copies of the document, however, had been 
 kept, and one, in particular, by Lord Balmerino. 
 
 Now, by ill luck, a certain Mr. John Dunmure, a writer in 
 Dundee, who was on friendly terms with Lord Balmerino, and
 
 234 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 had the run of his lordship's library at Barnton, near Edin- 
 burgh, came upon this copy, and, thinking the paper an inter- 
 esting one, made a transcript of it, meaning no harm. But 
 this Mr. John Dunmure had a friend, called Peter Hay of 
 Naughton, who, on being shown the paper, admired it so 
 much that he contrived to borrow it and make another copy. 
 He had a purpose in his admiration ; for no sooner was the 
 document in his possession than he carried it to Archbishop 
 Spotsvvood. The Archbishop, at once seeing what might be 
 made of it, posted it off, or posted off with it, to the King ; and, 
 after due consultation, it was resolved, in the month of May, 
 1634, to convert the accident into a crushing blow against the 
 Rothes oppositionists and all the gathering Presbyterianism 
 they represented. A commission was sent down, early in June, 
 from London to Spotswood and six others for the examination 
 of Lord Balmerino ; he was committed, by the King's own war- 
 rant, to close confinement in Edinburgh Castle : and the news 
 ran about of the discovery of a certain " Infamous Libel 
 against the King's Government," for which he, and perhaps 
 others, would have to stand their trial. Mr. Haig, who had 
 penned the paper, and against whom it would have been sure 
 to go hardest, prudently escaped abroad, only leaving an 
 acknowledgment that the draft was entirely and originally his ; 
 and the Earl of Rothes, after some examination about his con- 
 cern in the matter, was dismissed. The brunt was to be borne 
 by Lord Balmerino. 
 
 We need not relate the steps of the process. Enough that 
 from June, 1634, to July, 1635, or for more than thirteen 
 months, the business of the " Infamous Libel " was in all men's 
 mouths in Scotland, and poor Lord Balmerino's life hung in 
 the balance, the Bishops and their adherents pressing the case 
 against him with all their might, the more moderate members 
 of the Government doing all they dared to bring him off easily, 
 and the whole Presbyterian population of Scotland wildly ex- 
 cited in his behalf and praying for him in his strait. The
 
 Mtat 49-52. THE BALMERINO BUSINESS. 235 
 
 crisis of the business was in March, 1635, when, after many 
 preliminaries and postponements, during which there were 
 some hopes that the king would see fit to quash the proceed- 
 ings, Lord Balmerino, whose imprisonment had then lasted 
 nine months, was brought to trial before an assize of fifteen 
 noblemen and lairds. The indictment was founded on an Act 
 of James VI. making it capital to promote or possess Libels 
 against the King, his Council, or Nobility; and it charged Lord 
 Balmerino with having kept and concealed the particular libel 
 in question, with having allowed the original libeller to escape 
 when he might have apprehended him, and with having himself 
 been concerned in the libel. The trial lasted through the 
 whole of March 8, and into the following night. Of the fifteen 
 assizers or jurymen seven were for complete acquittal, and 
 seven for a verdict of guilty, though only on the first point of 
 the indictment ; so that the casting vote lay with the Earl of 
 Traquair, who had been elected chairman of the jury. It was 
 a disagreeable responsibility for Traquair; but, as he had 
 reasons at the moment for standing well with the Bishops, and 
 the sentence after all would depend on his Majesty, he gave 
 his vote against the prisoner. Virtually a condemned man, 
 therefore, Balmerino was removed back to prison, to await his 
 Majesty's pleasure. 
 
 The " Infamous Libel," for keeping a copy of which a Scot- 
 tish nobleman was thus in danger of the scaffold in the year 
 1635 may be read yet by any one who will take the trouble of 
 looking it up. Whoever does read it will be amazed (unless 
 his knowledge of those times has deadened all power of amaze- 
 ment at anything whatsoever occurring in them) that such a 
 document could ever have imperilled a man's life, or been 
 called a Libel at all. It is an extremely temperate, business- 
 like, and well-written paper, without a word of disrespect for 
 his Majesty, but, on the contrary, full of expressions of obedi- 
 ence to him. Mr. Haig, writing for Rothes and the other 
 Parliamentary Oppositionists to the Kirk Acts, had begun by
 
 236 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 saying that the Oppositionists were grieved at having incurred 
 his Majesty's displeasure, and hoped that, if he would read 
 their statement, he would see that they had been actuated by 
 " no want of affection" to his Majesty's service, "but a careful 
 endeavour to conserve" for him "the hearty affection of a 
 great many" of his good subjects, whose fears about innova- 
 tions in the Kirk must be well known to him. They then go 
 back on King James's reign, referring to innovations in that 
 reign, which some of themselves had then opposed, but point- 
 ing out that King James, " in the depth of his wisdom," had 
 refrained at a certain point, and " thought it fit absolutely to 
 prefer the peace of the Church to the appetite of Churchmen." 
 They beseech his Majesty to consider all this, and also to take 
 notice how moderate they had been in their opposition to the 
 Acts brought forward by the Lords of the Articles. Although 
 there were among those Acts not a few to which they objected, 
 or about which they were dubious, although there were various 
 heavy grievances of a secular kind under which the country 
 was labouring, — increased taxation, bad forms of taxation, 
 waste of public money, &c, — they had forborne any discussion 
 of these, in consideration of his Majesty's convenience, and 
 had confined themselves to the new Kirk Acts. These were 
 the matters of immediate importance, in which there was most 
 danger of alienation between his Majesty and the Scottish 
 people. They conclude, therefore, by imploring his Majesty to 
 prevent this danger by not introducing into the doctrine and 
 discipline of his mother Church anything " not compatible with 
 the honour thereof" and the conscience of his good sub- 
 jects. This, positively this, was the " Infamous Libel." It 
 
 was the intended Humble Petition to his Majesty of about a 
 dozen Scottish peers, and a larger number of lairds and bur- 
 gesses, Commissioners to Parliament. It had not been pre- 
 sented ; and the crime was in having kept a copy of it in 
 one's library. 
 
 Drummond, we are glad to say, was properly roused by the
 
 .litat. 49-52. DRUMMOND'S BOLD LETTER. 237 
 
 monstrous iniquity and absurdity of the whole proceeding. 
 The paper of his which refers to it is entitled An Apologctical 
 Letter, and is dated March 2, 1635, or six days before the trial 
 of Lord Balmerino. It is addressed to some noble lord whose 
 name is not given, but who is ascertained, from a scroll copy 
 among the Hawthornden MSS., to have been his old friend 
 Robert Kerr, now Earl of Ancram.'"' — " My Lord," he begins, 
 " in a time when men for reading papers concerning State are 
 " challenged, it must be a great hazard to write them, and a 
 " greater to send them from home, and the most to send them 
 " to one so near the helm as your lordship, who the next day 
 " perhaps may put in the Prince's hands what is sent him." 
 He professes, however, perfect confidence in his correspondent, 
 and says that, notwithstanding the danger, he adventures the 
 sheet of paper to him, and beseeches him to be " both judge 
 and patron" of it. It is clear, in fact, that Drummond was 
 willing to run the risk of its being shown to the King, if his 
 correspondent thought fit, and hoped, at all events, that the 
 substance would somehow be conveyed to his Majesty. There 
 was real courage in this, inasmuch as the paper is a ten times 
 sharper and more outspoken remonstrance with his Majesty 
 than the " Infamous Libel " which is the subject of it. 
 
 It is not, in the main, a defence of the Libel, but only a 
 protest against the folly of having made it the occasion of a 
 . State-trial. " What a noise hath been raised in this country," 
 says Drummond, "by prosecuting a piece of writing supposed 
 "to be derogatory to the honour of the King's Majesty ! No 
 " times have been without such men [as the supposed libellers]. 
 " Wise men keep their thoughts locked up in the cabinet of 
 " their breasts, and suffer the faults of times patiently : fools 
 " rail, cry out, but amend nothing." Here, with no great 
 politeness, Drummond at once disavows sympathy with Rothes. 
 
 * Arch. Scot., IV. 67; where Mr. Laing gives the title of the preserved 
 scroll copy thus: — "A Letter Apologeticall, concerning the divulging of a 
 Paper to his Majestie, 2nd March, 1635 : addressed to R., E. of A." — i.e. to 
 Robert, Earl of Ancram.
 
 2? 8 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Balmerino & Co., the troublesome Presbyterian Radicals that 
 they were: but only in order to be more effective in his plead- 
 ing for poor Balmerino. " Whatever advice," he proceeds, 
 " hath been given for the putting of Libellers to the extremity 
 " of Law, I would say, with all humble respect to grave states- 
 " men, that, in a matter of calumny and reproach with subjects, 
 " a Prince can do nothing more fitting his own fame and 
 " reputation than to slight and contemn them, as belonging 
 " nothing to him, and that 'twere better to neglect than to be 
 " too curious in searching out the authors." He introduces 
 here historical instances of the wise neglect of libels, and even 
 scurrilous pasquils, by ancient Kings and Emperors. " If 
 " these papers," he resumes, " were, for the King's honour, not 
 " to be seen and read, or if they did derogate from the fame of 
 " the nobles, why were they not suppressed and hidden ? But 
 " is this the way to suppress and hide them — to imprison, ar- 
 " raign, banish, and execute the persons near whom they are 
 " found? Or is it not rather to turn them in[to] a piece of the 
 " story of the time to make such a noise about them, and, by 
 " seeking to avoid the smoke, to fall into the fire ?" There then 
 follow more historical anecdotes — how Queen Elizabeth did 
 herself infinite harm with her subjects by " cutting off the 
 hands of Stubbes and Page" for a pamphlet; how "that 
 poor gentleman Collingburn " suffered from the tyranny of 
 Richard III. for a satirical rhyme; &c. In these allusions 
 one discerns not only a constitutional disgust at the barbarity that 
 had permitted such punishments, but also something of an 
 author's proper love of the right of free speech ; for, after a 
 repetition of the commonplace that the prosecution of writings 
 is the very way to call attention to them, and give them 
 influence above their worth, he bursts out, " No prince, how 
 " great soever, can abolish pens ; nor will the memorials of 
 " ages be extinguished by present power." Then he ventures 
 on more precise and dangerous ground. " Sometimes," he 
 says, "it is great wisdom in a Prince not to reject and disdain
 
 sEtat. 49-52. DRUMMOND'S BOLD LETTER. 239 
 
 "them who tell him his duty, and open to him bis mis- 
 " demeanours to the Commonwealth, and the surmises and 
 " umbrages of his people and Council, for the amending of 
 " disorders and bettering the form of his government." And 
 here, by way of examples of what it might be fit that " a man 
 should tell King Charles," he enumerates, with a perfectly 
 cutting emphasis, some of those secular grievances of the 
 Scottish people which the Lords implicated in the Libel had 
 been silent about in Parliament, but had adverted to generally 
 in the Libel itself. What if a man were to tell King Charles 
 " that there is none in all his kingdom here can reckon himself 
 " lord of his own goods amongst so many taxes and taillages, 
 " so much pilling and polling ? " What if he were to tell King 
 Charles that the Property Tax then in force would never do, 
 and " what a strange thing it is to swear a man for the true 
 " value of his own substance ? " What if he were to remind 
 King Charles of the Biblical condemnations of usury, and 
 suggest to him, if usury is "a sin in the persons of subjects," it 
 must be " a greater sin in the person of a Prince ? " Nay, 
 "about this subject [Lord Balmerino] who is the subject of 
 " this letter," what if the King were to be told that people were 
 quoting the proverb, " Kings seeking treason shall find land, and 
 " seeking land shall find treason," and so actually hinting that 
 the King had an eye to Balmerino's estates in the capital 
 prosecution ? These might be very unpleasant truths for the 
 King to hear; but were they not truths which an honest 
 subject might honourably convey to him? Especially it would 
 be a right thing to awaken the King thoroughly to the danger 
 of revolt and insurrection arising from the wretched financial 
 and administrative system subsisting in his name. " It hath 
 " often been found that nothing hath sooner armed a people 
 " than poverty ; and poverty hath never so often been brought 
 " upon a nation by the unfruitfulness of the earth, by disasters 
 " of seas, and other human accidents, as by the avarice of the 
 " officers and favourites of the Prince, who are brought foolishly
 
 240 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 " to believe that by tearing off the skins of the flock they shall 
 " turn the shepherd rich." For instruction in such themes, 
 and in the duties of supreme magistracy generally, " it were 
 " not ill for a Prince to read Jan Mariana and George 
 Buchanan's piece De jure Regni apud Scotos, for his own 
 private and the public good." After this strain, certainly 
 bolder and more definite than anything in the Libel itself, 
 Drummond returns to the Libel. There are various kinds of 
 Libels, he says, some containing truths, some of a mixed 
 character, and some sheer libels. In no case ought they to be 
 met by public prosecution or the exertion of mere power, 
 though in some cases, where they tended to sedition, they 
 might be answered by reason and overthrown ; and, farther, 
 "if they be presented by way of supplications for redressing of 
 errors in the State, it is a question whether they be libels or 
 not." In illustration of this last proposition, so relevant to 
 Lord Balmerino's case, he again adduces historical instances ; 
 after which there is a passage which seems to be levelled 
 distinctly at the Scottish Bishops : " Those who set their Prince 
 " to work to follow and pursue such an idle piece of paper, if 
 " they had unfair judges and powerful enemies near the Court, 
 " may themselves be brought within compass of the same 
 " punishment which they would have laid upon others, as 
 " Perillus was brought to take an assay of his own Brazen 
 " Bull ; for no better are they which relate, divulge, and are 
 " occasioners to have infamous Libels published, than they 
 " which write them. And these men have done what in them 
 " lay to make that paper public, and have recorded in the 
 " annals of this kingdom to all ages what should have been 
 " smothered in the darkest pits of oblivion. They have often 
 " assembled the King's Majesty's subjects, to the great charges 
 " and vain attendance of many noblemen and barons, to see 
 " their passions put forward. They have busied the Prince 
 " to condemn others by power (a minister of their attempts) 
 " and not to purge himself to posterity ; for such a paper
 
 sEtat. 49-52. STIRLING'S UNPOPULARITY. 241 
 
 " should have been answered by a pen, not by an axe. There 
 " is no Prince living, no nor dead, but subjects have and do 
 " both -write and speak of after their fancies." In conclusion 
 there is this fine sentence, in which the poet breaks out, — 
 "A Prince should be such towards his subjects as he would 
 " have God Eternal towards him, who, full of mercy, spareth 
 " peopled cities, and darteth his thunders amongst the vast and 
 " wild mountains." — Bravo ! Drummond. 
 
 This letter was penned six days before Balmerino's trial ; 
 and for four months afterwards he remained a prisoner in Edin- 
 burgh Castle, uncertain of his fate. In the circumstances, and 
 with all Scotland madly on the watch, it was impossible to 
 carry out the sentence ; and Traquair himself, going to London 
 on purpose, did his best to persuade the King that the release 
 of Balmerino would be a right and popular act. The Earl of 
 Stirling seconded him ; and Laud, on technical grounds, was of 
 the same mind. He had read the whole process, and he told 
 the King that, according to all practice of law in England, it 
 would be shocking to put a man to death who had been con- 
 victed only by a casting vote in a jury of fifteen, and even then 
 on the weakest part of the indictment. Traquair and Stirling, 
 accordingly, came to Scotland with the necessary warrant of 
 mercy; and on the 16th of July, 1635, Balmerino left Edin- 
 burgh Castle, to reside on his estates in Fifeshire on good 
 behaviour. 
 
 The Earl of Stirling had much need at this time of any re- 
 putation he could win by connexion with a popular act. He 
 had become a very unpopular man. Any old admiration for 
 him, or pride in him, among certain classes, on account of his 
 plentiful, clear and stately, but nerveless, boneless, and artificial, 
 English Poetry, had sunk in the dark thoughts about him as 
 one of the King's ministers, one of the abettors of the King's 
 tyrannical policy at head-quarters, and the official medium 
 through whom the King's decrees and warrants reached Edin- 
 
 Q
 
 2 42 DRUM MO ND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 burgh. The special means by which he had risen to wealth, 
 and was still acquiring wealth, added to his discredit. The 
 Nova Scotia scheme, with his bargain for the cession of other 
 people's rights in Nova Scotia as well as his own, was still a 
 sore subject; but, as he had a reserve of rights in Canada, and 
 had even started afresh on a new grant of lands, including what 
 is now Long Island and the site of New York, there may have 
 been hopes of his redeeming past failures in that vague Ameri- 
 can concern. A harder charge against him with his Presby- 
 terian compatriots was his monopoly in King James's Psalms, 
 his power of stopping Psalmody in Scotland unless people 
 would buy his precious edition of the royal translation printed 
 by Turner of Oxford. There were, however, turners of a still 
 more detestable kind, with which his name was associated. In 
 consequence, probably, of his original charter of Viceroyalty in 
 Nova Scotia, which gave him the right of coining money, he 
 had obtained license to issue, for circulation in Scotland, a 
 certain quantity of copper coin, to pass at such a rate over the 
 intrinsic value of the metal as to yield him a handsome profit ; 
 and these wretched black farthings of the Earl of Stirling, 
 called also turners for some reason (antiquarians may know, 
 but it would have been clever if it had been to identify them 
 with the Psalm-books), were a pest and a by-word in Scotland 
 for several years, and must have cost the Earl more in jests 
 and curses than they can have been worth to him in money. 
 Not a huckster would take one of Stirling's turners if he could 
 avoid it, and they fell lower and lower in value. On the Earl's 
 fine new mansion in Stirling, completed about this time, he had 
 placed his armorial bearings, with the motto Per mare, per 
 terras ; and wicked popular wit had converted the legend into 
 Per metre, per turners. Such may be the fate of a poet who 
 leaves poetry for politics, and grasps at wealth by means of 
 patents. 
 
 Drummond, who had expressed himself so strongly against 
 all forms of private fortune-making at the public expense, can-
 
 JEtat 49-52. STIRLING'S UNPOPULARITY. 243 
 
 not have approved of the courses into which his friend Stirling 
 had gradually gone. Their friendship, however, continued un- 
 broken, if with less frequent interchanges of letters than in the 
 old days when they were Alexis and Damon to each other. Of 
 extant letters from Stirling to Drummond about this time (in- 
 deed for a good while before and after) I find only one. There 
 is nothing in it of consequence, and the allusions to Drum- 
 mond's letter which evoked it are obscure; but, for the mere 
 flavour, it may be quoted : — 
 
 " My Noble Friend, 
 
 " I was very glad to see your letter, but displeased 
 with that part thereof whereby you excuse the discontinuance 
 of writing to me ; for no distance of degree nor place should 
 have the power to interrupt the course of so harmonious 
 an unitedness as hath so long continued between us. As for 
 the Fairy Queen, of whom you wrote to me, her apparitions of 
 late have bewitched so many that I find sundry ready to dance 
 with the Fairies; but I shall use my best means (for the Nymph's 
 sake that dwelleth upon the Lake) to conjure them, and shall 
 ever approve myself 
 
 " Your very loving Friend to serve you, 
 
 " Sterline. 
 " Newmarket, 22nd October, 1636."* 
 
 In this same year, 1636, Stirling had brought out a new 
 Edition of King James's Psalms, not in duodecimo as the 
 Edition of 1631 had been, but in folio, and not printed at 
 Oxford, like the former Edition, but in London. The Psalmes 
 of King David: Translated by King James, was still the title; 
 but, "London, Printed by Thomas Harper, 1636," was the 
 distinguishing imprint. In this Edition, besides the folio form, 
 there are the peculiarities of black letter, long lines, and the 
 accompaniment of musical notes. It also appears, on a com- 
 parison of the wording of the Psalms as they stand in it with 
 
 * Dmmmond's Works, p. 151.
 
 244 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 the wording of the former Edition, that very considerable 
 changes had been made, though nothing is said to that effect 
 in note or preface. The inference is, that Stirling, by advice, 
 had again revised the Version, with a view to remove, if pos- 
 sible, the objections that had been made to it, by Scottish or 
 other critics, in its first published form. * 
 
 As some demure and innocent-looking fish (I forget its name) 
 is said in the old stories to precede the Shark, so the Earl of 
 Stirling's fine new folio Edition of his Patent Psalms, in black 
 letter, and with musical notes, might have been taken as a 
 pretty sure indication of the approach of the long-expected 
 Scottish Service-Book. Nobody, in fact, could tell why it had 
 been so long in coming. It had been spoken of as already 
 existing, and its universal use had been enjoined, in May, 1635, 
 when the new Book of Ecclesiastical Canons appeared; and 
 yet months and months had passed without any sign of it. 
 The truth is, Laud and the Scottish Bishops had been exces- 
 sively careful over it ; proof-sheets had gone and come between 
 Edinburgh and Lambeth; there had been cancellings and 
 improvements and resettings; it should not go forth till Laud 
 was perfectly satisfied ! 
 
 This consummation, it appeared, had been at length attained 
 in October, 1636. On the 18th of that month there was a 
 royal missive to the Scottish Privy Council from the Court at 
 Newmarket (exactly four days before the preceding note from 
 Stirling to Drummond from the same place) reciting his Ma- 
 jesty's desires in the matter of the new Service-Book, announcing 
 it as now ready, and ordering proclamation to be made that it 
 should immediately come into use, under strict penalties, in 
 all the Scottish churches. Such proclamation was duly made 
 by the Privy Council on the 20th of December; but still not a 
 copy of the Service-Book was to be procured. Some new cause 
 of delay had occurred at head-quarters, or in the Edinburgh 
 
 * Mr. David Laing's Account of Metrical Versions of the Psalms : Ap- 
 pendix to Baillie's Letters, III. 531.
 
 JEtat. 49-52. THE NEW SCOTTISH SERVICE-BOOK. 245 
 
 printing-office, and there were the strangest rumours. At 
 length, in May, 1637, the anxiety was so far relieved that copies 
 could be had freely. The Book of Common Prayer, and Ad- 
 ministration of the Sacraments: And other Parts of Divine 
 Service for the Use of the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh : 
 Printed by Robert Young, &c., 1637, such was the title of a 
 volume in folio — printed in black and red, the black letters 
 in old gothic type, and with various devices of pictorial 
 capitals and the like, which made it altogether a marvel of 
 typographic art — bales of which, in various bindings, were lying 
 in Edinburgh in that month, ready for distribution into all parts 
 of Scotland. With most copies there was bound up, as an 
 integral part of the work, or necessary to its completeness, a 
 copy of the Earl of Stirling's last or London Edition of the 
 Patent Royal Psalms ; and to all the copies there was prefixed 
 the Royal Proclamation commanding universal conformity 
 to the book throughout Scotland under " charge of horning," 
 i.e. denunciation by blast of trumpet — the only instance, 
 thinks Mr. Hill Burton, in the history of Christianity, in 
 which a book of devotion appeared with a writ of legal 
 threat in its forefront. No need, therefore, for any longer 
 delay in the introduction of the new Service, Psalmody and 
 all, into the entire Kirk, from the Tweed to the Orkneys. 
 To prevent mistakes, however, the Bishops, in conformity 
 with the original instructions of the Royal Missive, issued 
 letters, commanding the parish-ministers individually through- 
 out their dioceses to provide themselves at once with two 
 copies each, one for the minister himself and the other 
 for his reader or assistant, at the expense of their parishes. 
 " The price of the Book, I think," the Bishop of Edinburgh 
 had already written to his clergy, April 28, " shall be £4, 16s. ; 
 "that is £9, 12s. the two. The matter is of no great 
 " moment, and the employment very necessar and profit- 
 " able, as experience shall prove. I hope, therefore, ye 
 " will not fail every one to bring in your moneys, and
 
 246 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " receive your books, for it is appointed that the printer be 
 " paid, and the books taken off his hand, betwix this and the 
 " 1 st of June." 
 
 O David Lindsay, Bishop of Edinburgh ! O David Lindsay, 
 Bishop of Edinburgh ! Little ken ye what experience shall 
 prove, or how speedily, and in what a three-legged form !
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 DELITIM POETARUM SCOTORUM : THE JENNY GEDDES RIOT AND 
 ITS CONSEQUENCES: THE SCOTTISH COVENANT: GRIEFS AND 
 DISGRACE OF THE EARL OF STIRLING: THE MARQUIS OF 
 HAMILTON'S MISSION : DRUMMOND'S THOUGHTS ABOUT PUBLIC 
 AFFAIRS : HIS IRENE AND ITS PECULIAR POLITICAL PHILOSO- 
 PHY : THE GLASGOW ASSEMBLY AND ABOLITION OF EPISCOPACY 
 IN SCOTLAND: HAWTHORNDEN HOUSE REBUILT. 
 
 1637— 1638. 
 
 " TDRODEVNT tandem Poetce Scoti, tuts, vir amplissime, 
 auspiciis et impensis (There go forth at length the Scottish 
 Poets, most generous Sir, under your auspices, and at your ex- 
 pense,") is the opening of a Latin letter that had been addressed 
 by the King's physician, Arthur Johnston, to "that noble 
 Maecenas of the Muses, Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet, Director of 
 the Chancery, and member of the King's Council in Scotland." 
 The letter had been intended to appear, and it did actually ap- 
 pear, at the beginning of that collection of the Poems of Scottish 
 Latinists which Scot of Scotstarvet had so long been anxious to 
 bring out for the credit of his country, and about which he had 
 been in correspondence with the printer Blaeu, of Amsterdam. 
 By Sir John's care in selecting the best out of the mass of 
 matter (in part already printed, but much only in manuscript) 
 that came within his design, by his assiduity in furnishing Blaeu 
 with the copies, and seeing after the correction of the proofs, 
 and by his readiness in paying Blaeu the " hundred double
 
 248 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 pieces" which were demanded for the transaction, all difficulties 
 had been overcome; and early in 1637 there arrived in Scot- 
 land, in some ship from Amsterdam, the long-expected " Delitia 
 Poetarum Scotorum Jiujus <zvi Illustrium" with " Amsterdami, 
 apud Johanncm Blaeu, MDCXXXVII." as the imprint at 
 the foot of the title-page. 
 
 It was a proud day for more people in Scotland than Scots- 
 tarvet when that cargo came to Leith ; and even yet there is 
 some interest in looking at any stray copy that has survived 
 from the cargo, shelved away in some obscure corner of a Scot- 
 tish library, after having been fingered more or less through 
 eight generations that are dead and gone. The book is in two 
 small dumpy volumes, of close and neat type, the first volume 
 containing 699 pages, and the second 575. There is first an 
 Imprimatur by Jo. Sanctandrece. Archiepiscopus (Spotswood, 
 Archbishop of St Andrews), in which he testifies that he has 
 reviewed the book, found nothing in it contrary to Christian 
 doctrine or sound morals, and therefore recommends it heartily. 
 Next follows that letter of Arthur Johnston to Scot of Scots- 
 tarvet the first words of which we have quoted. Johnston, as 
 himself by general acknowledgment at the head of the Scottish 
 Latinists of the time, and as moreover a man of official note, 
 had been thought a fit person to write such an introduction ; 
 and he does the duty very modestly and prettily. After some 
 sentences about the love of literature, and the patronage of it 
 among the ancients, he turns to his immediate subject. "This 
 " remote corner of the earth, lying almost under the world's very 
 " hinge," he says, addressing Scotstarvet, " was once made illus- 
 " trious by Buchanan, facile princeps of the poets of his age. 
 " That sun extinct, you redecorate it marvellously with new stars, 
 " among which you shine yourself. Of these not a few are of 
 " the first magnitude, and emulate in their splendour those 
 " greater luminaries which shone in the age of Augustus. 
 " There offered itself to you as it were an innumerable army of 
 " Poets, all of whom you keep in memory. But a choice has
 
 ALtat. 52-53. " DEL1TIM POETARUM SCOTORUM." 
 
 249 
 
 " been exercised, in which I admire no less the critical tact of 
 " your judgment than the elegance and brilliance of those whom 
 " you have selected. Only one thing deserves censure, and that 
 " is your placing your friend Johnston among those heroes of 
 " the Grampians." To this Latin letter of Johnston's there are 
 appended nine little pieces of elegiac verse, with the name of 
 one of the Muses heading each, all praising Scot (sometimes by 
 the name of Tarvatius) and his patriotic work. Next follow 
 similar commendatory verses by two Dutch scholars, Isaac 
 Gruter and Caspar Barloeus, both of whom were friends and 
 correspondents of Scotstarvet. Then comes the body of the 
 work, in the form of the collected or selected Latin Poems, in 
 various kinds of verse, but chiefly hexameters and elegiacs, of 
 thirty-seven recently dead or still living Scottish scholars, 
 arranged alphabetically. 
 
 Unread now, alas ! and utterly uncared-for, except perchance 
 by some rare book-worm or zealot in Latinity here and there, 
 those elaborately conserved productions, the growth of hours 
 and months of the linguistic skill, and even, in some cases, the 
 real thought and heart-throbbing, of men once alive as we are, but 
 whose dust lies long-scattered and untraceable now in Scottish 
 and foreign earth. All the more reason that the mere names of 
 the glorious thirty-seven should not be allowed to perish. Do 
 they not represent, in one department at least, what Scotland 
 in 1637 asked the world to look upon as her latest literary 
 
 effulgence ? If a name seems out of its alphabetic place in 
 
 the following list, it is because the Latin form of it is dropped 
 and the plain Scottish substituted. I annex dates as far as I 
 can : — 
 
 Patrick Adamson, 1543-1591. 
 Henry Anderson, 161 7. 
 Robert Aytoun, 1570-163S. 
 John Barclay, 1582-1621. 
 William Barclay, 1541-1605. 
 Mark Alexander Boyd, 1562-1601. 
 Robert Boyd, of Trochrig, 1578- 
 1627. 
 
 Thomas Craig, 15 38- 1608. 
 
 James Crichton ("the Admirable"), 
 
 1560-1582. 
 George Crichton, 1603. 
 Henry Danskin, 1617. 
 Thomas Dempster, 1580-1625. 
 David Echlin. 
 Peter Goldman, 161 7.
 
 25° 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 James Hakerstone. 
 David Hume, i56o?-i63o? 
 Arthur Johnston, 1587-1641. 
 John Johnston, 1550-1612. 
 David Kinloch, 1617. 
 James Macculloch, 1616. 
 Andrew Melville, 1542- 1622. 
 John Maitland, Lord Thirlestane, 
 
 1537-1595- 
 Thomas Maitland, 1570. 
 Thomas Murray, 1603. 
 Adam King, 1603. 
 Thomas Reid. 
 
 John Rose, 1637. 
 
 Hercules Rollock, 1600. 
 
 Alexander Ross, 1 5 75 -1 639. 
 
 Andrew Ramsay, 1637. 
 
 John Scot, 1603. 
 
 John Scot, of Scotstarvet, 1586- 
 
 1670. 
 Thomas Seghet, 1603. 
 George Strachan. 
 George Thomson, 1603. 
 Florence Wilson, 1500- 1546. 
 David Wedderburn, 15 70- 1645.* 
 
 Prodeunt tandem, in this same famous year 1637, however, not 
 only the Delitice Poetarum Scotorum, but also the new Scottish 
 Service-Books. While Archbishop Spotswood was licensing 
 the Dditice he must have been far less anxious about the re- 
 ception of that book among the few scores of Scotsmen into 
 whose hands it was likely to come than about the reception of 
 the Service-Book by the Scottish Clergy and People. 
 
 The bales of copies of the new Scottish Service-Book had 
 lain in Young's printing-office or elsewhere in Edinburgh since 
 April 1637, not much diminished by even the commanded pur- 
 chases of the clergy ; but a sufficient number of copies had 
 gone out for inspection and criticism. The criticism had at once 
 become sheer execration. Had the book been immaculate 
 in its kind, had it been the work of a joint-committee of 
 Cherubim and Seraphim, it would not have been accepted 
 in Scotland. But, on the first look, it was pronounced to be 
 
 * In the MS. volume otEpistola Doctorum Virorum to Scot of Scotstarvet, 
 referred to in a previous note (p. 227) as now in the Advocates' Library, 
 Edinburgh, there is what I take to be the original, in Arthur Johnston's 
 own hand, of the Introductory Letter to the Delituc Poetarum Scotorum. 
 It is one of the neatest, prettiest, pieces of the handwriting of that time I 
 have ever seen. — Johnston was quite right in saying that Scotstarvet had 
 given but a selection of the Poems of the Scottish Latinists since Buchanan. 
 Besides the favoured thirty-seven (among whom Johnston himself figures in 
 chief) there had been a shoal of others. The thirty-seven were, doubtless, 
 the best in Scotstarvet's judgment. Some of these I have had to leave 
 undated : others I have dated by some year when they were certainly 
 alive and flourishing. Those whom I have dated as alive in 1617 were 
 contributors to the Muses' Welcome to King James in that year.
 
 jEtat. 52-53. THE JENNY GEDDES RIOT. 251 
 
 Laud's all over, full of " Popish errors and ceremonies, and 
 the seeds of manifold and gross superstitions and idolatries," 
 altogether " little better than the mass," and much worse than 
 the Liturgy of the Church of England. Rather than accept such 
 
 a Book, Scotland would be hanged, drawn, and quartered ! 
 
 The Privy Council, all save the Bishops, were in a dreadful 
 difficulty; but what could they do but persist? On the 13th 
 of July another peremptory order was issued that the clergy 
 should obtain their copies of the Book, under grievous penal- 
 ties, within fifteen days ; and Sunday the 23rd of that month 
 was appointed as the day on which, by way of example to the 
 whole country, the new Service should be solemnly used for the 
 first time in all the churches of Edinburgh and the parts ad- 
 jacent. 
 
 That Sunday came. The early morning service in the 
 various churches passed quietly, the prayers and other forms of 
 worship being according to the ordinary Directory for such 
 purposes till then in use among the Scots. Ten o'clock was to 
 be the hour for the great innovation ; at all events, that was to 
 be the hour in the High Kirk of St. Giles, the Cathedral 
 Church of Edinburgh. By that hour the church was crowded 
 with a large congregation, most of the Council and other 
 officials being present, with the Chancellor-Archbishop him- 
 self, and the Bishops of Galloway and Brechin, besides 
 the Bishop of Edinburgh and his Dean, Dr. James Hannay, 
 who were to perform the service. The Bishop was in 
 the pulpit with the service-book, and the Dean was in the 
 reading-desk with the service-book, and the Bishop had opened 
 the book and begun to read, and the Dean had opened the 
 book and begun to read, when a moaning ran through the 
 church, which swelled into cries of " AVoe, woe ! " " Sorrow, 
 sorrow ! " and at length into a vast hubbub and uproar, the 
 women especially conspicuous, and rising from their seats, and 
 beginning to toss their arms to help their voices. Suddenly, 
 from one woman wilder than the rest {Jenny G aides she will
 
 252 
 
 DRUM MO XD OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 be called to the end of time, though some say that was not her 
 real name) there whirled into the air, for lack of any other 
 missile, her three-legged stool, aimed at the pulpit. On this 
 signal other stools flew in the same direction, till, stronger arms 
 beginning to aid, it seemed as if they would tear up the pews 
 and benches. Through the uproar the Bishop, the other 
 Bishops, the Archbishop, and high officials had been gesticulat- 
 ing in vain, and trying to be heard ; and many had run out of the 
 church in fright. If there were not to be absolute fighting and 
 murder within the sacred walls, there was no help for it but to 
 stop the attempted reading, and huddle through the rest of the 
 service anyhow. This was what was done ; but the tumult 
 meanwhile had communicated itself to the streets, and a mob 
 was waiting outside. When the Bishop of Edinburgh came 
 out he was pursued with hootings, and had to take refuge in 
 the nearest stair leading to a house ; and, had not the Dean, 
 who was more unpopular than the Bishop, prudently remained 
 in the church, it would have fared worse with him. All that 
 afternoon the riot continued ; and on a second appearance of 
 the Bishop in the High Street, he was again chased with such 
 fury that, had not the Earl of Roxburgh, who chanced to pass 
 in his coach, driven through the crowd to his rescue, and 
 pulled him in, his life would have been in peril. As it was, the 
 Earl and Bishop barely escaped in the shower of stones that 
 rattled against the coach at that part of the High Street where 
 they were then building the Tron Church and stones were 
 
 conveniently at hand. In short, on that day Edinburgh 
 
 was in revolt ; and, within the next week or ten days, the 
 rumour of this revolt having spread, and similar outbreaks 
 having attended the very few attempts that had been made 
 to read the sendee elsewhere, all Scotland was in revolution. 
 
 The Edinburgh Riot of the 23rd of July, and the evident 
 determination of the Court to persist in defiance of that 
 warning, having been taken as a sufficient signal by all the 
 scattered representatives of the Anti- Episcopal sentiment,
 
 Mtat. 52-53. PRE SB YTERIA N RISING. 253 
 
 whether in its stronger or in its weaker forms, there was a first 
 flocking of such into Edinburgh in the month of September, 
 with the result of separate "supplicates" against the Service-Book 
 and other innovations from 20 Nobles, a larger number of 
 Lairds, 100 Ministers, 14 Burghs, and 168 Parishes, and of one 
 general Supplicate combining the separate four for His Majesty's 
 own perusal. Then, this first general gathering having dis- 
 persed, only leaving a central nucleus of the most energetic 
 and long-headed men on the watch, there was a pause till the 
 answer to the Supplicate should come from Court. The 
 answer having come in the form of injunctions to the Privy 
 Council to receive no more such supplicates and to remove its 
 own meetings from Edinburgh, and also in the form of certain 
 high-handed proclamations to be made at the Cross, there was 
 a second gathering in Edinburgh, in October, larger than the 
 first, with the result of a new document of more fervid ex- 
 pression and deeper anti-Episcopal import. Then, in Novem- 
 ber, the Privy Council having in vain tried to remove itself out 
 of the pressure by going to Linlithgow and Stirling, there was 
 a repetition of the process, still with an increase of adherents 
 to the popular cause and an advance of the claims made. 
 Then also the machinery of The Tables, as they were called 
 (i.e., of the deliberative and executive committees of the leaders 
 stationed in Edinburgh), assumed regular form — a Table of the 
 Nobles, a Table of the Lairds, a Table of the Burghs, and a 
 Table of the Clergy ; with a supreme Table of delegates from 
 all the four, to consult and act for all in common. And so 
 through the winter the commotion continued, the infatuation in 
 London becoming more fatuous, and the Scottish Privy Council 
 drifting about in the popular tide, utterly powerless in com- 
 parison with the Provisional or Revolutionary government of 
 the Tables. At last, in February 163S, the popular association 
 now counting in its ranks over thirty nobles, lairds without 
 number, all the chief towns except Aberdeen, and nearly the 
 whole body of the parish-clergy, there was a change in the
 
 254 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 style of demonstration. A fresh royal proclamation having 
 come from London, denouncing pains of treason, &c, and the 
 Privy Council having duly made the proclamation at the 
 market-cross of Stirling, a Protest was then and there read 
 against the same with every possible ceremony. The process was 
 repeated with equal formality at the Cross of Edinburgh. This, 
 however, was but the preliminary to a more momentous 
 manifesto. Word having again gone out for a general gather- 
 ing of all the representative spirits in Edinburgh, and a vaster 
 crowd than ever having come at the summons, and the Tables 
 having met and deliberated, it was resolved to trust no more to 
 this method of mere periodical meeting and dispersing, suppli- 
 cating and protesting, but to declare the will of the Scottish 
 nation in a manner which neither Charles himself nor England 
 and the rest of the world could possibly misunderstand. It 
 was resolved to renew that national league and covenant 
 in matters of religion which had in former times in the history of 
 the nation been found a useful blazon of union and confederacy. 
 Accordingly, a document having been prepared, substantially 
 repeating documents of similar purpose framed in the days of 
 genuine Scottish Presbyterianism, all the leaders present, 
 nobles, lairds, burgesses, and ministers, put their names to it, 
 pledging themselves to adhere to each other to the death in 
 resisting the late innovations, and " promising and swearing to 
 each other, in the name of the Lord their God, that they would 
 continue in the obedience and discipline of the Kirk, and 
 defend the same, according to their vocation and power, all 
 the days of their lives, under the pains contained in the Law, 
 and danger both of body and soul in the day of God's fearful 
 judgment." The public signing of the Covenant began in 
 Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh on the ist of March, 1638; 
 and copies, with the leading signatures attached, were at once 
 despatched to all parts of the country, that people everywhere 
 might sign, or at least, standing up in open congregation, men 
 and women together, swear to the Covenant.
 
 j&tat. 52-53. THE SCOTTISH COVENANT. 255 
 
 Our ignorance is enormous in these days about past British 
 History generally ; but respecting few incidents is the ignorance 
 more dense than about the Scottish Covenant. When people 
 nowadays, even in Scotland, speak of the Covenant and 
 the Covenanters, they usually think of those much later times, 
 in the reigns of Charles II. and James II., when there were the 
 persecutions of the Presbyterians that refused to acquiesce in 
 the then restored Episcopacy, and the chasings and murderings 
 on the moors of the poor men and women of an exasperated 
 land. These too were times of the Covenant, but of the 
 remnant and closing agonies of the Covenant, or rather of a 
 subsequent Covenant which sprang out of this one ; and the 
 true time of the original Scottish Covenant was the year 1638, 
 with the years immediately following: Partly dependent on 
 this misconception as to the time of the original Covenant is a 
 misconception as to the nature and amount of the force engaged 
 in it. When the Covenanters are talked of, they are imagined 
 by many as a herd of poor men, blue-bonneted ploughmen and 
 shepherds, led by a few crack-brained enthusiasts of preachers, 
 Kettledrummles and Mucklewraths. Such were not the 
 original Scottish Covenanters. They were simply the general 
 body of the Scottish people, of all ranks and in all districts. 
 They comprised the majority of the whole peerage, the majority 
 of the landed proprietors next in rank to the peerage, nearly all 
 the parish-clergy, the magistrates and councils of nearly every 
 one of the Scottish burghs, and, surrounding these and cheering 
 them on, the entire mass of the Scottish commonalty, with local 
 exceptions which could be easily specified. At the head of the 
 clergy stood forth Alexander Henderson, of Leuchars in Fife- 
 shire, the ablest man among them all, with such seconds as 
 Andrew Ramsay and Henry Rollock of Edinburgh, David 
 Dickson of Irvine, Samuel Rutherford of Anwoth, Robert 
 Baillie of Kilwinning, Andrew Cant of Pitsligo, Robert Douglas 
 of Kirkcaldy, and George Gillespie of Wemyss. Among 
 the Burgesses were Kays, Smiths, Patersons, Cochranes,
 
 256 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTIIORNDEN. 
 
 Durhams, Meldrums, Buchanans, and others, now all forgotten, 
 but provosts or bailies of towns, and well-to-do men, in their 
 days. Among the lairds or lesser barons one notes, as having 
 names of interesting historical sound yet, Stirling of Keir, 
 Hume of Wedderburn, Douglas of Cavers, Mure of Row- 
 allan, Fergusson of Craigdarroch, Agnew of Lochnaw, Baillie 
 of Lamington, Graham of Fintray, Ramsay of Balmain, Skene 
 of Skene, Fraser of Philorth, Barclay of Towie, and (chief 
 in activity) the lawyer Archibald Johnstone of Warriston. 
 Perhaps, however, it is by the array of Scottish nobles 
 included among the original Covenanters that people even 
 now will judge of the strength and respectability of the move- 
 ment, as it certainly was by this test above all that Charles 
 judged it then. Well, the noblemen who signed the Covenant 
 in Edinburgh on the 1st of March, 1638, were the Earls of 
 Rothes, Montrose, Cassilis, Sutherland, Eglintoun, Wemyss, 
 Home, and Lothian, with Lords Balmerino, Loudon, Lindsay, 
 Yester, Burleigh, Melville, Johnston, Forrester, -Cranstoun, 
 Boyd, Sinclair, and Cupar ; and to these were added so many 
 more, when copies of the Covenant had got duly about, that 
 positively, with the exception of the lords of the Privy Council, 
 and four or five others (one or two of them Roman Catholics), 
 the whole Peerage of Scotland stood pledged to the Presbyterian 
 side. It was, indeed, only official allegiance that prevented 
 some of the peers of the Council itself from joining the con- 
 federacy. Almost all the lay-peers of the Council had become 
 sick of their compelled conjunction with the detested Bishops, 
 and several of them were tending, already all but openly, to 
 the Covenanters. Among these was Lord Lome, soon to be 
 among them, and, as Earl and Marquis of Argyle, to succeed 
 Rothes in the aristocratic leadership. 
 
 The Confederacy of the Covenant had not yet reached its 
 full dimensions, but its thoroughly national character was ap- 
 parent, when the news of it first reached London. Charles 
 was furious, and yet utterly nonplussed. "The damnable
 
 /Etat. 52-53. STIRLING AGAIN. 257 
 
 Covenant" became, from this time, one of the most frequent 
 phrases in his vocabulary. He muttered it to himself; he used 
 it in conversation, and in letters. His irritation broke out upon 
 all the Scotsmen around him. He was angry with the Scottish 
 Bishops, who posted up to report the state of matters and 
 blame their lay colleagues, and especially Traquair; he was 
 angry with the lay Councillors, who posted up to defend 
 themselves and blame the Bishops ; he was angry with the 
 resident Scottish Lords about the English Court. From this 
 time, indeed, the Scottish business ceased to be a purely Scot- 
 tish business, and became one of the most harassing subjects of 
 discussion between Charles and his English Privy Council. 
 
 Among the Scotsmen blamed most, with or without reason, 
 was Lord Secretary Stirling. Our last glimpse of him was 
 in October, 1636, when, in his secretarial capacity, he was 
 transmitting to Scotland the royal orders for the reception of 
 the Service-book, little thinking what a storm the book was to 
 raise when it actually appeared, and how his own amended 
 folio edition of King James's Psalms was to go down in 
 obloquy, as part and parcel of the abominated volume. In 
 the year and a half that had elapsed since then, not only had 
 his eyes been opened on that subject, but he had had sore 
 private troubles besides. 
 
 So little had the Earl foreseen the possibility of any such 
 catastrophe in Scotland as the Jenny Geddes revolution 
 that he had been regaling himself, just before it happened, 
 with a return to the society of his old Muses. If we except his 
 editorship of King James's Psalms (which was not acknow- 
 ledged), his last distinct metrical appearance had been in 1614, 
 when he added his Doomsday to his Aurora, his Partznesis to 
 Prince Henry, his four Monarchick Tragedies, and his Elegy on 
 the death of Prince Henry, published between 1603 and 1613. 
 Yet, through all those four-and-twenty intervening years of 
 courtiership, politics, Nova Scotia speculation, and the manage- 
 
 R
 
 *5» 
 
 DRUMMQND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 ment of home patents, he had never ceased to hanker after 
 his poetical fame ; and in his reflective moments he had pro- 
 bably sometimes envied the private and leisurely life of his 
 contemporary Drummond. Might not Drummond be said to 
 have succeeded him in that laureateship of English Poetry and 
 English Literature generally among the Scots which had once 
 been nominally his, and in which, poor post though it was in 
 comparison with a laureateship in South Britain, he might still 
 have been finding an honest pleasure ? As he had resigned it, 
 however, and it would have been unbecoming in him, a poli- 
 tician and Secretary of State, to be publishing more books of 
 Poetry in competition with Drummond or with anybody else, 
 what remained for him but to rest on what he had already 
 done of the poetical kind in his freer and younger days, and 
 show his continued interest in Literature only in reserved and 
 distant ways ? 
 
 A little Essay entitled Anacrisis, or a Censure of some 
 Poets ancient and modern, by William, Earl of Stirling, and 
 an accompanying short letter of Stirling's to Drummond, 
 are both printed in Drummond's Works. " After a great 
 " travail both of body and mind," the Essay begins, " (which, 
 " since not voluntary, but imposed upon me, was the 
 " more painful), by retiring for a time where I was born, of 
 " late, gladly embracing this rarely-offered opportunity to re- 
 " fresh myself, and being curious, as the most dainty kind of 
 " pleasure for such as are capable of these delicacies, to recre- 
 " ate myself with the Muses (I may justly say recreate, since 
 " they create new spirits, which, shaking off gross affections, 
 " diving into the depths, reaching the heights, and contemplat- 
 "ing both, are transported with those things which are only 
 " worthy to entertain so noble a thing as the Mind of Man), I 
 " began to renew my acquaintance there, having of a long time 
 " been a stranger with them ; so that at the first I could not begin 
 " to practise as one of their ordinary train, but only to court with 
 " those whose credit might procure my access. I conversed
 
 Mtat. 52-53. STIRLING AGAIN. 259 
 
 " with some of the Moderns as well as with the Ancients, 
 " kindling my fire at those fires which do still burn out of the 
 " ashes of ancient authors." Accordingly, the Essay consists 
 of a series of desultory remarks on poetry in general, suggested 
 to him by his readings, with little criticisms on Virgil, Ovid, 
 Horace, Juvenal, Statius, and Lucan, among the Latins, Tasso 
 among the Italians, and Du Bartas among the French, the con- 
 clusion passing unexpectedly into a survey of the special de- 
 partment of prose-romance, with mention of the Cyropcedia 
 of Xenophon, the ALthiopics of Heliodorus, Sir Philip Sidney's 
 Arcadia (praised to the utmost, with the information that 
 Stirling in his youth had tried a sequel to it), the Arcadia of 
 the Italian Sannazaro, the Diana of the Spanish Montemayor, 
 the French Marquis D'Urfe"s Asfrcsa, and Barclay's Latin 
 Argcnis. The whole essay is singularly pithless and pointless, 
 a kind of stately maundering about literary matters by one who 
 thought himself entitled to give his opinions, but who had none 
 worth giving. Evidently, however, the Earl attached some 
 value to it; for, having written it at Menstrie, immediately after 
 some holiday-time, he sent it to Drummond with the following 
 note : — 
 
 " To my much honoured Friend, Mr. William Drummond 
 
 of Hawthornden. 
 
 "Sir, 
 
 " I would have this piece appear to the world with your 
 name, as well for a testimony to after-times of our friendship 
 and love as for that, to my knowledge, there is not any in our 
 mother-country who hath more diligently perused the authors 
 cited in this Censure, and can so universally discern of every 
 one of them in their own language, as yourself. My daily cares 
 at Court, and employment in matters of the State, have not 
 granted me leisure to set the last hand on it ; neither have I 
 went (sic) so through all but that you, if you please, in that 
 solitariness and leisure which you enjoy, may proceed and 
 spend some flying hours upon this same subject. And I am
 
 260 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 assured our pieces cannot but with applause and contentment 
 be read and embraced by the thankful Posterity who after 
 death will render to every man what is his due. 
 
 " Your loving Friend and Brother, 
 
 " Stirling." * 
 
 It is by inference that we date this letter and the essay at 
 some time not long before the Service-Book revolt in Scotland ; 
 but the inference is confirmed by the fact, that in 1637 the Earl 
 did intimate in a public way that he had recently been doing 
 the very thing the essay speaks of so pointedly, i.e., " recreating 
 himself with the Muses." Recreations with the Muses ; By 
 William, Earl of Sterline, is the title of a folio volume 
 he published that year in London, with a fine portrait of 
 himself prefixed to some copies, and consisting of a revised 
 edition of all those of his former poems by which he cared 
 to be remembered. The Aurora set of juvenile Poems was 
 omitted, and there was included a longish fragment of an 
 intended heroic poem in stanzas, called Jonathan, not previously 
 published ; but, for the rest, the volume was essentially a repub- 
 lication of his Poetical Works in a collected and improved form 
 for a generation that had forgotten the first editions. 
 
 Just at this time it was that the poor Earl was visited by a 
 family misfortune, which must have taken away his thoughts 
 very considerably both from poetry and from politics. Of seven 
 sons that had been born to inherit his honours, at least three 
 had survived till 1637. His eldest son and heir, William, Lord 
 Alexander and Viscount Canada, a young man of peculiar talent 
 and promise, who had been educated at Glasgow, had for some 
 years been taking part in 'public affairs. He was, as we have 
 seen, one of the Scottish Privy Council; he had spent a year in 
 America, as deputy for his Father, in what were still vaguely 
 called the Nova Scotia settlements there, though they included 
 infant New York ; he had married the eldest daughter of the 
 
 * The letter is given in Drummond's Works (edit. 171 1) p. 158, and is 
 
 followed by the essay.
 
 JEtat. 52-53. STIRLING'S GRIEFS. 261 
 
 Marquis of Douglas, and had, altogether, the finest prospects. 
 Next to him in age was his brother, Sir Anthony Alexander, also 
 a young man of ability, who had been made Master of the 
 King's Works in Scotland, and had taken up residence partly 
 in Edinburgh and partly at, or somewhere near, the paternal 
 Menstrie. Younger still, and not yet of full age, was the third 
 brother, Henry. Now, in August 1637, about a month after 
 the Jenny Geddes Riot, the second of these brothers, Sir 
 Anthony, died when on a visit to London. The fact is thus 
 noted in Balfour's Annals — " About the latter end of August, 
 " this same year, Sir Anthony Alexander, Knight, second son to 
 "William, Earl of Stirling, and Master of his Majesty's Works 
 " for the Kingdom of Scotland, departed this life at London ; 
 " from whence his corpse, being embalmed, was brought by sea, 
 " and by torchlight privately interred in Bowie's Aisle, in the 
 " Church of Stirling. He married one of the daughters of Sir 
 " Henry Wardlaw of Pitreavie, Knight, in Fifeshire, and had no 
 " issue." Both on his father's account and on his own, the death 
 of the young Knight was the subject of considerable regret ; and 
 there is a special commemoration of it in a short poem printed 
 at Edinburgh, " in King James his College, by George Ander- 
 " son, 1638," and entitled, To the Exequies of the Honourable 
 Sir Anthonye Alexander, Knight, &>c. ; A Pastorall Elegie. 
 
 The piece does not bear Drummond's name ; but it has 
 always been included among his Works, and is undoubtedly his. 
 It is not written, however, in direct form — in which case it could 
 have but expressed the regret of a man of fifty-two years of age 
 on hearing of the death of a promising youth, some thirty years 
 his junior, and the son of one of his oldest friends. Wishing to 
 write something more artificial than this, Drummond quite con- 
 cealed himself, and threw the poem into the pastoral form of a 
 lament for the dead shepherd Alcon by his fellow-shepherd 
 Idmon, represented as of the same age with the deceased, and 
 his constant companion on the banks of the Forth when he had 
 been alive. Thus the opening lines —
 
 262 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " In sweetest prime and blooming of his age, 
 Dear Alcon, ravished from this mortal stage, 
 The shepherds mourned, as they him loved before : 
 Among the rout him Idmon did deplore." 
 
 The rest of the poem, accordingly, consists of the plaint of this 
 supposed Idmon, very much as, in Lycidas, the words are sup- 
 posed to be spoken by a fellow-swain of the dead Edward King 
 of that elegy. While, however, there may be a certain slight 
 interest on this account in comparing the poem with Lycidas 
 (which was published in the very same year), the composition is 
 so thin and poor on the whole, so much beneath Drummond's 
 best, as hardly to be worth remembering as his at all, much less 
 to be dwelt on as his in so trying a comparison. Besides the 
 vast inferiority otherwise, there is a jar all through in the recol- 
 lection that, while the shepherd who speaks in Milton's Monody 
 is really Milton himself, or undistinguishable from him, the 
 Idmon who grieves for Alcon could not be Drummond himself, 
 and was merely an invented speaker for an obituary tribute 
 which Drummond thought it proper to pay to the Earl of Stir- 
 ling's son, and decided to pay in the pastoral form. With this 
 explanation, an extract from Idmon's plaint may be given, the 
 rather as it conveys some information as to the circumstances of 
 the young Knight's death : — 
 
 " When from thy native soil love had thee driven, 
 Thy safe return prefigurating, a heaven 
 Of flattering hopes did in my fancy move, 
 Then little dreaming it should atoms prove. 
 ' These groves preserve will I, these loved woods, 
 These orchards rich with fruits, with fish these floods : 
 My Alcon will return, and once again 
 His chosen exiles he will entertain. 
 The populous city holds him ; amongst harms 
 Of some fierce Cyclops Circe's stronger charms. 
 These banks,' said I, 'he visit will and streams, 
 These silent shades ne'er kissed by courting beams ; 
 Far, far off I will meet him, as I best 
 Shall him approaching know, and first be blest 
 With his aspect : I first shall hear his voice, 
 Him find the same he parted, and rejoice
 
 ALtat. 52-53. STIRLING'S GRIEFS. 263 
 
 To learn his passed perils, know the sports 
 
 Of foreign shepherds, fawns, and fairy courts. 
 
 No pleasure to the fields : an happy state 
 
 The swains enjoy, secure from what they hate : 
 
 Free of proud cares, they innocently spend 
 
 The day, nor do black thoughts their ease offend ; 
 
 Wise Nature's darlings they live in the world, 
 
 Perplexing not themselves how it is hurled. 
 
 These hillocks Phcebus loves, Ceres these plains, 
 
 These shades the Sylvans, and here Pales strains 
 
 Milk in the pails ; the maids which haunt the springs 
 
 Dance on these pastures ; here Amyntas sings ; 
 
 Plesperian gardens, Tempe's shades are here, 
 
 Or what the eastern Ind and west hold dear. 
 
 Come then, dear youth ; the wood-nymphs twine thee boughs, 
 
 With rose and lily, to impale thy brows.' 
 
 Thus ignorant I mused, not conscious yet 
 
 Of what by death was done and ruthless fate.' 1 
 
 With the death of his second son lying at his heart, and 
 with whatever troubles besides, Stirling had toiled through the 
 winter of 1637-8, doing his best to manage the utterly 
 unmanageable business of the Scottish tumults. And, when it 
 had clearly proved itself to be unmanageable, — above all, when 
 there came to London the news of " the damnable Covenant " of 
 March, 1638, — then, I repeat, much of the blame, beyond any 
 share that would be properly his, fell upon Stirling. Was it 
 not his business to have given the king better information? was 
 it not his business to have seen such and such documents 
 better worded ? What else was he Secretary for ? Recreations 
 with the Muses, when he ought to have been putting down 
 Edinburgh bags ! Such were the hard thoughts that occurred 
 to the king, or were officiously fostered in his mind by some of 
 the Scottish Privy Councillors who came to Court to clear 
 themselves. Even before the crowning fact of the Covenant 
 the rumour ran through Scotland that Stirling was in disgrace, 
 and was to lose his Secretaryship. 
 
 That he was not actually disgraced may have been partly 
 because the king, when his first wrath was over, did not see so 
 much reason after all for blaming his old servant more than
 
 264 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 others ; but it seems to have been owing in part also to a natural 
 and widely-felt pity for him under a new domestic calamity. 
 In March, 1638, — the very month of the Covenant, — the Earl, 
 still in mourning for his second son, lost his eldest. He died 
 in London, unexpectedly, after a few days of fever; and his 
 body, having been embalmed, was brought to Scotland, and 
 buried beside his brother's in the Church of Stirling. The 
 Covenanting Baillie, who was related somehow to the Alex- 
 ander family, thus mentions the death in one of his letters to 
 a foreign correspondent : — " With the President [Sir Robert 
 Spotswood, son of the Chancellor- Archbishop, and President of 
 the College of Justice] comes news of my Lord Alexander's 
 " death. I have into it a loss of a near cousin and familiar 
 " friend. The king did profess his loss of a servant of great 
 " hopes. Ye know, beside the gallantness of his person, that 
 " he was both wise, learned, and very well spoken. The coun- 
 " try makes not much dool for him, for they took him for ane 
 " advancer of the Episcopal causes to his power. It fears me 
 " his death will undo that rising house : their debts are great ; 
 " his father is old, and extremely hated of all the country for 
 " his alleged bribery, urging of the Psalms, and the Books 
 " [Service-Books] for them [i.e., on account of the Psalms], 
 " overwhelming us with his Black Money. His son [the son 
 " of the young lord] is but ane infant ; his brother Sir An- 
 " thony, and Robert also, are dead ; Henry will not be able 
 " yet for his place ; and, if he should, what he can gain must 
 " be for himself, and not the House. Many who intended his 
 " father's overthrow were withholden for respect to him [Lord 
 
 " Alexander]." To this we may add what seems to be 
 
 Drummond's letter of condolence to the Earl, some weeks after 
 the occasion : — 
 
 " To the JRig/it Honourable the Earl of Stirling. 
 
 " When the pitiful news came of so dear funerals, though I 
 had an intention to have written to your Lordship, I restrained
 
 jEtat. 52-53. STIRLING'S GRIEFS. 265 
 
 myself, both because your wound was flagrant, and that I had 
 not an argument of comfort which was not your own. Nothing 
 is now left me but to manifest that the sense of this loss could 
 not but perplex him grievously who never made any difference 
 between your fortunes and his own. I hold myself co-partner of 
 all your griefs, as I have been of your prosperities. I know your 
 fatherly affection ; I know too your constancy ; which, being 
 seasoned with piety, will not suffer you to repine at that which 
 is the determined will of God. Your erudition and experience 
 instruct you that such accidents should be taken in good part 
 and cheerfully which are not incident to us alone, and which 
 by our sighs, tears, and plaints, we may not evite and put far 
 from us. You must not attend till time mitigate your languor ; 
 for this do the vulgar sort of men, with Sola dies fioterit tantum 
 lenire dolorem. A wise man should prevent and anticipate time, 
 overrun new-born grief; which is an ungrateful guest, thrusting 
 out and ransacking the masters of the inn. I, who am conscious 
 to your patience and wisdom, am assured you have performed 
 all this already ; upon which confidence I will leave off to 
 trouble you further, or lay a heavier burden and needless task 
 upon myself. 
 
 " W. Drummond." * 
 
 Stirling lived on in his Secretaryship, still sufficiently in 
 favour with the King, through the brief remainder of his life. 
 There was even some conjecture whether he might not be em- 
 ployed on a service for Charles of greater responsibility and 
 dignity than any yet imposed upon him. For, after revolving 
 the whole business of the Scottish Revolt, and taking counsel with 
 his English ministers, Charles had abandoned as hopeless the 
 project that had been first suggested to him, of trying to crush 
 the Covenanters by mustering an opposing force within Scotland 
 itself. He had come to two definite resolutions instead. The 
 first, and more secret, was to raise, as soon as possible, an English 
 army, with which, and the help of a contingent from Ireland, to 
 invade Scotland, restore authority, and punish the rebels; the 
 
 * Drummond's Works, p. 145. The letter is not dated ; I have assumed 
 it to be on the occasion of Lord Alexander's death ; but it is just possible 
 it may have been on a previous death in the family.
 
 266 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 other was to send a Plenipotentiary into Scotland, to treat with 
 the rebels in the meantime, make the best bargain with them 
 that circumstances would permit, get them on any pretext to 
 dissolve their " damnable covenant," and altogether pre-arrange 
 things so that, when the English and Irish forces should be 
 ready, Scotland might be walked over and all bargains annulled 
 with the least trouble. Who should the Plenipotentiary be ? 
 There was much speculation on this point. Several Scottish 
 nobleman were named on guess, and Stirling among them, 
 though it was acknowledged that his antecedents made him 
 very unlikely ; the Earl of Traquair was the favourite. At length 
 (May, 1638) it was announced that Charles had chosen from a 
 higher heaven than that of regular Scottish officialism, and 
 appointed his kinsman and intimate friend, the Marquis of 
 Hamilton. As the very highest, with one exception, of the 
 Scottish nobility, and yet hitherto quite out of the turmoil per- 
 sonally, the Marquis would enter on the mission with every 
 advantage. 
 
 The Marquis of Hamilton's mission carries on the History of 
 Scotland from May to the end of December, 1638; but there 
 was an important pausing-point on the 22nd of September. 
 The essence of the story to that point is as follows : — 
 
 The Marquis came empowered to grant concessions to the 
 Covenanters. That was involved in the very fact of his mission. 
 The question was between the amount of concession he was 
 empowered to grant and the amount the Covenanters were 
 determined to exact. Now the Marquis came empowered to 
 grant, or at least to offer at first, only the most wretched 
 minimum that it was possible to devise — a suspension of the 
 Service-Book and Canons till they could be legally introduced, 
 a rectification of the Court of High Commission, and a promise 
 of a General Assembly of the Kirk and a meeting of Parliament 
 to discuss matters at large at some convenient time : all this, 
 moreover, to be conditional on the immediate abnegation of
 
 jEtat. 52-53. HAMILTON'S MISSION. 267 
 
 the Covenant and dissolution of the Tables. The Covenanters, 
 on the other hand, not only regarded the Covenant as a solemn 
 oath which they could not unswear, and the Tables as their 
 established executive which it would be suicidal to dissolve 
 before everything was secure ; but, the Covenant having by this 
 time gone through the country like wildfire, they had resolved 
 not to be satisfied with even the entire abrogation of Charles's 
 own recent innovations — the Service-Book, the Canons, and the 
 High Commission — but to take the opportunity of sweeping 
 away also the ceremonies and the diocesan powers of Bishops 
 which had been introduced by James, so as to get back as 
 nearly as possible to Knox and the old Presbyterian basis. If 
 they did not yet demand the abolition of Episcopacy altogether, 
 but seemed to think only of a limitation of Episcopacy, it was 
 partly because they were willing that this should remain an open 
 question for the General Assembly and Parliament, the speedy 
 calling of which they made all-essential. Between the two 
 parties thus confronting each other for negotiation there was 
 for three or four months an incessant tugging and manoeuvring, 
 an incessant trial of firmness and skill, but with the result on 
 the whole that, as the Covenanters would not yield an inch 
 from their positions, the Marquis had to go over to them. 
 Accordingly, after he had twice gone back to London for fresh 
 instructions, after the King had writhed with pain inexpressible 
 under the necessity of yielding, and would at once have begun 
 war had he not known that the Covenanters were better pre- 
 pared for that emergency than himself, there was the form of a 
 full surrender. On the 22nd of September there were three 
 Proclamations in his Majesty's name at the Cross of Edinburgh 
 — one of them a General Declaration, revoking the Service- 
 Book, the Canons, and the High Commission absolutely, 
 suspending all the unpopular Kirk-ceremonies, and promising a 
 limitation of Episcopacy ; the others calling a General Assembly 
 at Glasgow on the 21st of November, and a Parliament at 
 Edinburgh on the 15th of May. The only drawback was a
 
 2 68 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 proposal to attenuate or modify the Covenant, by substituting 
 for it another document, the same in the main, but different in 
 some particulars, in which the King would be glad to agree with 
 his Scottish subjects. Not troubling themselves too much 
 about this proposal, though resolved not to accept it, the 
 Covenanters were satisfied with their victory, and there were 
 rejoicings through all the land. 
 
 It was at this moment that Drummond stepped forward, or 
 at least made the gesture of stepping forward, with an address 
 to his countrymen of all ranks, and to his Majesty also. 
 
 We understand sufficiently by this time what is likely to have 
 been Drummond's state of mind through the recent agitation. 
 Willing enough for a while that Charles and Laud should suc- 
 ceed in shaping the Kirk to their pleasure, and probably also 
 himself preferring something of the Prelatic pattern they were 
 devising, but intrinsically, I should say, rather indifferent as 
 to the pattern of the institution altogether, if only it were one 
 that would leave the country at peace, and allow elbow-room 
 to people of peculiar ways of thinking, he had found himself 
 obliged at length, by the force of facts, to question the royal 
 policy, and the blundering zeal of its agents, the Scottish 
 Bishops. On the whole, I should say, before the tumults had 
 actually broken out, he had come to side politically with the 
 Traqiiair party in the Scottish Privy Council, whose object 
 it was to sustain the king's authority, but recover popularity 
 for it by keeping the Bishops more strictly in their places. 
 Traquair, at any rate, had won his regards ; for, either on 
 Traquair's appointment to the Treasurership-Depute in 1630, 
 or on his promotion to the High-Treasurership in 1635, Drum- 
 mond had sent him some congratulatory verses, in acknowledg- 
 ment of his lordship's constant zeal towards the Muses. "They 
 " have fair hopes," he there said, " that the advancement of 
 " your Lordship is the advancement of them ; for, the body 
 " preceding, the shadow must follow. Your lordship being
 
 JEtat 52-53. POLITICAL RUMINATIONS. 269 
 
 " near the helm of the State, they expect a new Saturnian 
 "world."" Not on this evidence alone, however, may we 
 suppose the Traquair party in the Privy Council to have had 
 Drummond's best wishes through 1635, 1636, and that portion 
 of 1637 which preceded the Service-Book Riots. The Traquair 
 party was then, indeed, the hope of all moderate men, and 
 even of the Presbyterian dissentients throughout the country. 
 But, when the Traquair party had not been able to avert the 
 Service-Book, and stood equally implicated with the Spotswood 
 or Bishops' party in the consequent crash (it was even said by 
 Traquair's enemies that he had purposely urged the Service- 
 Book in order to bring on the crash), what were Drummond's 
 feelings ? Indignation, I have no doubt, at the St. Giles's riot, 
 and at the rising of the Edinburgh mob against the constituted 
 authorities — movings as these were of that most horrible of all 
 creatures in his imagination, the populace, or Blatant Beast. 
 Nor can the subsequent nocking into Edinburgh of the dissen- 
 tient nobles, lairds, burgesses, and ministers, to constitute their 
 Tables, and organize a national confederacy against the king's 
 government, have seemed less shocking to him. Farther re- 
 flection must have come, however, as he gauged the dimensions 
 of the movement so organised, and especially after he saw it hoist 
 the banner of the National Covenant in March, 1638. Clearly 
 this was no longer a loose popular commotion that could be 
 trampled down by any ordinary exertion of the executive, but 
 a full-grown and ably-managed League of the majority of the 
 Scottish People of all ranks, which Charles could never put 
 down, except by frank concession of all that was demanded, or 
 by the murderous alternative of a Civil War. There must have 
 been a significance for Drummond, more keen and exact than 
 we can recover, in the very names of the leaders of the con- 
 federacy. Whatever he may have personally known or thought 
 of such parish-ministers as Henderson, Dickson, Rutherford, 
 Baillie, Gillespie, and Cant, their reputation and power among 
 * Drummond's Works (1711), p. 136.
 
 270 
 
 DRUM MONO OF IIAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 their countrymen can have been no secret to him ; among the 
 representatives of the Scottish Lairds and Burghs in the Cove- 
 nant he saw many men of greater social weight and greater 
 experience in affairs than himself; and in the cluster of nobles 
 that formed the aristocratic top of the confederacy he saw 
 some who were acquaintances of his own, and others whose 
 ancestors figured with effect enough in that History of the Five 
 Jameses which he had been recently composing. Might not 
 some of these have inherited the ancestral faculty of thwarting 
 kings, and fashioning Scottish History in spite of kings ? 
 Rothes, Loudoun, Cassilis, Balmerino, and the other Parlia- 
 mentary Radicals of 1633, were now but the centre of a band 
 of some thirty Scottish Peers, including some sturdy old grey- 
 heads, and such younger spirits as the Earl of Lothian (the son 
 of his old friend Ancram) and that wonderful young Earl of 
 Montrose of whose genius and flashing eagerness to distinguish 
 himself everybody was talking. Plis own brother-in-law, Sir 
 John Scot of Scotstarvet, had taken the Covenant, and was a 
 leading man among the Covenanters. 
 
 " Well, what times we have got into ! " may be taken as a 
 fair summary of Drummond's meditations with himself after his 
 first disgust at the popular outbreak was over, and he had 
 taken a measure of the facts. Even the humours of the 
 crisis began to come in upon him, and, by exercising his pen 
 in little squibs and spurts of satire, to temper his disgust or 
 grief. The poor plight of the Scottish Bishops, for example, 
 in the crash that had befallen their system, had a comical 
 aspect for him as well as for their declared enemies ; and he 
 cculd place himself in the point of view of their enemies, and 
 ironically lead the clamour against them thus : — 
 
 " Do all pens slumber still ? Dare not one try 
 In trembling lines to let some pasquil fly? 
 Each hour a satire craveth to display 
 The secrets of this tragic- comic play. 
 If love should let me write, I think you'd see 
 The Pyrenees and Alps come skip to me,
 
 jEtat. 52-53. POLITICAL SQUIBS. 271 
 
 And laugh themselves asunder, if I'd trace 
 
 The hurly-burly of state-business, 
 
 And to the world abused once but tell 
 
 The legend of Ignatian Machiavel, 
 
 That old bold smoking monster, and the pride 
 
 Of these usurping prelates that dare ride 
 
 Upon authority and look so gay, 
 
 As if, good men, they ought, forsooth, to sway 
 
 Church, State, and all. Plague on that damned crew 
 
 Of such hell's black-mouthed hounds ! It's of a new 
 
 That Roman pandars boldly dared to woo, 
 
 Nay strain, a gentle king these things to do, 
 
 That move the French, Italian, and Spain, 
 
 In a luxurious and insulting strain 
 
 To sing Te Deum, 'cause they hope to see 
 
 The glory of the Popish Prelacy 
 
 Raised above his royal throne apace, 
 
 To drown his minor light with prouder face. 
 
 These hounds, they have engaged him on the stage 
 
 Of sharp-eyed Europe ; nay, there's not a page 
 
 But thinks he may laugh freely when he sees 
 
 Kings buffoons act and Bishops tragedies."* 
 
 There is irony in this ; but we may question whether it is all 
 irony, and whether Drummond did not write in his assumed 
 character of Episcopomastix with some good-will. Perhaps, 
 however, he was more in his own vein when he wrote — 
 
 " Bishops are like the turners, most men say ; 
 Though now cried down, they'll up some other day." 
 
 Or this against Andrew Ramsay, one of the ministers of Edin- 
 burgh, and now a Covenanter — 
 
 " Rams aye run backward when they would advance : 
 Who knows if Ramsay may find such a chance, 
 By playing the stiff Puritan, to wear 
 A Bishop's rochet yet another year ?" 
 
 Or this — 
 
 " God never had a church, but there, men say, 
 
 The Devil hath raised a chapel by some wiles : 
 I doubted of this saw till on a day 
 
 I westward spied great Edinburgh's St. Giles." 
 
 * From "Drummond's Lines on the Bishops, 14 April, 1638," printed 
 in the Maitland Club Edition of Drummond's Poetical Works (pp. 404-406), 
 "from a manuscript in the Advocates' Library, in the handwriting of Sir 
 James Balfour."
 
 272 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 But, while Drummond thus amused himself with the humours 
 of the crisis, and satirised right and left indiscriminately, not 
 the less was he anxious at heart for a restoration of peace and 
 order, and consequently for the success of the Marquis of 
 Hamilton's mission. He himself, of course, stood aloof from 
 the Covenant ; to sign which, so long as Charles's Privy Council 
 remained even nominally the government, there could be no 
 actual compulsion for men in his position. But he must have 
 marked the fever of subscription to it and swearing to it that 
 pervaded the country; and, though he may have had reason to 
 think that thousands who signed it did so only to be like their 
 neighbours and avoid trouble, and that in some districts the 
 moral pressure exercised by the clergy and lairds in its behalf 
 was little better than tyranny, still the increasing invincibility of 
 the League by anything short of a civil war, promoted by armed 
 force from England, must have been more apparent to him with 
 every day that passed. Hence, as such an extremity seemed to 
 him the most horrible of disasters, his anxiety was to see the 
 Marquis come to terms with the Covenanters, whatever they 
 might be. Nor, after all, was there anything so intrinsically 
 terrific in the extreme terms of the Covenanters themselves 
 that he or any peaceable lay Scotsman should object to them, if 
 only the King would be satisfied. When, therefore, on the 
 22nd of September, proclamation was made that the King had 
 in substance yielded all the demands of the Covenanters, 
 Drummond was little less delighted than if he had been a 
 Covenanter himself. He sat down at once to write an address 
 to his countrymen, congratulating them on the happy event, 
 and at the same time inculcating on all ranks and classes of 
 them the sentiments proper in connexion with it. 
 
 He entitled the address Irene {i.e., "Peace"): or A 
 Remonstrance for Concord, Amity, and Love amongst His 
 Majesty s Subjects ; and the title well indicates its character. 
 It is of the size of a considerable pamphlet, very thoughtfully 
 and eloquently written, in the most earnest mood throughout,
 
 /Eiat. 52-53. DRUMMOND'S "IRENE." 273 
 
 and with many traits of Drummond that are interesting, and 
 some that are likeable. Whether, however, because he was too 
 late in finishing it, or because he was dubious of its reception, he 
 did not publish it. Copies, nevertheless, were distributed 
 privately in manuscript ; and there is extant at least one note of 
 his, addressed to some noble Lord, which accompanied one of 
 these copies. " My Lord," the note runs, " having made a 
 " promise to my soul never to employ it to another use than to 
 " that where charity is required, I send you this Essay, a 
 " Remonstrance of Peace and Obedience for the Country. 
 " Force hath less power over a great heart than duty." * 
 There is proof, in short, that, though not actually published, 
 Drummond's Irene was in the hands of some persons of in- 
 fluence immediately after it was written, and was heard of with 
 curiosity by others. 
 
 The Pamphlet opens strikingly thus : — 
 
 " As pilgrims, wandering in the night by the inconstant 
 glances of the moon, when they behold the morning gleams; 
 as mariners, after tempests on the seas, at their arrival in safe 
 harbours ; as men that are perplexed and taken with some 
 ugly visions and affrightments in their slumbers, when they are 
 awaked and calmly roused up : so did this Kingdom, State, nay 
 the whole Isle, amidst those suspicions, jealousies, surmises, 
 misrepresentations, terrors more than panic, after the late 
 Declaration of the King's Majesty find themselves surprised 
 and over-reached with unexpected and inexpressible joys. 
 Religion was mourning, Justice wandering, Peace seeking 
 whither to fly ; a strange, hideous, grim, and pale Shadow of 
 a Government was begun to crawl abroad, putting up a 
 hundred heads. Men's courages were growing hot, their hatred 
 kindled, all either drawing their swords or laying hands upon 
 them. The enemy was the Country; the quarrel Differences 
 of Opinions. Towns were pestered with guards of armed 
 citizens, the country and villages thralled with dormant musters; 
 
 * The above is the whole letter, as printed by Mr. Laing in his Haw- 
 thornden Extracts, Arch. Scot., IV. 95. One infers from the wording that 
 the noble Lord addressed was some leading Covenanter, whom Drummond 
 was sorry to see in that company, and wished, if possible, to rescue. 
 
 S
 
 274 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 the danger seemed great, the fear greater : all expected the 
 Prince would enter the lists. And so he did ! Mean things 
 must yield unto the more noble; vicit amor patria ; that same 
 wind which gathered the clouds did dissipate them. He not 
 only giveth way to our zeal, graciously assenting to all our 
 desires, but condescendeth, nay commandeth, that our own 
 writ should be current, and embraced by all his subjects. To 
 human eyes a perfect conclusion of our wretched distractions ! " 
 
 There follows much laudation of King Charles for his 
 wisdom and management in having at last granted the con- 
 cessions, all in the tone of a man who thoroughly approved of 
 the concessions and had himself desired them, but still con- 
 sidered that the King ought now to have the full credit. 
 There is also a glowing apostrophe to Peace, and a welcome of 
 the blessed prospect of her re-appearance in Scotland. But, to 
 convert that prospect into reality, there must be a unanimous 
 thankfulness to the King for his present gracious yielding, with 
 a candid allowance for all the causes (distance of place, mis- 
 information, multiplicity of cares, &c.) which had prevented 
 his yielding sooner ; and there must also be the most zealous 
 co-operation with him for the future. " It is the duty of every 
 " man not only to rest satisfied with this fair way and entrance 
 " to peace, concord, and unanimity, which the Prince most 
 " graciously hath yielded unto, but to endeavour and use all 
 " possible means and industry that they may be permanent, 
 " lasting, and eternal, so that division, strife, and dissension be 
 "wholly taken away and extinguished, that the people be 
 " recalled, tamed, and persuaded to live in quietness, recover 
 " the taste of government, peaceably exercising their wonted 
 " trades and arts, and that differences and doubts, if any yet 
 " remain, be pleaded and decided by reason and law, and not 
 " by violence and arms." 
 
 Obedience, Drummond proceeds to say, is the main principle 
 of all civil society ; and, under the guise of this maxim, he 
 inculcates, without any stint or measure, his own peculiar
 
 sEtat. 52-53. DRUMMO-ND'S "IRENE." 275 
 
 political conservatism. Absolute submission in every matter, 
 and at all costs, to the officially-declared authority of the 
 Prince, whatever may be one's own opinion or private repug- 
 nance : nothing short of this seems to be the political belief 
 into which Drummond had reasoned himself. To this propo- 
 sition, in its most naked and offensive form, he seems to have 
 been quite willing to commit himself, if urged to it, and this on 
 the plea that in no middle proposition could he find either 
 logical or practical resting-ground from that other extreme of 
 Democracy which he found unfigurable altogether, or could 
 only figure hatefully as chaos. But let him speak for himself — 
 
 " Obedience being the strongest pedestal of concord, and 
 concord the principal pillar of State, we should always embrace 
 and follow her, if we would enjoy a civil happiness, or at least 
 use her as a bridle, helm, or stay to our wild perturbations and 
 disordered passions. Imagine in the statutes, edicts, and 
 ordinances of Princes there be many things contrary to our 
 opinions, and which do displease us ; to such difficulties, 
 contrarieties, and differences, let us apply the remedies of 
 patience and obedience. For it is not lawful for a subject to 
 be a syndic of the actions of his Prince in matters of State, 
 being for the most part ignorant of the secret causes and 
 motives upon which they are grounded ; it belonging only to 
 God Almighty, the searcher of all hearts, to censure and judge 
 the actions of Princes, from whom alone they have their royal 
 power and sovereignty. . . . If inferior subjects were permitted 
 to examine, approve, and condemn the ordinances of their 
 magistrates, where were the security and safety of the Common- 
 wealth ? The greater number, rejecting the obedience and 
 yoke of the fewer, would make all things common, or every- 
 thing their own ; servants should violently over-run their 
 masters, vassals their patrons, children their parents, the strong 
 the weak, the poor the rich, and all civil order be overturned, 
 confusion entering in where obedience goeth out." 
 
 A practical consequence of this doctrine was that there 
 should be an immediate dissolution of the Covenant — 
 
 " Let us then, to this effect, give over and desist from all
 
 2 7 6 DRUMMOND OF HAU'THORNDEN. 
 
 Leagues and Confederations (which are, in plain terms, Trea- 
 sons), secret Fraternities, Bonds amongst ourselves or with 
 foreigners, without warrant and leave granted by Royal 
 Authority ; it belonging only to the Prince to confederate and 
 league his People : for otherwise ordinarily all such Bonds, 
 Practices, and Intercourse end in the ruin of the State. A 
 League giveth a Law to a King, and is an usurpation of those 
 rights, pre-eminences, and prerogatives, which the Crown re- 
 served! only to the Prince ; it abolisheth the oath of fidelity 
 which the subjects owe him ; it transferreth the Royalty 
 into a confusion and oligarchy — which cannot but bring forth 
 divisions, and occasion envy, jealousies, quarrels, and com- 
 plaints, to which all oligarchies and associations are usually 
 subject; and it is a visible preparation for a change in the 
 State. To league a people is to make them know their strength 
 and power, — how many heads, how many hands, what riches, 
 what arms they have, — and to dissolve in one day that power 
 and frame which in a monarchy hath been joined and soldered 
 together many ages, and thus to bring in a popular State, or 
 warn and cite a People to make choice of a new Master. In 
 all which interval and space of change, poor silly men, they are 
 miserably oppressed : for by a League a man or nation is in- 
 vassaled and thralled to obey and follow another man's or 
 nation's pleasure, to give obedience to many when he oweth it 
 but to one. He that is not his own, but another man's, and 
 yet a man, the same, saith Aristotle, is a bound slave. Now he 
 is another man's whosoever, being a man, is possessed of ano- 
 ther. Such are all Leaguers." 
 
 Drummond next passes on to remonstrate with each of the 
 great sections of his countrymen respectively. First of all he 
 lectures the Nobility and Gentry, having in view more especially, 
 we are to suppose, the Nobles and Lairds who had joined the 
 Covenant and composed two of its Governing Tables. He is 
 extremely severe in his address to them, not concealing his 
 opinion that the great mass of them were actuated by motives 
 of personal revenge or ambition, though they made religion 
 and the public interests their pretext. One passage may be 
 quoted : —
 
 sEtat. 52-53. DRUMMOND'S " IRENE." 277 
 
 " If the Prince holdeth not his Crown of you, but of God 
 (who distributeth honours as it seemeth best unto Him) and 
 the ancient laws of His kingdom ; if his crown be not by elec- 
 tion, but by a lineal succession ; if he be lawfully invested, 
 anointed, and crowned : why should ye servants give a law to 
 your Master? What honours, riches, greatness, you enjoy you 
 have all from the kings his ancestors ; and you owe him all 
 subjection, service, and obedience. Who assume and usurp 
 the rights of their Sovereign the laws of God and Man proclaim 
 worthy of death. Good Princes should be obeyed ; yea, evil 
 Princes should be tolerated : God who raised Kings above you 
 holdeth Himself wronged in their wrongs, and revengeth the 
 injuries done unto them. Though they should in some things 
 go beyond their duties, they are not to be judged by their 
 subjects ; for no power within their dominions is superior to 
 theirs. What can you purchase, by some few months' liberty 
 of dancing to your own shadows in new magistracies, offices of 
 State, imaginary and fantastical councils, landscapes of com- 
 monwealths, and an icy grandeur erected by yourselves to 
 impair and derogate from sovereignty and to dissolve govern- 
 ment, but a part of a tragi-comedy ? . . . The climacteric 
 and period of the Monarchical Governments of Europe is not 
 yet come : and when, or if ever, it shall come, ye who are 
 Nobles shall perish with it; for the Commons, then all Princes, 
 will not suffer in their statutes, edicts, and ordinances, any 
 longer I, but We. In distribution and parting of honours, 
 offices, riches, and lands, they will proceed after an arithmetical 
 proportion, and not a geometrical ; towns 'will close their gates 
 upon you ; and ye may some day expect a Sicilian Even-Song.'' 
 
 The address to the Common People need not be quoted 
 from : it is simply to the effect that they are seduced, deceived, 
 misled, are sure to be the chief sufferers in the end, and had 
 better at once return to their allegiance,*their shops, ploughs, 
 and handicrafts. The address to the Clergy is more subtle and 
 complex, and deserves some attention, not only because it 
 shows the relation in which Drummond chose to stand publicly 
 to such Presbyterian contemporaries of his as Henderson, 
 Baillie, Rutherford, and Gillespie, but also because it brings out 
 special reasons of his for appearing in that relation. For the fact
 
 278 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 is, that underneath Drummond's doctrine of Passive Obedience, 
 and probably the chief secret source of his liking for that new 
 obsolete doctrine, was his unusual zeal for an important form of 
 Liberty, about which he saw his Covenanting fellow-countrymen 
 sadly indifferent. 
 
 It would hardly be a paradox to maintain that not a few of 
 the defenders of the Passive Obedience principle in state- 
 politics have been actuated, in considerable degree, by a regard 
 for that freedom of individual thought which students and 
 speculative men always value more than the active multitude. 
 When there is a democratic movement in a country, an agita- 
 tion for political liberty, or for the rights of the collective body- 
 politic against despotism or hereditary prerogative, it is in the 
 very nature of things, especially if there is life-and-death danger, 
 that the partisans of the movement shall band together in the 
 biggest possible mass, shall adopt watchwords defining their 
 immediate aims, shall sink minor differences among themselves, 
 shall ostracise and black-mark all who do not come into their 
 confederacy, shall construct a system to be imposed on the 
 country when they win the game, and shall push on in the faith 
 and hope of that system, with even threats of what shall happen 
 to opponents when it comes into supremacy. In such a con- 
 dition of affairs there is little patience with any demand for 
 intellectual liberty for the individual. It is like the demand of 
 a luxury for some few while the community at large want food. 
 All the while, however, those whose habits have made this 
 luxury essential for themselves, or who have perhaps perceived 
 that it is no mere luxury, but the very breath of human life — 
 all the while, I say, these persons are looking on ; and some of 
 them, unable to reconcile the passion for collective liberty 
 which they see rampant with security for the individual liberty 
 in which they have a true interest, wrap themselves in from the 
 rampant passion in a mantle of proclaimed disgust, and resile to 
 any extreme of the doctrine of Prerogative. In some cases 
 of such conduct in the past it may have been because the un-
 
 sEtat. 52-53. DRUMMOND'S "IRENE." 279 
 
 popular dissentients knew by experience that under the old 
 authority there would still be liberty for their own ideas, 
 whereas under the new system striven for there would be liberty 
 also for other people's. In other cases, however, there was no 
 such selfish narrowness, but a real willingness to see a protec- 
 tion for all differences. 
 
 This decidedly appears to have been Drummond's predica- 
 ment. We have seen already that he had no sympathy with 
 the persecuting and repressive policy of Charles's past govern- 
 ment, but could on occasion stand forth boldly in defence of 
 free speech. It was not, then, because he thought individual 
 liberty had been sufficiently respected under the system of use- 
 and-wont, which the Covenanters were bent on subverting, that 
 he fell back on the doctrine of passive obedience to the Prince. 
 He probably regarded the persecutions of prominent Presby- 
 terian ministers under Charles and his father as shabby and 
 unnecessary stretches of power; and one of his objections to 
 Laud's high Episcopacy, when he came to know it. must have 
 been that such persecutions would be multiplied under it, and 
 that excellent and pious men, whose only fault was that they 
 were a little crazed about Predestination or the Sabbath, or 
 absurdly squeamish about surplices and candles, would have no 
 peace left them. But then, looking forward to what Scotland 
 was likely to be when the Covenanters had fashioned it to their 
 pleasure, he foresaw, quite as distinctly, that under that rule 
 there would be no toleration for the opposite sorts of opinions 
 and prejudices. Calvinism, Sabbatarianism, and Presbyterian 
 ritual and discipline would then be in the ascendant ; and, 
 though it might be but a small minority that would care to have 
 a little liberty of Arminian Theology, or Roman Catholicism, 
 or Ritualism, reserved them, or that would be aggrieved by the 
 prohibition of surplices and symbolic candles, why should that 
 minority not have quiet corners left for their habitation ? All 
 this being in Drummond's mind, and the concessions of the 
 King to the recent Presbyterian demands having probably made
 
 280 DRUMMOND OF HAIVTHORNDEN. 
 
 it easier for him to conceive an ideal state of things, in which, 
 under a single high-minded authority atop, there should be no 
 tyranny of majority over minority, or of one denomination of 
 subjects over another, but a fine general carelessness of trifles 
 and indulgence in differences, we have the curious fact that 
 Drummond, so conspicuously the advocate in 1638 of that 
 doctrine of Passive Obedience which the Scottish Presbyterian 
 Clergy were manfully throwing off, was yet the conspicuous advo- 
 cate also of that principle of Toleration or Individual Liberty 
 which these Clergy repudiated and meant to suppress. How 
 difficult it is to apportion praise and blame among the men of 
 past times ! Henderson and his Presbyterian colleagues were 
 ably, courageously, and energetically leading a cause unques- 
 tionably righteous, and were cleaving the way for a great political 
 liberation, the benefits of which were not to stop within Scotland, 
 but were to extend to England and all the British Islands. Yet 
 these same men intended a system of compulsory Calvinistic 
 and Presbyterian uniformity when they should come into power, 
 and, when they did come into power, established such a system, 
 and denounced the doctrine of Toleration or Liberty of Indi- 
 vidual Conscience as impious and diabolic. Drummond, on the 
 other hand, who shuddered at the manly pugnacity of these 
 men, and insisted on the figment of Passive Obedience which 
 they were tearing to tatters, was indubitably the one eminent 
 representative in Scotland of the idea of Toleration or Liberty 
 of Difference. 
 
 In proof of what has been said, take the following string of 
 extracts from the part of the Irene which consists of an address 
 to the Scottish clergy. The reader will obtain from the extracts 
 also some light on Drummond's own Theology and his views 
 of the History of the Church : — 
 
 " Ye lights of the world, examples of holiness and all virtues, 
 you living libraries of knowledge, sanctuaries of goodness, look 
 upon the fragility of mankind ! The bodies of commonwealths 
 are already turned into skeletons, the cities into sepulchres, the
 
 &lat. 52-53. DRUMMOND'S " IRENE." 281 
 
 fields into shambles, the trees into gibbets. Pity the human 
 race, spare the blood of man ; the earth is drunk with it, the 
 waters empurpled, the air empoisoned ; and all by you. For 
 they who give advice and counsel for the performing of evil 
 actions cause them, and do these actions themselves ; and they 
 who command them, and approve them when done, are beyond 
 the actors guilty. . . . Holy chain betwixt Heaven and Earth, 
 how art thou profaned ! How long shall ambition, emulation, 
 avarice, malice, revenge, make a cloak of thee to their most 
 irreligious ends ? If we must fight for thee, have we not 
 millions of infidels to pursue, and that bloody race of Ottoman 
 which possesseth the fairest bounds and dearest pledges of 
 Christianity of all the earth? But for what great matters con- 
 cerning thee would Ave now launch forth into a sea of blood? 
 Not for renewing thy beauty ; not for supporting thy glory ; not 
 for propagation of thee amongst the sunburnt nations of the 
 South, or the far East, or North, or Western wildernesses ; but 
 for taking from thee what thou hast many ages since purchased, 
 for turning thee as naked as when thou first appeared in the 
 world, for quintessencing and alembicking thee, and using thee 
 as alchemists do gold, which they turn often into sophisticate 
 powders. Sacred race ! have you no remorse when ye enter 
 into the cabinets of your own hearts, and there, for arras and 
 portraits, find millions of Christians represented unto you dis- 
 figured, massacred, butchered, and made havoc of in all the 
 fashions the imaginations of wicked mankind could devise, for 
 the maintaining of those opinions and problems which ye are 
 conscious to yourselves are but Centaurs' children, the imagi- 
 nations and fancies of your own brains, concerning which ye 
 would argue with and chide one another, but never shed one 
 ounce of your blood? Have you no remorse that by your 
 rhetoric, under pretence of piety and devotion, ye persuade a 
 populace to cast off that obedience they have sworn to their 
 native Kings, arise in arms against them, breathe nothing but 
 spoil, vengeance, and rebellion ? . . . With what countenances 
 can ye look upon your Master, at whose nativity Angels pro- 
 claimed the joyful embassy of peace unto Men and glory to 
 God ; whose last will was love and peace ; who so often recom- 
 mended patience and suffering ; whose example in all his actions 
 ever crieth peace ? But ye have transformed truth into rhetoric, 
 by your commentaries destroyed the texts ; the shadows have 
 deprived us of the bodies; the echoes, so often redoubled and
 
 282 DRUM MO ND OF II A WTIIORNDEN. 
 
 multiplied amongst mountainous concavities, have drowned and 
 made unheard the proper and personal voice. . . . Ye may err, 
 fion solum errore personali, scd ' judiciali. How then have ye raised 
 yourselves to that height of presumption to assume the power of 
 God in sainting some and sending others to the infernal ghosts as 
 they favour you and your cause ? Ye have named many martyrs 
 who have been infernal furies, and many good have ye drawn 
 your sword against who have been innocently guiltless. Why, 
 in an hungry rage of vainglory and false constancy, do ye eat 
 and gnaw upon one another with malignant disputations and 
 reproachful violence ? Are ye not afraid to find the accom- 
 plishment of that prophecy of Bernard, that the Saviour of the 
 world will come down from Heaven, and beat out of his Temple 
 the Priests, as once he did the Buyers and Sellers ? Compound 
 your differences and controversies ; forsake your furious dis- 
 putes ; use your eloquence to quench the flames of rebellion, 
 and not to blow them up ; labour to establish order, not to 
 bring in confusion ; study unity and not distractions ; seek not 
 so much cunningly to make men know what goodness is as to 
 make them embrace and cheerfully follow it. A little practice 
 of goodness is many degrees above abstract contemplations, 
 disputes, and your learned orations ; at least suffer never your 
 differences to arise to that height as to keep citizens amongst 
 themselves irreconcileable, or that they trouble the state of a 
 kingdom, and, though they walk through diverse paths, but that 
 they may all meet and condescend upon one highway. ... If 
 we shall consider this Universe, ex diversis substantiis, diversis 
 officiis, constans, diversitatibus corporator et temperatur : the 
 Sovereign Creator of this All making nothing but in order, and 
 that not being but where there is a difference and diversity ; yea, 
 not only this Universal in general, but there is no creature in 
 it, not a body, not a simple, that is not composed and existing 
 with some diversity. Gems, gold, the minerals, the elements, 
 exist not pure ; the Planets have a motion contrary to the First 
 Moveable : yet is there a perfect harmony in all this great 
 frame, and a discording concord maketh all the parcels of it 
 delightful. Of the diversity and variety which is in this world 
 ariseth that beauty so wonderful and amazing to our eyes. In 
 architecture diversity doth not destroy conformity ; the limbs of 
 a noble fabric may be correspondent enough though they be 
 various. We find not two persons of one and the same shape, 
 figure, and lineaments of the face, much less of the same con-
 
 jEtat. 52-53. DRUMMOND'S "IRENE." 283 
 
 ditions, qualities, and humours, though they be of the self-same 
 parents ; and why do we seek to find men all of one thought and 
 one opinion in formalities and matters disputable? Or, if they 
 shall be found dissonant and disagreeing from the vulgarly 
 received opinions or errors, why should we, by our fancy and 
 law of power, banish, proscribe, design, or expose them to 
 slaughter? Why should we only honour and respect those of 
 our opinions as our friends, and carry ourselves towards others 
 as if they were beasts and trees, nay as our enemies? Were it 
 not more seemly and meet to make a difference between men 
 according to their vice or virtue ? There be many wicked men 
 of our profession, and a great number of good and civil men of 
 other professions. Suadenda est Religio, non imperanda. The 
 consciences of men neither should nor will be forced by the 
 violence of iron and fire ; nor will souls be compelled to 
 believe that which they believe not : they are not drawn nor 
 subdued but by evidence and demonstrations." 
 
 The Treatise is wound up with an address to King Charles 
 himself. " And, now, Sir," Drummond begins, " if ever this 
 paper shall have the happiness to kiss your royal hands . . . ; 
 but suddenly he stops this direct form of address, and throws the 
 speech, for greater decorum, into the form of a pleading by 
 Scotia herself, personified as prostrate at Charles's feet. It is very 
 eloquent, and, though in the language of profound loyalty, 
 contains some home-truths for Charles. Thus, after confessing 
 that her children have gone greviously astray and forgotten 
 their duty, Scotia continues : — 
 
 " Since one evil amendeth not another, vanquish and subdue 
 them by mercy. The impregnable fortress of a Prince is the 
 love of his subjects; which doth only arise from the height of 
 his clemency. And this excess of meekness is in him a kind 
 of Justice. Extremities had changed their humility into rage, 
 their sugar into wormwood, their obedience into a disorderly 
 revolt. It was not Religion alone which did occasion these 
 troubles; she was combined with State; their first miseries 
 were the occasion of all which hath since followed. Suspicions, 
 misconstructions, and fake fears for the liberties of their birth 
 and country, in many matters violated, and their common unity
 
 284 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 endangered ; credulity in believing that all things were carried 
 by the hands of some few, that the managing of the public 
 affairs was trusted to men who would clip them to the quick, 
 not fleece them ; taxes and customs daily enhanced ; extreme 
 poverty, the principal ground of novations and alterations : all 
 these turned them from one evil to another, changed their 
 hopes into despair, and, like men in shipwrack, made them 
 catch at anything which came nearest to help. And, if they 
 shall enterprise and undertake aught hereafter, it shall be out 
 of distrust, and by way of necessity, having nothing now, as 
 they conceive, remaining but arms and courageous hearts, 
 their vows to Heaven, and their promises one to another upon 
 Earth. . . . Dissolve, and, like another Alexander, cut these 
 Gordian knots of Leagues and Rebellion, but without the 
 blood of your People. Qui ducuntur non errant ; necessaria 
 venia est ubi totus erravit exercitus. For, if you should, Sir, you 
 shall make your power odious every way, even to yourself; 
 your loyal subjects shall smart and suffer with the bad, being 
 their friends, kinsmen, compatriots, and be compelled, for the 
 necessity of their safety, to run the same course with them, 
 and, to prevent their harm, be partners and companions of 
 their dangers. The drawing of your sword against them shall 
 be the drawing of it against yourself; instead of triumphs, you 
 shall obtain nothing but sad exequies and moanful funerals. . . . 
 Turn me not, Sir, your country, into shambles, a desert wilder- 
 ness, a sepulchre, a monument of desolation. By that duty 
 and reverence you owe to God Almighty, who placed you to 
 represent Him upon Earth ; by the ashes and memories of so 
 many kings, your predecessors, who here so peaceably reigned ; 
 by that charity which is due to me, your native country ; if 
 there be no king so good as yourself; if there be no people 
 which more dearly love their kings (however now in an ague) 
 than this ; if they have lost anything of what they feign to be 
 Liberty (which is only a power to do what is convenient) : re- 
 store it unto them; change their troubles into rest, their miseries 
 into prosperity, their dissensions into concord and peace ! " 
 
 It is with a certain humorous pleasure that one finds that, if 
 Drummond placed at one end of his political philosophy a 
 strenuous doctrine of passive obedietice on the part of the 
 subject, he tried to counterbalance it at the other end by an 
 equally strenuous recommendation to the King of a policy of
 
 Jhtat. 52-53. DRUMMOND'S " IRENE." 285 
 
 unenforced command. Without dwelling, however, on the 
 rather abstract oddity of a political philosophy revolving on 
 two such poles, or inquiring how it would work in practice, 
 one may rest with a certain respect, and even admiration, on 
 Drummond's patriotic intention in penning so peculiar a 
 pamphlet at so critical a time. As it was written with the 
 most passionate earnestness, and from a point of view which 
 was neither that of the King nor that of the vast majority of 
 Drummond's countrymen, so there was much in it that might 
 have been useful on both sides. The advice to Charles, at 
 least, was excellent. " Change your ways, or you are a lost 
 King; oppose no longer this banded determination of the 
 Scots to have their Kirk and State settled to their own liking ; 
 above all, give up your horrible purpose of invading Scotland 
 with an English army and asserting your authority and Laud's 
 crotchets by war and bloodshed :" such was the exact substance 
 of the advice, and Charles never received a better. The 
 advice to the Covenanters was not so perfectly to the point. 
 The protest in behalf of Toleration and Liberty of Religious 
 Difference was, indeed, much needed. Could the Covenanters 
 at this early period of their history have taken something of 
 the tenet thus urged upon them into their political creed, the 
 career of Scottish Presbyterianism in the few years that were 
 immediately coming might have lost none of its real emphasis, 
 and there would not afterwards have been its deserved break- 
 down and condemnation under the criticisms of some of its 
 first well-wishers among the largest minds of England. Yet 
 the moment for such advice lay perhaps a little ahead of that 
 which Drummond had chosen ; and, at all events, had it been 
 published among the Covenanters, it would have been vitiated 
 for most of them by the accompaniments. For, in the main 
 matter, which these accompaniments concerned, the Covenan- 
 ters were decidedly in the right, and Drummond was queru- 
 lously in the wrong. Passive Obedience to the Prince I 
 Pshaw ! it was not a principle that had ever been very deep
 
 2 86 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 in the Scottish mind, and what rag of it was there had been 
 torn out by recent experience and argumentation. Did any 
 man mean to say that, if nine-tenths of the Scottish people 
 were Calvinistic and Presbyterian, they had not a right to 
 insist that their national Church, if they were to have one at all, 
 should be of their own pattern, and not a gewgaw fabricated for 
 them by a Berkshire ecclesiastical upholsterer? Did any man 
 mean to say that they were to be dragooned, and fined, and 
 banished, and hanged into accepting Dr. Laud's ideal Beauty 
 of Holiness, or even the best Church in the world, if they did 
 not like it ? Did any man mean to say that they had any way 
 left of getting rid of the torture, in Church and State, that had 
 so long been inflicted on them, but sheer revolt ? Could any 
 man deny that Charles's late concessions had been wrung from 
 him only by a display of force which astounded him, and which 
 he was not prepared to resist? Could any man deny that he 
 had yielded in appearance only, and that, as soon as he should 
 be able, he would annul all his concessions, restore all he had 
 consented to abrogate, and exact vengeance ? And yet Mr. 
 Drummond could represent all as now satisfactory, exhort to 
 peace and a cessation from farther effort, perfume his periods 
 to that effect with the water of roses, and, for the rest, assail 
 with eloquent invective all classes of his countrymen for that 
 very course of action which had brought about the consumma- 
 tion he praised ! Observe the very gist of his advice ! Was 
 it not that there should be an immediate dissolution of the 
 Covenant? What was this but playing into the King's hands? 
 What was the single remaining stumbling-block of the crisis 
 but the demand made by the King that, in return for his 
 concessions, the Scots should dissolve their League, surrender 
 their Covenant, and join with him in another Covenant which 
 was much the same, only more to the royal taste? Was not 
 this the one remaining subject of heat and dispute between 
 the Marquis of Hamilton and the Covenanting leaders? 
 Had it not been well considered by the Covenanting leaders ;
 
 JStat. 52-53. THE GLASGOW. ASSEMBLY. 287 
 
 and, with all their willingness to be fair and reasonable, had 
 they not come to the conclusion that the King's proposal of 
 another Covenant was but a politic device to introduce discord 
 into their ranks? Their own Covenant was not a toy which 
 they could throw aside, like children, because another was 
 offered ; it was a solemn oath between them and Heaven, and 
 they would stand by it to the last ! 
 
 The matter of the rival Covenants was for some time very 
 serious. The conclusion of Henderson and the other Cove- 
 nanting leaders for abiding by the original Covenant having, 
 however, been aided by the fact that the chief alacrity for the 
 King's Covenant was in Prelatic Aberdeen, the Marquis had to 
 report that his attempt to dissolve the popular Covenant was a 
 failure. In his wrath, the King thought of retracting his per- 
 mission for 'a General Assembly at Glasgow r , and resuming his 
 policy of menace and defiance. This having been judged 
 inexpedient, all that could be done was to make every effort 
 beforehand to deter the Assembly from bringing the Scottish 
 Bishops to ecclesiastical trial for their past misdemeanours, as the 
 Covenanters had announced their intention of doing, and from 
 stirring the fundamental question of Limited Episcopacy or 
 Absolute Presbytery in the future constitution of the Kirk. To 
 this end the Marquis was busy through the weeks preceding 
 the meeting of the Assembly ; but the Covenanters were busier. 
 The Marquis had his instructions how to act in the Assembly 
 itself in the last emergency. 
 
 And so at length the famous Glasgow Assembly did meet, on 
 the day appointed, November 21, 1638. It consisted of 144 
 representative clergymen from all parts of the country, and 96 
 lay elders, among whom were most of the Covenanting nobles, 
 and a selection of Covenanting lairds or burgesses. Alexander 
 Henderson was chosen Moderator of the Assembly, and John- 
 stone of Warriston Clerk ; the Marquis sat on a throne as 
 representing the King, and with most of the King's Privy
 
 2 88 DRUMMOND OF II A WTHORNDEN, 
 
 Councillors in attendance. The real strife began when the 
 Assembly proceeded to the trial of the Bishops, in spite of a 
 legal document which the Bishops had sent in, declining the 
 Assembly's jurisdiction. At this point, the Marquis, acting on 
 his final instructions, struck in for the Bishops, declaring that 
 they had appealed to the King, and that, in the name of his 
 Majesty, he must stop the Assembly in that business. As the 
 Assembly would not be stopped, the Marquis left the house 
 with his Privy Councillors, and next day proclaimed the 
 Assembly dissolved under pain of treason. Deserted by no 
 more than four or five of their number in consequence, the 
 Assembly sat on resolutely, — sat on, day after day, till the 20th 
 of December. And what a month's work they did ! All the 
 Scottish Bishops deposed, and the majority of them excom- 
 municated as well as deposed ; all Acts of former Assemblies 
 ratifying ceremonies and Episcopal jurisdiction in the Kirk 
 condemned and repealed; Episcopacy in every form rejected 
 and declared at an end in Scotland ; and the Kirk re-settled, 
 not in generality only, but in the most minute details of 
 arrangement, on its old Presbyterian basis ! This was the 
 great news that rang through the land, and at which crowds 
 shouted and huzzaed in cities and towns, and groups of peasants 
 gathered joyfully in villages and fields, and venerable men, 
 seated among their grandchildren by cottage fire-sides, removed 
 their bonnets from their heads, thanking the Lord that they 
 had seen this day ! 
 
 Before we leave the year 1638 there is one incident of Drum- 
 mond's life of which we must take notice. A married man for 
 some years, and with two or three infant children, he had thought 
 it necessary to repair or rebuild his house in Hawthornden. 
 The building and repairs must have been going on through 
 months and months of that troublous period which we have 
 been traversing, and it is quite possible that this disturbance of 
 his usual dwelling may have been the occasion of that temporary
 
 Mtat. 52-53. HAWTHORNDEN HOUSE REBUILT. 289 
 
 stay of his with his brother-in-law, Scot of Scotstarvet, during 
 which he is surmised by his old biographer to have been 
 engaged on his History of the Five Jameses. The new house 
 was completed in 1638, when Drummond, to commemorate the 
 event, caused this inscription to be carved over the new door- 
 way : "Divino munere Gulielmiis Drummondus ab Hawthomden, 
 Joannis, Equitis Aurati, Filius, ut honesto otio quiesceret, sibi et 
 successoribus insfai/ravit, 1638 " (" By the divine favour, William 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, son of Sir John Drummond, 
 Knight, that he might rest in honourable ease, founded this 
 house for himself and his successors.") Accordingly, the 
 mansion of Hawthornden which tourists now admire, peaked so 
 picturesquely on its high rock in the romantic glen of the Esk, 
 is not the identical house which Ben Jonson saw, and in which 
 he and Drummond had their immortal colloquies, but Drum- 
 mond's enlarged edifice of 1638, preserving in it one hardly 
 knows what fragments of the older building. One associates Ben 
 Jonson with the house all the same, and fancies this or that 
 lintel the one he must have sat under, and this or that place in 
 the rock around and beneath a spot where his figure may have 
 rested. The hoary old tower to the left, with its mysterious 
 caverned socket, lasts now, at all events, very much as it was 
 when Ben Jonson saw it ; and the great old sycamore in front, 
 under which tradition will have it that the first meeting between 
 Drummond and Ben took place, and which must have been a 
 tree of goodly age even at that time, still lives and flourishes, the 
 pride of the place, and the most celebrated sycamore in all Scot- 
 land. If anywhere on earth Ben Jonson's ghost still walks, surely 
 it is by the side of that grottoed tower and under that old 
 sycamore. There, indeed, Drummond himself, now and then 
 on a thoughtful evening, may perchance have encountered the 
 burly phantom. For, when Drummond, at the age of fifty-three 
 took possession of the mansion as he had rebuilt it, Ben 
 Jonson's visit lay already twenty years in the past, and Ben 
 himself was no more in the world. He had died in London on 
 
 T
 
 2 qo DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 the 6th of August, 1637 (just a fortnight after the Jenny Geddes 
 Riot), at the age of sixty-three, after much indigence, and suffer- 
 ing from dropsy and other diseases, in his later years, but brave, 
 famous, and formidable to the last. They buried him in West- 
 minster Abbey, not in the usual horizontal fashion, but, from 
 deficiency of room, or some other reason, standing on his feet. 
 Most of the English poets and wits, with such men among them 
 as Falkland and Buckhurst, celebrated him in obituary verses; 
 and a collection of such, unusual for its size and the respecta- 
 bility of the contributors, was published six months after his 
 death by Dr. Brian Duppa, tutor of the Prince of Wales, 
 afterwards Bishop of Winchester. It was intended also to 
 erect a noble monument to him in the Abbey by subscrip- 
 tion ; but this intention had not been fulfilled, and all that 
 marked his grave was the inscription which an Oxfordshire 
 squire, who was walking in the Abbey at the time of the funeral, 
 had given a mason eighteen pence to cut in the stone placed 
 over him : " O Rare Ben Jonson."
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 PREPARATIONS ON BOTH SIDES FOR THE FIRST BISHOPS' WAR: 
 DRUMMOND UNDER SUSPICION : LASSWADE PARISH AND THE 
 PRESBYTERY OF DALKEITH : DRUMMOND AS A PSEUDO-COVE- 
 NANTER OR COVENANTER BY COMPULSION : SECRET SQUIBS OF 
 HIS IN VERSE AND PROSE : LESLIE AT DUNSE LAW : CLOSE OF 
 THE FIRST BISHOPS' WAR IN THE PACIFICATION OF BIRKS : 
 DRUMMOND'S CONCERN IN THE AFFAIR: HIS LETTERS TO THE 
 MARQUIS OF DOUGLAS. 
 
 1638— 1639. 
 
 *T^HE King, who had all along intended war, had been making 
 what preparations for it he could even while the Marquis 
 of Hamilton was negotiating with the Scots in his name. He 
 had been taking counsel with his English ministers, and he had 
 been in correspondence on the subject with Wentworth, whose 
 help, in the shape of some force from Ireland, was an important 
 item in his calculations. Now, however, that the insult to his 
 authority by the proceedings of the Glasgow Assembly had 
 removed all doubt, he was doubly busy, raising money, pushing 
 on levies, and getting ready ships. His difficulties, it is true, 
 proved far greater than he had expected. The Puritanism of 
 England, which for ten years had been dumb and dormant, 
 bereft of the power of uttering itself through a Parliament, and 
 almost of the hope of ever seeing a Parliament in England again, 
 had been marvellously set astir by the recent events in Scotland ; 
 and, instead of a desire to aid Charles in putting down the
 
 292 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Scots and restoring the Scottish Bishops, the prevalent feeling 
 throughout England had come to be one of sympathy with the 
 Scots, and longing to imitate their example. 
 
 This was pretty well known in Scotland ; but, even had it 
 not been known, the Covenanters would not have shrunk from 
 the war. All Scotland, with few exceptions, was now theirs. 
 The King's government was at an end ; the deposed Bishops 
 were fugitives in England ; the Covenanting Tables, represented 
 now not only by a central executive in Edinburgh, but also by 
 subordinate committees in the shires, managed everything ; the 
 Covenanting nobles were the chiefs of a new national adminis- 
 tration. To the number of these there had been a remarkable 
 accession in Lord Lome, now Earl of Argyle by his father's 
 death, who had taken the opportunity of the Glasgow Assembly 
 to detach himself from the Marquis of Hamilton and his 
 colleagues of the Privy Council, and adhere publicly to the 
 Covenanters. Influenced by his example, or by the force of 
 circumstances, four or five other great Lords, hitherto Privy 
 Councillors and King's men, had thrown in their lot with the 
 Covenant ; so that there was no lack of men of great name and 
 estates to assume the responsibility for all acts, regular or 
 irregular. Musters were going on everywhere ; there was drill- 
 ing in all towns, villages, and parishes ; moneys were subscribed, 
 or raised on loan ; disaffected districts, more especially Aberdeen 
 and Aberdeenshire, were visited and cowed into subjection ; the 
 more important castles and places of strength, such as Edinburgh 
 Castle, Dalkeith Palace, Douglas Castle, Dumbarton Castle, 
 were one by one seized and garrisoned for the Covenant. Care 
 had, of course, been taken to provide the professional military 
 ability required for these preliminaries and for what was to 
 follow. Sir Alexander Leslie, an experienced general and field- 
 marshal of Gustavus-Adolphus in the great German war, had 
 come home from Sweden to be commander-in-chief of the 
 Covenanting Army; and other Scottish soldiers, trained in the 
 same great school, were at hand, for colonelcies, captaincies,
 
 sEtat. 53-54. DRUMMONErS DILEMMA. 293 
 
 and lieutenancies, in any number that might be wanted. Not 
 the least important of these, under Leslie, was that " Sandy 
 Hamilton " whom we saw long ago as the homely Scottish 
 Archimedes of his day, upon whose reputation in that capacity 
 Drummond's splendid Patent for Military Machines had been a 
 very dubious encroachment. As Colonel Hamilton, and desig- 
 nated for the chief command of the Artillery under Leslie, he 
 was already giving the Covenanters the benefit of his engineering 
 talent by improving for them the fortifications of Edinburgh 
 Castle, and directing a cannon-foundry in the Potter Row. 
 
 The position of Drummond in the midst of all this was very 
 peculiar. It was the result of a conflict of motives and influ- 
 ences, which may be described seriatim. 
 
 In the first place, he could not absolve the king. Although 
 the issue of the Glasgow Assembly in a total abolition of Epis- 
 copacy and a general defiance to the king had been a grievous 
 trouble and disappointment to him, it was not in accordance 
 with his principles that even yet he could justify the armed 
 invasion of Scotland on which he saw Charles bent. Thus, in 
 one of the little epigrams in which he gave vent privately to his 
 feelings : — 
 
 " The Scottish Kirk the English Church do name ; 
 The English Church the Scots a Kirk do call : 
 ' Kirk and not Church ! Church and not Kirk ! O shame ! 
 Your kappa turn in c/ii, or perish all ! ' 
 Assemblies meet ; post Bishops to the Court : 
 If these two nations fight 'tis strangers' sport." 
 
 In other words, the dispute between the two forms of Church- 
 government was still to Drummond only an affair of Kappa or 
 Chi; and, though he had wished that the Scots would oblige 
 the king by accepting the chi, yet, as they had persisted in their 
 kappa, he thought it monstrous that the king should raise his 
 English subjects to impose his and their chi by force on people 
 who preferred the kappa.
 
 294 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 In the second place, however, his indignation at the contrary 
 phrenzy of his countrymen was vastly greater. For, as his 
 theory of passive obedience compelled him to maintain that, if 
 the king did and would dictate chi, it was the duty of the sub- 
 jects to acquiesce with patience, he regarded it as positive 
 rebellion in the Covenanters, and not mere mistaken zeal, to 
 have provoked the war by their obstinacy for the kappa. 
 While one might criticise the king, therefore, it must be with 
 public allegiance to him; and it was the Covenanters that 
 must be publicly blamed. This, accordingly, is what Drum- 
 mond did. Another of his epigrams about this time was the 
 following satirical analysis of the motives of the several classes 
 adhering to the Covenant : — 
 
 "Against the King, Sir, now why would ye fight? 
 ' Forsooth, because he dubbed me not a Knight' 
 Andj,?, my Lords, why arm ye 'gainst King Charles? 
 ' Because of Lords he would not make us Earls.' 
 Earls, why do ye lead forth these warlike bands ? 
 ' Because we will not quit the Church's lands.' 
 Most holy Churchmen, what is your intent ? 
 ' The King our stipends largely did augment.' 
 Commons, in tumult thus why are you driven ? 
 ' Priests us persuade it is the way to Heaven.' 
 Are these just cause of war, good people, grant ? 
 ' Ho ! plunder ! thou ne'er swore our Covenant.' " 
 
 In this last line there is indicated a third influence acting 
 on Drummond, and which had at length come to act irresis- 
 tibly. It was all very well for him, in his private reasonings, to 
 apportion the right and the wrong between the King in London 
 and his fellow-countrymen up in phrenzy all through Scotland ; 
 it was all very well to conclude that the King was ill-advised, 
 but that his fellow-countrymen were positively mad, and ought 
 to be told so roundly. Let him but try to tell them so roundly.. 
 Let him but take a copy of this last epigram of his in his hands, 
 post himself on the steps of St. Giles's Church in the High Street 
 of Edinburgh, and read it aloud to any little crowd gathered there. 
 What would have been the consequence ? He would have been
 
 sEtat. 53-54. LASSWADE PARISH. 295 
 
 mobbed at once. There would have been cries of " Ho ! 
 plunder I", " Here's a Non-Covenanter," " Down with him," 
 followed by a cry, " O, it's the Laird of Hawthornden : we all 
 know him." Then, amid more cries, there might have come 
 taunts from the wits in the mob : "How about Forth Feasting now, 
 Mr. Drummond? Is Endymion rousedfromhis Latmian caveyet? 
 How do you like your new house ? Have you got such a thing 
 
 as a Cypress Grove about it?" &c, &c. Very much so, 
 
 without needing such an experiment in street-ribaldry to find it 
 out, Drummond knew himself to be situated. 
 
 Hawthornden, the reader ought now to be informed, is in 
 the parish of Lasswade, which is one of the parishes of the 
 ecclesiastical district called the Presbytery of Dalkeith. Now, 
 the minister of Lasswade, ever since 16 16, when Drummond 
 was new in his lairdship, and beginning to be known as a poet, 
 had been a certain Mr. James Porteous, of some repute for the 
 resoluteness of his Presbyterian opinions while these opinions 
 were still under discouragement from the authorities. He had, 
 on one occasion at least, been summoned before these authori- 
 ties for neglect of the ceremonies which King James's legislation 
 had imposed on the Kirk. He and his parishioner Mr. Drum- 
 mond, therefore, had never, we must suppose, been much 
 drawn together by Kirk sympathies. Nevertheless, as Mr. 
 Porteous appears to have been a pious and faithful pastor, and 
 as the tempering of Presbyterian discipline by Episcopal rule in 
 those days must have kept a man in Drummond's position free 
 from any undue interference on the part of his parsh-minister, 
 there is no reason to doubt that he and Mr. Porteous had 
 always been very good friends. On Sundays, when not absent 
 from Hawthornden, he would be in his place in Lasswade 
 Church to hear Mr. Porteous preach ; and on week-days there 
 would be the proper interchange of courtesies between Haw- 
 thornden House and Mr. Porteous's modest manse, where 
 his wife, Christian Symsone, presided among their rather 
 numerous children. Nor, in that comparatively easy-going
 
 296 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 time, had there been any greater variance, on ecclesiastical 
 grounds, between Drummond and neighbours of his living 
 beyond the bounds of Mr. Porteous's parish, in any other of 
 the parishes of the same Presbytery of Dalkeith. Newbattle, 
 for example, is one of these parishes, bordering on Lasswade ; 
 and in this parish was Newbattle Abbey, the chief seat of the 
 Lothian family, with two generations of whose representatives 
 Drummond had been on most friendly relations. A letter of 
 his, undated, but probably written some fifteen or sixteen years 
 before our present date, and accompanying a gift of some music- 
 books, is one "to Annabella, Countess of Lothian," i.e., that 
 Annabella Campbell, sister of the great Earl and Marquis of 
 Argyle, who had married Robert Kerr, 2nd Earl of Lothian. 
 The letter is in so pretty a strain, and reminds us so pleasantly 
 of those calmer days of Drummond's life Avhich had now for 
 ever passed, that it may be here quoted — 
 
 " Madam, 
 
 " As those ancients who, when they had given over 
 with credit any faculty wherein they excelled, were wont to offer 
 the tools and implements of their art to the shrine of some 
 deity, — my musical recreations giving place to more laborious 
 and serious (my lute these many days, like my mind, lying out 
 of tune, keeping no harmony in perfect discord,) — I offer these 
 Airs and Tablature to your Ladyship's harmonious virtues • 
 and to whom could they more deservedly appertain than unto 
 her whose goodness of nature and eminent known virtues of 
 mind may justly entitle her the only Grace and' Muse of our 
 northern climate ? Though the gift be not much worth, I hope 
 your Ladyship will deign to accept it, as if it were a greater and 
 more precious, from a giver brought already in admiration of 
 your Ladyship's worth, and who desireth nothing more than to 
 remain 
 
 " Your Ladyship's to command, 
 
 "W. Drummond." 
 
 The Countess of Lothian here addressed had become a 
 widow by the death of her husband in 1624, and had since
 
 JEtat. 53-54. XEWBATTLE HOUSE. 297 
 
 then gone to reside in France;* and the Countess of Lothian 
 in possession of the title and of the Xewbattle property at the 
 time at which we are now arrived was her eldest daughter, 
 Anne. This lady, her father having left no male heir, was 
 Countess of Lothian in her own right ; and it had been in 
 consequence of her marriage with her distant relative, William 
 Kerr, eldest son of Drummond's friend, Sir Robert Kerr of 
 Ancram, that that young man had, as we have seen, been 
 himself created Earl of Lothian in 1631, two years before his 
 father received a similar honour by being created Earl of 
 Ancram. The Ancram peerage, it had been arranged, was to 
 descend to the Earl of Ancram's male heirs bv his second wife, 
 Lady Anne Stanley, of the English family of the Derbys, with 
 remainder to the elder or Lothian branch only in case of the 
 failure of such heirs in the junior. There is no doubt that, as 
 Drummond kept up his old friendship with Ancram, now more 
 fixed than ever in England by his second marriage, so a portion 
 
 * This Annabella, Countess of Lothian, is described by Scot of Scots- 
 tarvet, in his Staggering Stat . a woman of a masculine spirit, but 
 
 Highland-faced;" and he relates a mysterious scandal of which she was 
 the subject in connexion with " a young gentleman called William Douglas 
 of Tofts, the grandson of James, Earl of Morton [the famous Regent 
 Morton, beheaded 1581], a man of a brave personage and of a notable 
 spirit " — which scandal rose to its height in March, 1624, when her husband, 
 Robert, 2nd Earl of Lothian, "was found lying in his own chamber with 
 his throat cut. never man knowing who was the author of that wicked 
 deed." (The Presbyterian historian Calderwood, writing nearer the event, 
 speaks of it as undoubtedly an act of suicide, deliberately committed by the 
 Earl in a room in Xewbattle House, where -he had shut himself up for the 
 purpose). Scotstarvet adds that, at the time of his writing, i.e., about or 
 after the Restoration, the Countess was still living in France, and also that 
 the William Douglas associated with her in the scandal had gone to 
 
 Holland, "where shortly thereafter he was killed at a siege." 1 may 
 
 here note, among Drummond's letters, one printed in his Works, 
 (p. 144) without any indication of the person to whom it wa- ed. 
 
 It begins, " Should you think to escape the enemy of virtue, Fortune, when 
 " she never spareth the most worthy? Who hath ever yet in many excel - 
 " lencies been eminent whom she hath not, either after one fashion or 
 "another, if not trampled, yet tossed?" Examples to this effect are then 
 given. "You have Sidney cropped in the vigour of his youth by a 
 "murdering bullet, Raleigh brought to a fatal scaffold, La Xoue with the 
 " Marquis D'Urfe complaining in miserable prisons, Tasso famishing in the 
 " like thraldom, the two Counts of Mirandula spectacles of pity and cruelty,
 
 298 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 of the life-long intimacy transferred itself to Ancram's son and 
 daughter-in-law, William, Earl of Lothian, and the Countess 
 Anne, his close neighbours at Newbattle. 
 
 The Service-book Revolt, the National Covenant, and the 
 proscription of all forms of Episcopacy in Scotland by the 
 Glasgow Assembly of 1638, had very much disturbed the rela- 
 tions that had existed among neighbours and friends so long as 
 the differences on the kirk-question were more moderate or more 
 easily concealed. Presbyterianism, having been restored to 
 full possession, was resuming its rights of discipline over its sub- 
 jects, in their districts and localities, through the action of Pres- 
 byteries and the kirk-sessions of individual parishes. Especially 
 in a parish or Presbytery where the minister or group of minis- 
 ters went strongly with the new current of affairs, persons dis- 
 affected to the Covenant and its consequences would find them- 
 selves marked out for censure and suspicion. Now, Mr. Por- 
 teous of Lasswade, as one who had not only been a Presby- 
 terian when Presbyterianism was under a cloud, but had recently 
 had the honour of assisting in the triumph of Presbytery as one 
 
 " the one by too soon a death (if death can be too soon), the other by 
 " being assassinated by his dearest kinsman." After another sentence or two 
 of moralising, the letter concludes, "We may doubt whether excellencies and 
 " heroical virtues were to be desired, with so many dangers and miseries 
 "lackeying them, or a home-bred, untaught, and rude plebeian life." 
 Evidently the letter is one of sympathy with some man of spirit under some 
 misfortune. Mr. David Laing having found from the Hawthornden 
 MSS. that the person addressed was "Sir W. Duglasse" {Arch. Scot., IV. 
 98), I had concluded that he was probably Sir William Douglas of Cavers, 
 and that the letter referred to a temporary arrest of that gentleman, with 
 some risk to him, when he was in London as co-Commissioner for the 
 Covenanters with the Earl of Loudoun in 1640. In this faith, I had 
 reserved the letter for insertion in that connexion, mentioning Douglas of 
 Cavers incidentally beforehand as one of Drummond's friends and corres- 
 pondents {ante p. 216). I now surmise, however, that the "Sir W. 
 Duglasse" of the letter was the "William Douglas of Tofts" of Scotstarvet's 
 mysterious stoiy, and that it may have been written about 1624 and had 
 some reference to that story. I am confirmed in this by having observed 
 that in a list of Drummond's correspondents prefixed to the preserved 
 scrolls of his letters (Hawthornden MSS., Vol. IX.) the name " Wm. 
 Douglas of Tofts" occurs, but not that of Douglas of Cavers. Except 
 the letter in question, I have not found any one in the collection appear- 
 ing to be addressed to Douglas of Tofts.
 
 sEtat. 53-54. THE EARL OF LOTHIAN. 299 
 
 of the clerical deputies from his district to the Glasgow As- 
 sembly, was not likely to be remiss in the exercise of any new 
 powers of suasion or remonstrance which the change had given 
 him over his parishioners. And who had been the ruling-elder 
 or lay representative sent by the same Presbytery of Dalkeith to 
 the same Glasgow Assembly, along with Mr. Porteous and its 
 two other clerical representatives, Mr. James Robertson of 
 Cranstoun, and Mr. Oliver Colt of Inveresk? Who but the 
 young Earl of Lothian, Drummond's neighbour of Newbattle ? 
 This young nobleman, in fact, had become a leading Covenanter, 
 associated with his wife's uncle, the Earl of Argyle, and with 
 the other chiefs, in all their counsels ; and to him more espe- 
 cially had been assigned the charge of the interests of the Cove- 
 nant in the region south of Edinburgh lying round Newbattle 
 and Dalkeith. A rupture had thus taken place between him and 
 his father, the Earl of Ancram, which was to continue for the 
 rest of their lives, Ancram remaining in England as the faithful 
 courtier of Charles, while Lothian became more and more pro- 
 minent in Scotland in the opposite part he had chosen. Any 
 cognisance which Lothian, in the name of the Covenanting com- 
 mittee of his region, might be called on to take of Drummond's 
 very unsatisfactory conduct in the crisis that had arrived would, 
 doubtless, be as courteous and respectful as the circumstances 
 permitted. It is to be remembered, however, that Lothian 
 himself, if not also Mr. Porteous and the rest of the Dalkeith 
 Presbytery, was under orders from head-quarters, and that, with 
 an immediate invasion of Scotland threatened by the king at the 
 head of an English army, the Covenanting powers at head-quar- 
 ters could not stand on ceremony. Any laird or lord in the south 
 of Scotland who had abstained from taking the Covenant, espe- 
 cially if he were a man of name and influence, was, ipso facto, to be 
 regarded as an enemy of the national cause, and a friendly expec- 
 tant of the coming invasion. Not that, as yet, the Covenanters had 
 adopted the policy of requiring all their countrymen, by actual 
 force, to take the Covenant. Sorely as they had been tempted
 
 300 DRUMMOND OF IIAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 to that course by the knowledge that Scotsmen in London were 
 compelled by the English Home Office to disown the Covenant 
 and the Glasgow Assembly, and that Wentworth was more 
 rigorously enforcing the same test upon the Scots in Ireland, 
 they had hitherto refrained from so violent a strain upon 
 private conscience. It was the ardent young Montrose, it is 
 believed, that first introduced that questionable method of re- 
 cruiting for the Covenanting cause, when, in the course of his 
 terrible chastisement of the Prelatic Aberdonians (March 30 — 
 April 10, 1639), he collected them like sheep and made them 
 swear to the Covenant under pain of confiscation of all their 
 goods ; and not even then did the act meet with the general 
 approbation of his colleagues of the Tables. For months and 
 months, however, there had been moral pressure of all kinds ; 
 and, now that war was imminent, the pressure had naturally 
 became more general and severe. A nation going to war could 
 have little patience with individual shilly-shallying. Hence, 
 whoever remained a non-Covenanter, or did not profess himself 
 an adherent to the Glasgow Assembly, was a tainted man, a 
 Prelatist, a Malignant, an object of suspicion to his neighbours, 
 and, if he were of sufficient importance, to the Covenanting ex- 
 ecutive itself. The Laird of Hawthornden could not escape 
 some such notoriety. With all respect for him on account of his 
 character generally, and his fame as a man of letters, the 
 Covenanting government could not but have their eye upon 
 him. Hawthornden was not a place of military importance ; 
 but, at a time when it was deemed necessary to seize the chief 
 castles, and to search the houses of suspected noblemen and 
 gentlemen in the south of Scotland, might not a visit to Haw- 
 thornden, if only for an inspection of the papers there, be a 
 natural precaution? And, if the chiefs argued so, the populace, 
 of course, outwent them. With the very country-people of 
 his own parish of Lasswade, as we fancy, looking at him 
 askance, and the Edinburgh mob ready for any mischief in 
 the guise of a demonstration for the Covenant, Drummond
 
 /Etat 53-54. SQUIBS IN VERSE. 301 
 
 was hardly safe within his new house, or in his comings and 
 goings between it and the city. Ut honesto otio quiesceret had 
 been his purpose in building the new house, and lo ! hardly 
 had he been in it when there was this Presbyterian hurri- 
 cane ! What a difference from the old quiet days of King 
 James, when one could walk all the way into Edinburgh, and 
 down the High Street to Andro Hart's shop, saluted everywhere 
 with respect and smiles ! 
 
 To such a pass of actual danger had this social pressure come 
 that Drummond had to do as others were doing, and give in his 
 adhesion to the majority. Here is one of his metrical scraps, 
 recording the hard reason : — 
 
 " The King good subjects cannot save. Then tell 
 Which is the best, to obey or to rebel." 
 
 And here seems to be the burst of wrath with which he secretly 
 consoled himself : — 
 
 " Give me a thousand Covenants, I'll subscrive 
 Them all, or more, if more ye can contrive 
 Of rage and malice ; and let every one 
 Black Treason bear, not bare Rebellion. 
 I'll not be mocked, hissed, plundered, banished hence, 
 
 For more years standing for a Prince ! 
 
 His castles all are taken, and his crown, 
 His sword and sceptre, ensigns of renown, 
 With that Lieutenant fame did so extol, 
 And captives carried to the Capitol. 
 I'll not die martyr for a mortal thing : 
 Enough to be confessor for a King I" 
 
 This epigram contains its own date. The reference in it is to 
 the taking of Dalkeith Palace on Sunday the 22nd of March, 
 1639, by a band of a thousand armed Covenanters, led by the 
 Earls of Rothes, Home, and Lothian, and Lords Yester, St. 
 Clair, and Balmerino. Edinburgh Castle had been seized the 
 day before, and other castles and places of strength were being 
 seized about the same time in other parts of Scotland ; but this
 
 3 o2 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 taking of Dalkeith Palace was particularly impressive from the 
 fact that the keeper who surrendered it was Traquair himself, 
 " that lieutenant fame did so extol," and who was now the 
 King's chief minister in Scotland, and also from the fact that 
 among the spoil taken from the Palace were the Scottish regalia, 
 or, as the annalist Balfour calls them, " the royal ensigns of the 
 kingdom, crown, sword, and sceptre." They were conveyed the 
 same night to Edinburgh Castle — " the Capitol," as Drum- 
 mond calls it — and deposited there with great ceremony. 
 After that, Drummond means to say, what could a man do ? 
 Was one to stand out longer, and be mocked, hissed, plundered, 
 
 and perhaps banished, for a Prince (does the blank cover 
 
 some disrespectful epithet?) whose own chief minister had 
 succumbed, and who could not save even his own regalia ? 
 
 The inference is that Drummond did stand out no longer, 
 but did, in the last week of March, or early in April, subscribe 
 the Covenant, whether in his own parish of Lasswade, or 
 elsewhere within the bounds of the Dalkeith Presbytery, or 
 more publicly in Edinburgh. If so, it must have been a great 
 relief to Scotstarvet and others of his best friends, already more 
 or less zealous on that side, and anxious to have him with 
 them for his own sake and on public grounds. 
 
 If Drummond had now signed, however, he had signed, as 
 the above verses intimate, with a mental reservation. By no 
 reasonable construction of his duty as a subject did he think 
 himself bound to play the part of ??iartyr for a King whose 
 power was gone, and who was after all persisting in a cause 
 which no Scottish mortal, except the deposed Bishops and 
 their clients, regarded as of vital interest. But, if he would not 
 be a martyr for Charles in these circumstances, he would not 
 cease to be a confessor for him. By tongue and pen, so far as 
 opportunity offered, he would still maintain Charles's royal 
 prerogative — his right even to do wrong. What though one had 
 taken the Covenant? It was a document susceptible of various 
 interpretations. It had been drawn up nine months before the
 
 sEtat. 53-54. SQUIBS IN PROSE. 303 
 
 Glasgow Assembly, and when Limited Episcopacy was perhaps 
 the utmost dream of many who signed it; and, though the 
 total abolition of Episcopacy, the recognition of the Glasgow 
 Assembly, and the right of war in defence of its proceedings, 
 were now regarded as involved in the Covenant, these were but 
 the glosses and comments of the prevailing faction. It might 
 be a fair argument that the Covenant itself did not contemplate 
 or authorise war against the King in circumstances as they 
 now were. 
 
 In illustration of Drummond's peculiar state of mind at this 
 moment, when he found himself a Pseudo-Covenanter, or 
 Covenanter by compulsion, adhering publicly to the Covenanting 
 Government in their preparations to resist Charles, but privately 
 abhorring the whole business, there are several short papers 
 of his, the scrolls of which remain yet among the Hawthornden 
 MSS. Though not printed till 17 n, when they were inserted 
 immediately after his Irene in the Edinburgh Edition of his 
 Works, and though any use of them in their MS. form at the 
 time when they were written must have been very limited indeed, 
 some small circulation of them at that time among Drummond's 
 friends may be supposed. Let us take them, however, simply 
 as Drummond's colloquies with himself at this juncture of his 
 life, and describe them briefly in that character: — 
 
 The first is entitled The Magical Mirror; or, A Declaration 
 upon the Rising of the Noblemen, Barons, Gentlemen, and 
 Burgesses, in Arms, April 1, 1639 ; or, rather, that is the title 
 of the main portion, while an appendix or conclusion bears the 
 
 separate title of Queries of State. Any one coming upon this 
 
 double-barrelled production of Drummond's, as it stands in his 
 collected Works, would be puzzled what to make of it. The 
 first part, which is much the larger, consists of a gravely-argued 
 manifesto in the name of the Covenanting leaders and in 
 favour of their policy. " Forasmuch," it begins, " as 
 " evil-affected and malicious spirits, which, denying verities, 
 " throw dust in the eyes of the weak and simpler sort, may
 
 304 DRUMMOND OF HAIVTHORNDEN. 
 
 " sinistrously interpret and calumniate the resolution which we 
 " have taken for the preservation of our Religion, Persons, and 
 " Estates, by resisting and opposing ourselves to the open 
 " violence, secret plots and mines, of the troublers of the Peace 
 " of this Realm : to remove all offence, and whatever may cast 
 " a shadow of disloyalty on our demeanour towards our Prince, 
 " or breed jealousies in our neighbour country of our inten- 
 " tions towards them, We have determined to publish this 
 " Declaration, and manifest to all the world the just occasion 
 " and sincerity of our actions and proceedings." Accordingly, 
 the manifesto goes on to express the reasons of the Covenan- 
 ters, very much as they would have been expressed by one of 
 the ablest of themselves, doing his very best. So fine is the 
 irony that, save for a turn of the phraseology here and there, it 
 would never be perceived that there is irony at all, or that the 
 manifesto is not exactly what it professes to be. Indeed, it 
 may be questioned whether the mood of the writer was that of 
 mere irony. It rather is as if Drummond had set himself to 
 the exercise of conceiving as fairly as possible the arguments 
 which the Covenanters might use in opposition to himself and 
 others, and considering the best form in which they could be 
 put. That he thought he had succeeded is indicated by the 
 very title — The Magical Mirror— given to the piece. The 
 -Covenanters, he meant, could not deny that here their cause 
 was truly represented, that here they might behold their own 
 faces in perfect reflection. If there is a visible touch of irony 
 anywhere, it is where he imagines how the Covenanters would 
 meet the doctrine of absolute or passive obedience, which 
 was so axiomatic with himself, and which had been ur°-ed 
 against the Covenanters at this time by others, especially the 
 Prelatic doctors of Aberdeen. " This duty of Obedience," he 
 makes the Covenanters say, "being a part of Justice, that 
 " queen and mother of other Virtues, by which is determined 
 " and judged what to every one doth duly appertain, it is found 
 "clear and certain that, to be truly just in Obedience, it is not
 
 Mtat. 53-54. SQUIBS IN PROSE. 305 
 
 " enough to be always and ever in everything obedient, but 
 " that we ought to measure, examine, and discern the degrees : 
 " Obedience, as all other virtues, being situated between two 
 " extremities, the too much and the too little, the passing over 
 " of either of which may corrupt the virtue and make it degene- 
 " rate into a vice ; they being only preserved by the medioc- 
 "rity." After a little more in the same strain, the Covenanters 
 are made to assure their countrymen and the rest of the world 
 that they have avoided the error, too frequent in the past, of 
 obeying too much, and are endeavouring " to keep the golden 
 mediocrity in Obedience." But, through the rest of the mani- 
 festo, for all that appears, it might be Argyle, or Rothes, or 
 Alexander Henderson himself, that is speaking. Thus : — " If 
 " we should obey the King without exception of God, then the 
 " commandment of a Prince should be greater than the com- 
 "mandment of God, and in the Oath of Fidelity and Obedience 
 " which the subject sweareth to the Prince the greater Power, 
 " to wit God, is not excepted ; which is absolute impiety. If 
 "• Religion be not a sufficient cause to excuse the subject in 
 " rising in arms against their Prince, it follows that a Prince is 
 " sovereign and supreme in Religion, and that he may appoint, 
 " ordain, and dispose what gods he pleaseth to have wor- 
 " shipped, what altars erected, what sacrifices instituted ; which 
 " is to open a gate to idolatry and all impiety. If there be not 
 " a law amongst men to excuse the taking of arms against a 
 " Prince, then may a Prince play the Caligula, Nero, Com- 
 " modus, — pervert, destroy, turn upside-down all things, accord- 
 " ing to his pleasure. The consequent holds; for, if the Prince 
 " will do it, and the People may not nor should not resist him, 
 
 " the Prince by force and violence will obtain it." It 
 
 is difficult to think that Drummond could have penned all this 
 without feeling its force ; and one does not, up to this point, 
 see what purpose he could have had in the document, unless 
 it were his own amusement in his study, or the mystification of 
 any one that might examine his papers. Perhaps, indeed, 
 
 u
 
 3 o6 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 some mystification of this kind was his immediate intention, 
 and it may have been afterwards that, not to carry the mystifi- 
 cation too far, he appended what now forms the conclusion of 
 the piece. That conclusion is introduced by a note, thus : — 
 " The Magical Mirror having in it the most weighty of those 
 " arguments by which those who opposed the just and lawful 
 "government could endeavour to justify their rebellious pro- 
 " ceedings, and not being answered within the body of the dis- 
 " course (though the title clears the author's design), I think 
 "these Queries of State, immediately subjoined, will fully 
 " answer the strength of what is said." There follow, accord- 
 ingly, nearly thirty rough practical Queries, calculated to break 
 down the preceding casuistry, however plausible. One query 
 is, "If it be not Anabaptism to preach the overthrow of the 
 authority of Princes?"; another is, "If external ceremonies, or 
 the diversity of the discipline of the Church, be jnsta belli 
 causa for subjects to take arms against their native kings?"; a 
 third is, " If a civil war be to be preferred to the Government 
 of Bishops in the Church, or Episcopacy?"; a fourth is, "If 
 they who have subscribed the Covenant be obliged to fight for 
 matters not set down in it, or ambiguously and by equivoca- 
 tion understood, and by appendices and commenting sup- 
 posed?"; and a fifth, varying the last, is, "If the oath of the 
 Covenant obligeth the subscribers to adhere to all the articles 
 that shall be concluded in General Assemblies, and to fight for 
 them ? " Two of the other queries run thus : " Whether this 
 war may not renew the old national quarrels between Scotland 
 and England, and divide the Island in itself, to be a 
 prey to foreign conquest?"; "Whether these great commo- 
 tions and discords may not dissolve in belhun servile, and 
 peasants, clowns, farmers, base people, all in arms, may 
 not swallow the nobles and gentry, invest their possessions, 
 adhere together by a new Covenant, and follow our example." 
 These are interesting indications of the nature of Drum- 
 mond's conservative fears; but, on the whole, the Queries do
 
 jEtat. 53-54. SQUIBS IN PROSE. 307 
 
 not take much strength away from the document to which 
 they are appended. 
 
 A second paper of Drummond's, dated "May 2, 1639," is 
 entitled, A Speech to the Noblemen, Barons, Gentlemen, 6rc, who 
 have leagued themselves for the Defence of the Religion and 
 Liberty of Scotland. It is a direct address or letter, in 
 which Drummond, " like another Cassandra," as he himself 
 says, forewarns his "Dear Countrymen" of the horrors and woes 
 into which they are plunging. One passage in it was con- 
 sidered by Drummond's old biographer of 1 7 1 1 to be so great 
 a hit that he invites attention to it in his memoir of Drummond 
 as nothing less than a prophecy, and indeed ventures to 
 substitute the word "Prophecy" for the word "Speech" in 
 Drummond's title of the piece itself. " During these miseries," 
 says Drummond, " of which the troublers of the State shall 
 " make their profit, there will arise perhaps one who will name 
 " himself Protector of the Liberty of the Kingdom. He shall 
 " surcharge the people with greater miseries than ever before 
 " they did suffer. He shall be the Protector of the Church, 
 " himself being without soul or conscience, without letters, or 
 "great knowledge; under the shadow of piety and zeal shall he 
 " commit thousand impieties, and in the end shall essay to 
 " make himself King, and under pretext of reformation bring 
 " about confusion." Here, the old biographer meant to say, 
 was Cromwell predicted to the life, some years before his advent, 
 by the studious seer of Hawthornden ! Was there ever such 
 an example of the foresight of genius? The reader may judge 
 for himself. Cromwell was at that moment walking about 
 the fields near Ely, a man of forty years of age, full of deep 
 Puritan thoughts, and of such passionate mutterings of them 
 that neighbours and kinsmen marvelled, but with only the 
 vaguest expectations as yet raised in him, or in them, of what 
 might be coming for England out of all this tumult in Scotland. 
 No such man was then within the range of Drummond's con- 
 ceptions; and he was not thinking of England at all. His
 
 3 o8 
 
 DRUM MO ND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 thoughts were confined to the possibilities within his own 
 rugged and stern little Scotland, amid which the rise of an 
 Argyle or some other astute noble to the titular Dictatorship or 
 Protectorate did not appear an absurd conjecture. 
 
 There are two other brief things of Drummond's, which, 
 though undated, seem to have been written about the same time. 
 One is a fragment, called The Idea, the intention of which was 
 to trace the commotions in Britain to the agency of the Roman 
 Catholic or Imperialist party on the continent, and especially 
 to the recent intrigues of France and Richelieu. Starting with 
 this notion, he proceeds to a set of chronological jottings of 
 recent facts in England, but chiefly in Scotland, which might 
 bear it out. He gets no further, however, than the Jenny 
 Geddes Riot, the Marquis of Hamilton's mission, and the 
 Glasgow Assembly. The other paper, entitled The Load Star, 
 or Directory to the New World and Transformations, must have 
 been written after the last faint hopes of an accommodation were 
 over, and Leslie's army was already on march. It is in a spirit 
 of crabbed criticism, and takes the form of a series of directions 
 supposed to embody the policy of the Covenanters. Thus 
 "All shall be sworn to obey what is decreed in General 
 Assembly, and for that to expose their estates, persons, and 
 what they hold dearest ; " " The Bishoprics shall be distributed 
 to the Noblemen and Courtiers ; " " The Nobles, if the King 
 awake out of his lethargy, shall make choice of a General to 
 defend the good cause against him, who shall have the title of 
 His Excellency ;" "That all who are of a contrary mind and 
 differing in opinion from us be marked and sequestrated from 
 coming near the Army ; " " To beat down and raze to the 
 ground the castles and strongholds of all gentlemen and others 
 of the contrary party ; " " That preachers be chosen, the fittest 
 in the Presbyteries, for the army, not too learned, but men who 
 have greater fancy than judgment, vehement and zealous in 
 their utterance."
 
 sEtat. $y$4- LESLIE AT DUNSE LA IV. 309 
 
 None of these caricatures or more serious dissuasives of Drum- 
 mond's, as we have explained, can have had any general 
 circulation. They must have been confined to his own writing- 
 desk, or have gone about only within a very limited circle 
 of friends. In fact, while Drummond was still grumbling and 
 prophesying, the war which he would fain have stopped had been 
 not only begun, but concluded. For The First Bishops 1 War, as 
 it is called in British History, was a very brief affair. An English 
 fleet under the Marquis of Hamilton being already in possession 
 of the Forth while Drummond was writing his dissuasives, the 
 King had come gradually north himself, with his reluctant 
 English army of some 24,000 men, commanded in chief by the 
 Earl of Arundel, with the Earl of Essex as Lieutenant-General, 
 and the Earl of Holland as Master of Horse ; and on the 28th 
 of May, 1639, this army was at Berwick-on-Tweed, close to the 
 Scottish frontier. To feel the way for it, there were two little 
 raids of invading detachments into Scotland — one as far as 
 Dunse, in Berwickshire, on the night of the 31st of May, led by 
 Arundel in person ; the other, on the 3rd of June, in the neigh- 
 bourhood of Kelso, in Roxburghshire, led by the Earl of 
 Holland. These ended in instant retreats. For the Scots, 
 on their side, were quite ready ; and on the 4th of June, that 
 the King might see them, Leslie encamped his main army, of 
 about the same size as the King's, on Dunse Law, a hill six or 
 seven miles from the English position. With but that distance 
 between them, the two armies stood gazing at each other, 
 Leslie, as in duty bound, leaving the King the option of 
 moving first and bringing on the consequences. The more the 
 King gazed, the less he liked the look of things. He had, in 
 short, to come to the conclusion that, with such an army as he 
 had, ill-disciplined, ill-provided, and all but mutinous, a battle 
 with Leslie would be certain defeat. It was accordingly 
 conveyed to the Scottish army that his Majesty, if properly 
 solicited, would condescend to treat. Quite as ready for that 
 alternative as for fighting, the Scots made no difficulty about the
 
 3io 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 solicitation required ; and on June 6th there began a negotiation, 
 the King himself taking part, which ended on the 18th in the 
 so-called Pacification of Birks. The King, on his side, 
 yielded all the demands of the Scots, not exactly in the 
 retrospective form of a recognition of what had been done by 
 the Tables and by the Glasgow Assembly, but in the substan- 
 tially equivalent form of a consent that the affairs of Scotland 
 should for the future be regulated by free annual Assem- 
 blies of the Kirk and free Parliaments, the first such Assem- 
 bly and the first such Parliament to meet within two 
 months, and his Majesty himself to be present in both if 
 possible. The Scots, on their side, agreed to surrender back 
 
 the King's castles and forts in Scotland. No sooner was 
 
 the Treaty over than the King became so gloomy, moody, and 
 snappish to everybody about him, that it could be plainly seen 
 he did not mean to let the peace last long. After about a 
 month more spent at Berwick, he returned to London, leaving 
 the Scots to hold their Assembly and Parliament as they best 
 could without him. His poor disbanded soldiers had mean- 
 while gone to their homes in different parts of England, each 
 horse-soldier with four pounds, and each foot-soldier with forty 
 shillings, for travelling expenses. 
 
 What share had Drummond had personally in that great 
 military mustering of the Scots, culminating in the spectacle 
 of Leslie's brave army of resistance at Dunse Law, by" 
 which Charles had been thus ignominiously foiled, the First 
 Bishops War closed ere it had commenced, and the cause of 
 the Covenant and Scottish Presbyterianism apparently secured ? 
 That he must have contributed in some form or another is 
 certain. All Scotland had been taxed for the enterprise by the 
 Covenanting Government, and the rate at which the Laird of 
 Havvthornden was taxed must have been considerable. If the 
 story of his old biographer is true, he must have been rated, in 
 a peculiar fashion, at a certain number of men for Leslie's army.
 
 &tat. 53.54. THE MARQUIS OF DOUGLAS. 311 
 
 " He was a great cavalier, and much addicted to the King's 
 " party," says this authority, "yet was forced to send men to the 
 "army which fought against the King; and, his estate lying 
 "in three different shires, he had not occasion to send one 
 " entire man, but halves and quarters, and such like fractions : 
 "upon which he wrote extempore the following verses to his 
 " Majesty — 
 
 " Of all these forces raised against the King 
 'Tis my strange hap not one whole man to bring : 
 From diverse parishes yet diverse men ; 
 But all in halves and quarters. Great King, then, 
 In halves and quarters if they come 'gainst thee, 
 In halves and quarters 9end them back to me.'' 
 
 The bit of doggerel represents credibly enough Drummond's 
 feelings, though in his heart, there is no doubt, he did 
 not desire any such savage execution among the poor fellows 
 he had sent to Dunse Law, nor wish, after all, to see the King 
 enter Scotland after any bloody battle. But what of Drummond's 
 own soldiering ? He was liable to personal service, if required : 
 had any such been required of him ? On this point we have 
 some information, though but vague and incidental, in two 
 preserved letters of Drummond's, the interest of which other- 
 wise is wholly of a literary kind. 
 
 High among the Scottish nobility at this time was William 
 Douglas, first Marquis of Douglas, who had been raised to that 
 dignity by Charles in his Coronation Visit of 1633, after having 
 been known for a good many years by his inherited title of 
 Earl of Angus. High by his rank, he was higher still as the 
 chief living representative of the great historical family of the 
 
 Scottish Douglases. "Who has the credit of this day?" 
 
 asked the old Scottish King Solvathius of his general, after 
 that great battle, fought some time in 770, in which Donald 
 Bane or White Donald, with his horde from the Western Isles, 
 was defeated and slain, and the Kingdom was saved for 
 Solvathius. " Sholto Du-glas " (" Behold that dark-grey man ")
 
 312 £>R UMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 said the conscientious general, pointing to a warrior then stand- 
 ing modestly in the royal presence, who had been observed to 
 fling himself into the battle, no one knew whence, at the very 
 moment of crisis, and with such effect that it was unanimously 
 agreed that he had won the victory. The "dark-grey man," 
 continues the myth, was rewarded with lands in Clydesdale ; 
 and, settling there, he became the progenitor of the Douglases. 
 And what a race ! 
 
 " So many so good as of Douglas blood have been 
 Of one surname in one Kingrick never yet were seen." 
 
 First, there were the Knights, Lords, and Earls of Douglas 
 proper, patriots of the earlier days of authentic Scottish History, 
 king-makers, king-quellers, their strong hands wound in all 
 the affairs of the kingdom for generation after generation, till 
 their special line became extinct in James, the 9th Earl of 
 Douglas, who died in 1488, his Estates and Earldom having 
 been already forfeited to King James III. Then the main 
 tradition of the family passed, with the Clydesdale Estates, to 
 the Angus branch of it, already powerful for a century in their 
 independent Earldom, and so conspicuous latterly, in rivalry 
 with the senior house, that it had been said that the Red 
 Douglases were putting down the Black. Archibald, 5th Earl 
 of Angus, commonly known as " Bell-the-Cat " or " the Great 
 Earl," was the head of the Angus house when this complete 
 transference happened ; and from him the Douglas tradition 
 was transmitted in pretty direct succession through three more 
 Earls of Angus, all potent in the Douglas style in the politics 
 of their country. In 1588, however, when Archibald, the 
 8th Earl, called also " the good Earl," died, they had to find 
 the next heir among the Douglases of Glenbervie, descendants 
 of the second son of Archibald Bell-the-Cat. William Douglas 
 of Glenbervie, great-grandson of Bell-the-Cat, had thus become 
 9th Earl of Angus (1588-1591); his son William was 10th 
 Earl (1591-1616); and so we arrive at our present William, the
 
 <s£tat. S3S4- THE MARQUIS OF DOUGLAS. 313 
 
 nth Earl, raised to the Marquisate of Douglas in 1633. 
 His elevation to the Marquisate had been but a ratification of 
 the precedence already accorded to the Earls of Angus as re- 
 presenting all the complex and immemorial fame of the 
 Douglases ; for, on his father's accession to the Earldom in 
 1 59 1, a charter of James VI. had recognised the right of the 
 Earls of Angus to the first place and the first vote in the 
 Scottish Parliament, with the privilege of bearing the crown 
 there, and the honour of leading the van of the Scottish army 
 in battle. Nevertheless, the Marquisate was useful. For was 
 there not a third old Douglas Earldom, that of Morton, illustrious 
 through some who had held it, and especially through Regent 
 Morton, the fourth Earl, who was himself a scion of the house 
 of Angus? Nay, had not Charles himself in 1633 created a 
 fourth Douglas Earldom by making the Douglas who was then 
 Viscount Drumlanrig Earl of Queensberry, while another 
 Douglas, an offshoot from the Morton stem, had been raised 
 to the Viscountcy of Belhaven ? Did not the title of Marquis 
 of Douglas happily signalize the headship of the Angus Douglas 
 over even these other Douglases of the Scottish Peerage, as 
 well as over many Douglas families of inferior rank ? 
 
 The Marquis of Douglas, it appears, maintained suitably the 
 splendour of his position. "As he was master of a most plenti- 
 "ful fortune, so he kept up the old Scots hospitality and 
 " grandeur at his Castle of Douglas, where he usually resided, 
 "having perhaps a more numerous family and attendants than 
 "any nobleman in the kingdom." He had been twice married. 
 By his first wife, Margaret, daughter of Claud Hamilton, Lord 
 Paisley, the ancestor of the Abercorn family, he had two sons 
 and three daughters ; by his second, Mary, daughter of the 
 great Marquis of Huntly, he had three sons and five daughters. 
 The eldest son by the first marriage, now Archibald Earl of 
 Angus and heir-apparent to the Marquisate, was already of 
 sufficient age to be acting as one of the Scottish Privy Council ; 
 the eldest daughter was the young widow of the lately deceased
 
 3i4 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Lord Alexander, the Earl of Stirling's son ; but most of the other 
 children of both marriages were living with the Marquis and his 
 second Marchioness in Douglas Castle. This famous mansion, 
 the "Castle Dangerous" of Scott's last novel, was on the banks 
 of the Douglas Water, in Lanarkshire, where one solitary frag- 
 ment of it still exists, beside a great new Castle of Douglas begun 
 about a hundred years ago, but never finished. Close to the 
 Castle, in the town or village of Douglas, was the old Church of 
 St. Bride, in the vault of which were piled one above another 
 the stone or lead coffins of the dead Douglases of many genera- 
 tions, while in the choir above were their sculptured effigies and 
 monuments, including one of "The Good Sir James," the 
 companion of King Robert Bruce, who had died in 1330, fight- 
 ing with the Moors in Spain, as he was carrying the heart of 
 Bruce to the Holy Land. 
 
 Dead, indeed, now all that was best of the Douglases ! It 
 was rather as a dignitary among his countrymen than as an 
 active chief amongst them that the present Lord of Douglas 
 Castle lived. He had taken his high ceremonial part in the 
 Parliament of 1633 which graced Charles's coronation; but 
 otherwise he appeared little in public affairs. The reason may 
 have been that he was precluded from active politics by his 
 religion. His father, the 10th Earl of Angus, a studious and 
 scholarly man, had become a Roman Catholic in his later years, 
 had gone into exile in consequence, and had died in France as 
 a devotee to the Old Church; and, if the Marquis had avoided 
 very open profession of the same faith, he seems gradually to 
 have tended to it, and to have become confirmed in it after his 
 marriage with his second wife, of the great Roman Catholic house 
 of the Huntley Gordons. Overt or even suspect Roman Ca- 
 tholicism was a bar from public employment, even before the 
 Presbyterian Revolt of 1638 and the renewed zeal for Pro- 
 testantism which it brought about ; and the Marquis had 
 acquiesced in this, and had been willing that (by an arrangement 
 often found convenient in those days) the conformity necessary
 
 ^Etat. S3-54- THE MARQUIS OF DOUGLAS. 3^ 
 
 to link the family to the existing powers and to public affairs 
 should be given rather by his eldest son and heir, the Earl of 
 Augus, than by himself. When, however, the question came to 
 be between loyalty to Charles and adhesion to the Covenanting 
 Government of Scotland, then surely it might have been expected 
 that the Marquis would step forth for the King. Roman 
 Catholics were acceptable enough recruits in that service ; and 
 indeed Charles, counselled as he was by his Roman Catholic 
 wife, Henrietta Maria, had now the opportunity of showing how 
 smal was his dislike personally of that class of religionists, and 
 how glad he would be if, by aiding him against the Presbyterian 
 Revolutionists, they could enable him to remove their disabilities, 
 and admit them, in due proportion, to public trusts. It had, 
 in fact, been expected, in the spring of 1639, when there was 
 the expectation of Charles's invasion of Scotland, that the 
 Marquis of Douglas would be one of the first to rise in his be- 
 half. Among the precautions accordingly then taken by the 
 Covenanters had been the seizure of Douglas Castle. The band 
 of Covenanting nobles and gentlemen who were then seizing 
 all dubious strongholds in the West " went up," Baillie tells us, 
 " to the Castle of Douglas, where they expected nothing but 
 " blows and a shameful retreat from a rash enterprise, for the 
 " house was strong and they had no cannon." But they had 
 been agreeably surprised. " The Marquis's courage failed him, 
 " and he fled ; so, without din, the house was rendered, and 
 " manned by us." On due submission or promise of neutrality, 
 he seems to have been re-admitted into his castle, with part pos- 
 session at least ; and here he was, with his family, while Leslie's 
 army was facing the King's on the border, and the First Bishops' 
 War was in the act of collapse. " Upon the commencing of 
 " the Civil War," says Crawfurd in his Scottish Peerage, " I do 
 " not find this noble lord engaged much on either side, but kept 
 " himself out of the broils of those times as much as any of his 
 " quality in the kingdom." It was a strange lot for a Douglas ; 
 and he was to bear his trials in it so meekly that one wonders
 
 316 DRUM MO ND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 the dead old Douglases did not rise from their coffins in the 
 adjacent church -crypt, and surround him in his dreams to kick 
 him into activity. For not only the Covenanting Government, 
 but the Presbytery of Lanark, were pecking at him. In the 
 restored state of Presbyterian discipline, that reverend body 
 thought it their duty to be specially severe with the great Roman 
 Catholic Marquis ; and they had already begun a long series of 
 persecutions of him and his Marchioness, with visits to the 
 castle, entreaties that they would abjure Popery, threats of ex- 
 communication if they did not, and interferences with the educa- 
 tion of their children, so that these little brands, if not the old 
 wood itself, might be plucked from the everlasting burning. 
 
 Having nothing Douglas-like to do himself, the Marquis had 
 found a melancholy pleasure in brooding over the legends of the 
 Douglases who had gone before him, and had led such different 
 lives. His father, it appears, had left behind him, at his death 
 in 1616, an elaborate MS. history of the Douglases, compiled 
 from family documents and other records. The MS. remained 
 in Douglas Castle, and the Marquis had recently been examin- 
 ing it with a view to publication. There had been a special 
 occasion for his doing so. The history of the House of Douglas 
 was a subject of too wide and deep interest throughout Scotland 
 to remain a monopoly of members of the house itself. Other 
 Scottish pens could not but be attracted to it ; and one such 
 pen, the Marquis had come to know, had been attracted to it. 
 David Hume of Godscroft, mentioned by us long ago as a 
 veteran Scottish poetand prose-writer in the time of Drummond's 
 youth {anil p. 25), and again as one of the Scottish Latinists re- 
 presented in the Deliticc Poetarum Scotorum of 1637 (antk p. 
 250), had employed his last years in writing, in homely but 
 graphic English, a History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus. 
 The work, bringing the story down to the death of the good Earl 
 Archibald, 8th Earl of Angus, in 1588, had been left in MS. at 
 the author's death, in or about the year 1630, and so had come 
 into the charge of his daughter, Anna Hume. This lady, how-
 
 /Etat. 53-54. HISTORIES OF THE DOUGLASES. 317 
 
 ever, had inherited the literary tastes of her father, and was her- 
 self a poetess, a translator of Italian poetry, and an admirer of 
 the good British poets of her day. Among Drummond's letters 
 is one addressed "To the Learned and Worthy Gentlewoman, 
 Mrs. Anne Hume, daughter to Mr. David Hume of Godscroft," 
 from which it appears that she had expressed her especial admi- 
 ration of Drummond in some complimentary verses. " Worthy 
 " Madam," says Drummond in acknowledgment, " I should be 
 " too ambitious, I will not say arrogant, if I thought that honour 
 " which you give me in your delicate verses to be due to the 
 " honoured, and not rather to the honourer. They reflect and 
 " turn back unto yourself, as to a more renowned wonder, that 
 "praise by desert which ye bestow upon me of your mere 
 " courtesy. Alas ! my muses are of no such value to deserve 
 " the blazon of so pregnant and rare a wit." In filial duty to 
 her father's memory, and also perhaps because his book might 
 be of some value as a property, it was natural for such a lady to 
 do all she could to bring it out. She had, accordingly, had it 
 printed in Edinburgh, very handsomely, in the form of a quarto 
 volume of 440 pages, by Evan Tyler, printer to the King ; and, 
 as she proposed to dedicate the volume to the Marquis of 
 Douglas, and it was in any case proper that his Lordship should 
 see a book so largely concerning his house, she had sent him 
 an early copy, with a request for the necessary permission. The 
 difficulty of the Marquis may be imagined. He had his own 
 father's History of the Douglases in his keeping, ready to be 
 edited and published by himself ; and here was a proposal that 
 he should allow another book on the same subject, by an alien 
 pen, to go forth under his auspices, and prepossess the public 
 mind. Moreover, was Hume of Godscroft's book in itself, and 
 apart from competition with the other, exactly such a History 
 of the Douglases as he could approve, or as his father would 
 have approved had he been alive ? By confession, Hume had 
 infused his own political opinions and criticisms into his narrative, 
 had not slurred over the rebellions of some of the Douglases,
 
 3 1 8 DR UMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 and their conflicts with the Crown, but, on the contrary, had 
 been frank in his commendations at such points, and his explica- 
 tions of the principle of popular liberty as opposed to kingly 
 power. In these days of war between Charles and his subjects, 
 would it be decorous, would it even be safe, for the Marquis to 
 sanction the appearance of a history of his ancestors written in 
 such a spirit, and capable of being turned to such disloyal 
 account ? 
 
 In his strait, after having taken some steps to stop or delay 
 the publication of Godscroft's book, the Marquis had consulted 
 Drummond. He had sent Drummond, by the hands of his 
 son, the Earl of Angus, and a certain Laird of Gaggy, the 
 printed copy of the yet unpublished book, followed by a letter 
 stating his difficulties and the reasons ; and he had requested 
 Drummond, if it were possible, to pay him a visit at Douglas 
 Castle, that he might read the rival history among the family 
 MSS., and advise him what would be best in all the circum- 
 stances. So we gather from Drummond' s letters of reply. They 
 are very respectful, as well as careful and judicious ; but one can 
 see that the Marquis's request that he would leave his own house 
 at such a time, and travel some forty or fifty miles on such an 
 errand, had struck him as just a little, just a little, too much 
 like a marquis. 
 
 " To the Right Honourable, His Very Good Lord, the 
 Marquis of Douglas. 
 
 "My Noble Lord, — 
 
 "A letter by an obscurer hand and a 
 meaner carrier, bearing your Lordship's name, had power to 
 draw me upon a longer journey, and to a more difficile task 
 than the reading of books in your Lordship's castle ; and shall 
 at all occasions : but the disorders of these times, and imminent 
 troubles about the place where now I live, shall excuse for a 
 season my not seeing your Lordship, and plead forgiveness. Les 
 Pilieres ou Pilleures de la Rcfiubliqite cut to the gentlemen here- 
 abouts so much work that none can be many days absent from
 
 jEtat. 53-54. LETTERS TO THE MARQUIS. ^ig 
 
 his own dwelling place, especially those whose brains are not 
 fully mellow with their new potions. 
 
 " Some days before your Lordship's letter came, I received 
 from the Laird of Gaggy a copy of the history of your Lord- 
 ship's progenitors in print [Godscroft's book], which I have not 
 yet thoroughly perused. What I have observed on it your Lord- 
 ship will find on a sheet apart. This book by these times 
 
 will be much made of ; and above the whole the last part of it, 
 where are discourses which authorize rebellion, and the forcing 
 of consciences, and putting the sword in the people's hand. In 
 a little time more, if our princes shall re-obtain their authority, 
 it may be challenged. Meanwhile, it will be no prejudice nor 
 disgrace to your Lordship's house if by the present rulers of the 
 State the books be suffered to come forth, your Lordship having 
 used the ordinary means to suppress and call them in. The 
 worst which can happen is to put forth a new edition of them, 
 in which your Lordship may cause take away what is faulty, and 
 adjoin what is wanting, with an Apologetical Preface for what 
 was first passed or then came to light. — — Your new book [the 
 Marquis's intended edition of his father's history] would bear 
 no author's name, save that it is collected and taken off the 
 original and ancient records of your Lordship's house. — If this 
 book be of equal bigness with Mr. D. Hume's book, the two 
 books cannot be seriously matched and conferred together (as 
 they must be) in one whole month, yea, perhaps two ; which 
 time, to my regret, I cannot now have to attend your Lordship 
 at the Castle of Douglas. But, if it would please your Lordship 
 by the hand of your Lordship's son, or Gaggy, to hazard your 
 Lordship's book to be brought to Edinburgh and delivered to 
 me, I shall omit no time in paralleling the two books ; and, 
 being nearer many histories in divers languages in mine own 
 study, I can more conveniently peruse them than in your Lord- 
 ship's castle, where I will be but like an artisan without tools. 
 
 " I would request your Lordship to be assured that there shall 
 be nothing within the compass of my endeavours wherein I shall 
 be deficient ; and shall remain most willing 
 
 " Ever to serve your Lordship," 
 
 [W. Drummond.] 
 
 Besides three scrolls of this letter, there are, among the Haw- 
 thornden MSS., two scrolls of what seems to have been the
 
 320 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " sheet apart," mentioned in it as conveying Drummond's more 
 particular impressions of Godscroft's book after his first glance 
 through it. Substantially, it is the same as the letter itself, but 
 with additional details. Thus : — 
 
 " My Noble Lord, — 
 
 "At the receiving of your Lordship's letter, 
 there came a letter and charge from those of the Committee, to 
 command all the gentlemen upon Friday after to meet at Lauder 
 [a town in Berwickshire, about twenty miles from Hawthornden], 
 and resist the English, who were making incursions upon the 
 Borders, and near to Kelso [about twelve miles from Lauder]. 
 I was not resolved to accompany them ; but, if I leave my 
 house, I know not whether they will send out and plunder it. 
 Thus your Lordship shall excuse my not seeing your Lordship at 
 this season. 
 
 " I received the History of the Douglases [Godscroft's] from 
 my Lord your son. [In the other letter he said 'from the Laird of 
 Gaggy,' but the Earl may have sent the Laird, or accompanied 
 him.] I have gone through it, and considered some parts of it. 
 — Extreme puritanical, especially in the life of Archibald the 
 third, Earl of Angus, towards the end [N.B. — Drummond does 
 not mean here the third Earl of Angus, who was a William, but 
 the third of the name of Archibald who was Earl of Angus, i.e., 
 Archibald, the 8th Earl, or 'Good Earl,' who died 1588], and 
 the Regency of the Earl of Morton [the immediately preceding 
 chapter of Godscroft's book]. . . . Since your Lordship hath 
 done what was possible for the suppressing the copies, it will be 
 noways prejudicial to your Lordship's book ; for your Lordship's 
 book, coming forth, will make the errors of this book appear, 
 and, both the books, though after diverse ways, tending to the 
 glory of the name of Douglas, it is no great matter to suffer the 
 one to be a preamble to the other. . . . The puritanical parts 
 [of Hume's book] may in the second edition be left out and 
 neglected. He justifieth the wrongs [wrong deeds] of the Earls 
 of Douglas ; that is, he condemns the King and the Earls of 
 Angus [the Red Douglases who helped the King to put down 
 the Black] for cutting them off and suppressing their rebellion. 
 
 He should have made a transition from the house of to 
 
 the House of Glenbervie [Drummond means here that Hume 
 ought to have continued his History beyond 1588, when the
 
 sEtat. 53-54. LETTERS TO THE MARQUIS. 321 
 
 first direct line of the Red or Angus Douglases ceased, and the 
 succession came to the Marquis's grandfather, oftheGlenbervie 
 branch |. His Life of the Lord Liddesdale [William Douglas, 
 Lord of Liddesdale, called " The Flower of Chivalry," a scion 
 of the old Douglas House, slain 1333] is like a romance. This 
 [the whole book] is rather Commentaries and Discourses upon 
 the Lives of the Noblemen of the name of Douglas than a His- 
 tory. 
 
 "Your Lordship will be petitioned for the gentlewoman [Hume 
 of Godscroft's daughter] — who hath ventured, she says, her whole 
 fortunes — by the Lords of State, to suffer the book to come 
 abroad, or then [else] to give her satisfaction [compensation] 
 for her copies [already through the press] and do with the 
 books what your Lordship pleaseth. If the books return to 
 your Lordship, provided the gentlewoman will give assurance 
 that she hath not sent any copies to England, they may be 
 amended by cutting some sheets and printing others in their 
 place, and adjoining the records of the House of Glenbervie : 
 otherwise her copy now (with Knox's Chronicle, printed with 
 authority in London) might be reprinted. The next [i.e. the 
 alternative to buying up Hume of Godscroft's book] were : — 
 your Lordship, having the first volume of the Lives of the Earls 
 of Douglas printed [irom your father's MS.], to put to press the 
 second tome of the Earls of Angus, and send abroad your book 
 before the other; which [however] will undo the poor 
 woman 
 
 " When the Life of Queen Mary his mother was presented to 
 King James by one William Udall, though the King liked not 
 the religion of the man (for he had been seconded nobly by 
 some Jesuits, of whose education and society he was), he 
 accepted cheerfully of the book, and said it was a strong wadge 
 to cleave much crooked wood against his mother. After which the 
 gentleman put to the Epistle of the book " W. Strongwadge," 
 rejecting his first surname. This piece [Hume of Godscroft's 
 History] is a strong wadge against many things can be objected, 
 or have been objected, against the families of the Douglases; 
 though it contain too much of the humours of this present 
 time/'* 
 
 * The two Letters to the Marquis of Douglas were first pilated by Mr. 
 Laing in his Extracts from the Hawthornden MSS. {Arch. Scot. IV. 95-98). 
 The preserved scrolls bear no date ; but several phrases in the Letters them- 
 selves refer them to the time of the First Bishops' War, and one phrase in 
 
 X
 
 322 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 What we learn from the Letters respecting Drummond's own 
 share in the First Bishops' War is that, though he was not 
 actually in Leslie's army at Dunse Law, he was under orders, 
 like other gentlemen of his neighbourhood, from those whom 
 he calls the " Pillars or Peelers " of the State, and might have 
 been summoned to the field at any moment in case of need. 
 No such service was required ; and within a few days after the 
 foregoing letters were written Drummond knew that the war 
 was certainly over, the " Pillars or Peelers " triumphant, and 
 the King laughably foiled. Although he had never really 
 desired the King's success through such a horrible means as 
 the slaughter of thousands of his countrymen, the actual issue 
 must have been a vexation to him. What a Scotland now to 
 look forward to ! These Covenanting Nobles and their fol- 
 lowing of Lairds, arrogant enough already, would now be abso- 
 lutely unendurable ; and, as for their colleagues, the Presby- 
 terian Clergy — ugh ! the land would be black with them ! 
 
 the second positively determines that they were written early in June 1639, 
 just as the war was in collapse. "Resist the English, who were making 
 incursions upon the Borders and near to Kelso:'" at no other time than pre- 
 cisely after the Earl of Holland's fruitless Kelso raid of June 3 does such 
 
 a phrase fit the facts. Hume of Godscroft's book was kept back, and 
 
 probably by the agency of the Marquis. " Edinburgh, Printed by Evan 
 Tyler, Printer to the King's most excellent Majestie, 1644," is the imprint 
 on the title-page of the quarto when it did at length appear publicly. In 
 a copy before me, however, I observe that "the Second Part," which con- 
 tains the Lives of the Angus branch, and which, though paged continuously 
 with the First Part, has a separate title-page, bears the date 1643. Copies 
 of the whole work, I also understand, are found with no date, and with a 
 leading title-page different from that of 1644 ; and some are found with and 
 others without a dedication to the Marquis of Douglas. These variations 
 seem to attest that there were delays in the regular issue of the work, and 
 that "the learned and worthy gentlewoman, Mrs. Anna Hume" had her 
 anxieties about it. One is glad to find that, in the very year in which she 
 saw it fairly out, and from the same respectable printing-press, she saw also 
 published a book of her own. " The Triumphs of Love, Chastitie, Death : 
 transl ted out of Petrarch by Mrs. Anna Hume. Edinburgh, Printed by Evan 
 Tyler, Printer to the King's most excellent Majestie, 1644" is the title of 
 this duodecimo volume.
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 SCOTLAND UNDER TIGHT PRESBYTERIAN RULE: DRUMMOND'S 
 DISGUST AND SARCASMS : PREPARATIONS FOR THE SECOND 
 BISHOPS' WAR : DEATH OF SECRETARY STIRLING: THE SECOND 
 BISHOPS' WAR, AND LESLIE'S INVASION OF ENGLAND ; TREATY OF 
 RIPON: ACCIDENT AT DUNGLASS: LETTER OF DRUMMOND'S TO THE 
 EARL OF PERTH: MEETING OF THE ENGLISH LONG PARLIAMENT. 
 
 1639 — 1640. 
 
 HpHE course of affairs in Scotland immediately after the Paci- 
 fication of Birks was not calculated to restore Drummond's 
 good humour. The new General Assembly met as promised at 
 Edinburgh on the 12th of August, with David Dickson as 
 Moderator, and the Earl of Traquair as Royal Commissioner, 
 only to repeat and confirm all the acts of the Glasgow 
 Assembly, and put them beyond cavil. Nay more, there was a 
 solemn and formal renewal of the Covenant by the Assembly, 
 with a petition to the Privy Council (now again in its place 
 as the nominal executive of the realm), that there should be an 
 Act of Council enjoining subscription to the Covenant univer- 
 sally on his Majesty's Scottish subjects ; and this petition the 
 Council found so just and reasonable that they immediately 
 framed the desired Act (August 30), Traquair himself, and 
 those of the Privy Council who had not already subscribed, 
 setting the example by their official signatures. Over this 
 conversion of the Covenant into an obligatory rule for all 
 classes of Scottish subjects, enforced by the authority of his 
 Majesty's own Government, the joy was enormous ! Bells
 
 324 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 were rung, bonfires lighted, and "all die pulpits and streets were 
 full of Traquair's praises." There was some abatement of the 
 satisfaction, it is true, in the course of Traquair's dealings with 
 the Parliament which met in Edinburgh immediately after the 
 Assembly, and sat on for more than two months (August 31- 
 November 14). The instructions from the King to Traquair 
 were that he had gone too far, that the King had never con- 
 sented to "declare Episcopacy unlawful in the Kirk," as 
 Traquair had done in his name in the Assembly, but only 
 "contrary to the constitutions of the Kirk !" In the Parliament, 
 accordingly, Traquair explained and boggled so much that, 
 though he lost his popularity in the process, he succeeded 
 in proroguing it before it had accomplished nearly so much 
 as had been expected. Nevertheless, it was a memorable 
 convention, inasmuch as the absence of Prelates from it and 
 the introduction of various new forms marked the beginning of 
 a new era in the history of Scottish Parliaments. 
 
 Our first new glimpse of Drummond in this lull of affairs, or 
 rather this general exultation of his countrymen in seeing their 
 Presbyterianism ratified and the Covenant made universal by 
 law, comes in the form of this entry of a baptism in the parish- 
 registers of Lasswade : "Aug. 22, 1639— Richard Drummond, 
 " son lawfull to Mr. William Drummond of Hawthornden and 
 " Elspeth Logane. Witnesses, Mr. Rit. Maitland, and John 
 " Drummond, brother germane to the said Mr. William 
 " Drummond." This was Drummond's fourth son ; and, as the 
 Lasswade Register does not contain the births of any of the 
 three preceding, we have in that fact a confirmation of the belief 
 that Drummond had been away from Hawthornden a good deal 
 from 1633 or 1634 onwards, while his house was being rebuilt 
 (residing with Scotstarvet, tradition says, and composing his 
 History of the Jameses), and had not come back into permanent 
 residence till the new house was ready in 1638. At all events, 
 Mr. Porteous, Drummond's own parish minister, had the satis-
 
 sEtat. 54-55. MORE SQUIBS AND SARCASMS. 325 
 
 faction of baptising this little Covenanter and Presbyterian. 
 The Richard Maitland who was one of the witnesses, and 
 probably also the boy's name-father, appears to have been one 
 of the Lauderdale Maitlands, a family for whose living members, 
 as well as for their celebrated ancestors, Drummond had a high 
 regard.* 
 
 While thus conforming to the Kirk in all observances expected 
 from a parishioner of Lassvvade, Drummond continued, all the 
 same, to vent his private opinions about the condition both of 
 Kirk and State in squibs for the comfort of himself and his 
 friends. Thus : — 
 
 " The King nor band nor host had him to follow 
 Of all his subjects : they were given to thee, 
 Leslie. Who is the greatest ? By Apoilo, 
 The Emperor thou, some Palsgrave scarce seems he. 
 Couldst thou pull Lords as we do Bishops down, 
 Small distance were between thee and a crown." 
 
 Again, in prose, in the form of a mock set of Considerations to 
 the Parliament, September, 1639, where he recommends fifty- 
 eight distinct enactments to that legislative body as quite in 
 the spirit of the time. Here is a specimen of the fifty-eight : — 
 
 " That whatever hath been done by the Clergy, Noblemen, 
 Barons, Gentlemen, and Burgesses, in Scotland, during these 
 late troubles shall be for ever holden, estimated, and accounted 
 good service to the Crown." 
 
 " That it shall be lawful, in time of trouble and necessity, 
 for the Provost of Edinburgh to offer up his prayers in the 
 Cathedral Church by shot of pistols, which are more conform 
 to the times than organs." 
 
 " That bickering [throwing stones] upon the Sunday shall be 
 
 * The above is the only entry of a birth in Drummond's family which 
 my search in the Register House in Edinburgh has enabled me to discover. 
 There is a blank, however, in the preserved birth registers of Lasswade, 
 from 1640 to 1645, at which time all the later of Drummond's nine 
 children were born. The marriage registers are pretty complete from 16 17 
 to 1820, but do not contain Drummond's marriage in 1632. The registers 
 of deaths for 1634-1641 are all that are preserved of Drummond's period.
 
 326 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 lawful against coaches in the High Street, provided there be 
 either Bishop, new Councillor, or non-Covenanter, in them." 
 
 " That, in time of war, it shall be lawful, for the weal of the 
 kingdom, to the Noblemen, Barons, &c, to choose a Dictator, 
 providing he can neither read nor write " [a hit at Leslie, who 
 was rather illiterate]. 
 
 " That Buchanan's Chronicle shall be translated into the 
 vulgar Scottish, and read in the common schools ; and, the 
 Books of the Apocrypha being taken away from the Bible, his 
 book De Jure JRegni be in the place thereof insert." 
 
 "Thatall tombs and monuments in which there are any images, 
 especially those in the common burial-place of Edinburgh, be 
 demolished, as bearing resemblances of ancient idolatry." 
 
 " That the old Translation in Verse of the Psalms which was 
 in the three-score and six year of God [i.e., the old Scottish 
 form of Sternhold and Hopkins] be sung, and none else, it being 
 even approved by our little children and most ignorant persons, 
 and all printers and booksellers be discharged to print or sell any 
 others" [such as the Earl of Stirling's edition of King James's 
 Psalms]. 
 
 " That the beards of all Judges, — as Lords of Session, 
 Commissaries, Sheriffs and Bailies — shall be long, except 
 the Provosts of towns and the chief city, who shall have 
 them short." 
 
 " That Heralds, Officers of Arms, and other Messengers,' 
 shall not speak at any market-cross before they open their 
 mouths." 
 
 " That great horologies of towns be reformed according to 
 the small sun-dials." 
 
 " That the books of Wallace and King Robert the Bruce be 
 printed over again against our old enemies of England, and 
 pensions be given to some learned rhymers to write Twelve 
 Books of our Expedition and Victory at Dunse Law, or Duns- 
 laidos Libi'i 12." 
 
 " That none in Lochaber wear castor hats or velvet 
 breeches." 
 
 " That no man swear the Oath of Supremacy, except in 
 England ; yet it shall be lawful for any man to swear it to his 
 wife, if he please." 
 
 " That the Church-race marry only among themselves, — 
 ministers' sons with ministers' daughters, — and it shall be law- 
 ful, for the procreation of the race, and [on account of] the
 
 Mtat. 54-55. SIGNS OF A NEW WAR. 327 
 
 number of she-children, that any minister's son may take unto 
 him two wives." 
 
 " That it shall be lawful for the schoolboys in all towns and 
 villages, every seventh year once, to take the schools against 
 their masters, put them out, and in their places appoint new 
 doctors, under-doctors, masters, for the space of twenty days, 
 in perpetual remembrance of our happy and blessed relief from 
 the ecclesiastic and episcopal government." 
 
 Scotland was not much disturbed by these sarcasms of Drum- 
 mond, nor even by the more important intriguings of Traquair 
 and other pseudo-Covenanting politicians in the king's, behalf. 
 Stronger than ever in the Covenant by Field-Marshal Leslie's 
 triumph at Dunse Law, and represented at the centre now not 
 merely by the general Tables, but also by a Committee of 
 Estates nominated by Parliament, she struggled on through the 
 winter of 1639-40 to the new trial that awaited her. For that 
 the King intended a new war was now beyond doubt. He had 
 caused Covenanting explanations of the late Pacification to be 
 burned in London by the hands of the hangman ; he had re- 
 fused to see the Earl of Dunfermline, Lord Loudoun, and other 
 Covenanting Commissioners sent up by the Scottish Parlia- 
 ment ; he would hear nothing except through Traquair ; the 
 whole tenor of his behaviour to the Covenanters corresponded 
 Avith the message sent by the Marquis of Hamilton to one of 
 them : " Beware that your stout hearts make not your heads 
 dry a gutter." This time, however, the king meant to come 
 against the Scots not in his own name only, but with the full 
 and formal authority of the English nation. To procure the 
 necessary supplies, he had been induced at last, by the per- 
 suasions of Wentworth, Hamilton, and Laud, to do what he 
 had hoped never again to be brought to do in his life. He had 
 actually summoned an English Parliament, to meet on the 13th 
 of April, 1640. Eleven years had passed since it had been 
 treason in England even to speak of a Parliament, and the 
 people of England could hardly now believe the strange news. 
 " After all, this Parliament will serve little for England : it is
 
 328 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 only called for the war against the Scots," said the more 
 desponding Puritans. " We shall see, we shall see," thought 
 such stronger hearts as Pym, Hampden, and Cromwell. 
 
 One Scotsman, superfluous on the stage for some time, but 
 who was still about the King when he took the bold step of 
 calling this English Parliament, did not live to see it meet. 
 " In February this year [Feb. 12, 1640]," writes the Scottish 
 annalist Balfour, " died William, Earl of Stirling, Viscount 
 " Canada, Lord Alexander, Principal Secretaiy of State for 
 " Scotland to King Charles the First, at London. His body 
 " was embalmed, and by sea transported to Stirling, and there 
 " privately interred by night in Bowie's Aisle in Stirling Church, 
 " the 12th of April, 1640." And so this is the end of our long 
 acquaintance with Alexander of Menstrie. On the whole, we 
 must pronounce him about the most unfortunate Scot of his time. 
 Better for his memory had he died long ago, when he was still 
 only Alexander of Menstrie, or at least no more than that Sir 
 William Alexander, " the rarest gem of our north," with whom 
 it had been such a delight to Drummond to have that first 
 meeting in the Clackmannanshire mansion in 16 14, when they 
 revelled over books and papers, and became Damon and Alexis 
 to each other. What had all the intermediate courtiership and 
 climbing, with the Scottish Secretaryship, the Novia Scotia 
 Charter, the Viscountcy, the Earldom, the splendid new family 
 edifice at Stirling, been really worth ? It had been al\/>er metre, 
 per turners, all by a dirty application of talent, all at the expense 
 of the growing hatred of his countrymen at every step, and, what 
 was worst, with no such countervailing consciousness of right, 
 nor even such iron wilfulness in wrong, as have borne up better 
 or stronger men through that form of calamity. If the hatred 
 had lessened at the end, it had only been because much of it had 
 been turned into contemptuous pity. Broken down by the loss 
 of two of his sons, deep in debt, and with the future of his 
 family overclouded, he had persevered through the First Bishops'
 
 jEtat. 54-55. DEATH OF THE EARL OF STIRLING. 329 
 
 War in the routine of his fatal Secretaryship, to become a kind 
 of underling at last of Hamilton and Traquair in arranging the 
 new onslaught on Scotland which the King had decreed. That 
 was his final appearance in the world. All that one sees more 
 is the ship toiling along the eastern coast with the leaden 
 coffin in her hold, and the farther conveyance of the same up 
 the windings of the Forth, to be laid, at dead of night, beside 
 the other coffins in the vault in Stirling Church. There he lies, 
 I suppose, to this day, vaguely remembered as the second-rate 
 Scottish sycophant of an inglorious despotism, and the author 
 of a large quantity of fluent and stately English verse which no 
 one reads. 
 
 Drummond did not think so hardly of his dead friend. 
 Among his manuscripts Mr. Laing found the title " IV. Z>., 
 his Cypress over the grave of S. W. A. ;" and also, under the 
 separate title of " Alphander^ these jottings for some intended 
 Memorial or Epitaph : " His deeds in Caledonia, Arcadia, 
 " Alexandria : his poesies, adding to them his Jonathan : his 
 " gravity and wit in counsel : his friendship, love, familiarity 
 u with his friends : his alliance with the greatest : his humanity 
 "towards all: his breeding at Leyden : his natural judgment 
 " above learning. I expected an Epitaph of thee, and now I 
 " must write owe for thee, on thee : receive, accept of my brass 
 " for thy gold." * These hints suggest what the Epitaph would 
 have been ; but it does not seem to have been ever written. 
 
 The successor of the Earl of Stirling in the Scottish Secretary- 
 ship was William Hamilton, Earl of Lanark, a very young man, 
 brother of the Marquis of Hamilton. The two brothers, with 
 Traquair, and some of the refugee Scottish bishops and nobles 
 then in London, were the group of Scottish counsellors with 
 whom the King took his measures for that new war with the 
 Scots in view of which he had called an English Parliament ; 
 but the preparations engrossed his English Council also. Laud 
 * Extracts from the Hawthornden MSS. : Arch. Scot. IV. 87.
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 was still supreme as ecclesiastical adviser; Windebank was the 
 draftsman of all necessary warrants ; and Wentworth (now 
 created Earl of Strafford) was purposely over from Ireland, to 
 infuse his energy into the business. With every effort, nothing 
 was made of the Parliament by these statesmen for the purpose 
 for which it had been called. For this was "The Short Parlia- 
 ment" of English historians (April 13 — May 5, 1640), memorable 
 only for its wise obstinacy in refusing to do what Charles wanted, 
 and so preserving all rights and all opportunities for the more 
 effectual Parliament which was to follow. The Convocation of 
 the English Clergy, which met at the same time as the Parlia- 
 ment, and which sat on, engaged in very dangerous work, for 
 three weeks after the Parliament was dissolved, did yield 
 Charles some welcome supplies for his Scottish war; but they 
 were a poor substitute for the larger Parliamentary subsidies he 
 had expected. In short, the behaviour of the Parliament was 
 a vast new chagrin to Charles, and his disappointment showed 
 itself in a thousand ways. He had tumbled into The Second 
 Bishops' 1 War too far to retreat of his own accord, but had begun 
 to doubt whether he had not tumbled into it too rashly. 
 
 Another English army, as reluctant as the last one, had been 
 got together by the most desperate ways and means, and quar- 
 tered here and there in the North of England, much to the 
 discontent of the inhabitants, and against the muttered recla- 
 mations of the great body of the English Puritans. The Earl 
 of Northumberland, who had been designated for the chief 
 command of this army, having been detained in London by 
 indisposition (presumably in both senses of the term), and 
 Strafford, who had been appointed second in command, having 
 but just returned from Ireland for the service, the management 
 of the army in the meantime had been wholly in the hands of 
 Lord Conway — an amiable nobleman of military experience, 
 who had been appointed Master of the Horse. He it was that 
 had all the trouble of quartering the reluctant levies in the 
 northern counties, drilling them, and keeping them in order
 
 sEtat. 54-55. THE SECOND BISHOPS' WAR. 331 
 
 till the King and Strafford should arrive from London, and give 
 
 the order for their march into Scotland. The Scots, on their 
 
 side, however, had made up their minds not to wait this time 
 for any such leisurely aggression on the part of his Majesty. 
 They also had been levying and arming ; and on the 2nd of 
 June the Parliament, which stood prorogued to that day, met 
 in Edinburgh, declared itself legally constituted in spite of 
 official protests in the King's name, and proceeded to pass all 
 the Acts necessary to stamp the new war with the last national 
 sanction. Field-Marshal Sir Alexander Leslie was re-appointed 
 Commander-in-Chief, with Lord Almond for his Lieutenant- 
 General, and Sandy Hamilton for his General of Artillery ; and, 
 other arrangements having been duly made, the Parliament rose 
 June 12, deputing all powers till it should meet again to a war- 
 and-revenue Committee of forty persons, of whom twelve were 
 Nobles (the Earls of Rothes, Montrose, Cassilis, Wigton, Dun- 
 fermline, and Lothian, and Lords Balmerino, Lindsay, Cupar, 
 Burleigh, Napier, and Lower), four were Senators of the College 
 of Justice (Scot of Scotstarvet one of them), twelve were Lairds 
 or I -esser Barons (Stirling of Keir one of them, and Drummond 
 of Riccarton another), and twelve were Burgesses. All this and 
 more had been done, and the Earl of Argyle, who had pur- 
 posely been left out of the war-committee for especial work in 
 the Highlands, was away on that work, careering through Athole, 
 Angus, Mar, Badenoch, and Lochaber, and taking severe order 
 with hostile or dubious families there, when Lord Loudoun, 
 who had been one of the Scottish Commissioners sent to nego- 
 tiate with the King, and whom his Majesty had arrested and 
 thrown into the Tower on a peculiar charge of treason, was un- 
 expectedly released, with his head still on his shoulders, and 
 returned to Scotland with some instructions how he might act 
 in the King's interest. Any effort to delay matters was utterly 
 past his power; and, seeing no great reason to exert him- 
 self fo that end, he plunged again heartily into what was going on. 
 Indeed, with the exception of a few extreme "Malignants"
 
 332 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 among the nobles, mostly refugees in England by this time, all 
 Scotland may be said to have concurred visibly in this second 
 war for the Covenant. Among the colonels of regiments, 
 besides some of the nobles of the War-Committee already 
 mentioned, were the Earls of Kinghorn, Dalhousie, Queensberry, 
 and Crawford, with Lords Loudoun, Erskine, Elcho, Carnegie, 
 and Drummond, this last being the son of our poet's chief and 
 patron, the Earl of Perth. 
 
 By the middle of August 1640 Leslie, with his army of 25,000 
 men, was at his old station on Dunse Law. Not to wait there, how- 
 ever, as on the former occasion ! It was quite understood that 
 the English Puritans would not now misinterpret a Scottish in- 
 vasion of England, would not object to it, and indeed would 
 consider themselves greatly obliged by it. Leslie did them the 
 favour. On the 20th of August he crossed the Tweed, Mon- 
 trose wading the water first; thence on he moved through 
 Northumberland ; on the 28th there was a conflict between him 
 and a portion of Conway's English army at Newburn, near 
 Newcastle, ending in the defeat and flight of the English, and 
 the evacuation of Newcastle by Conway; and on the 29th 
 Leslie entered Newcastle. Charles and Strafford, who had 
 hurried north to join Conway on the first news of the invasion, 
 and had come as far as Darlington, found themselves too late. 
 The English forces were withdrawn to York till his Majesty 
 should consult there what was farther to be done ; and the 
 northern counties were left to the undisputed possession of the 
 Scots. At York his Majesty's deliberations were precipitated 
 by the signs of a Puritan heaving all through England to take 
 advantage of his distress, and by open petitions, from eighteen 
 of the chief English nobles and from the city of London, 
 that he would consider the state of his English realm in con- 
 nexion with his Scottish difficulty, and at once call another 
 Parliament. To stave off that dreaded finality, he tried first 
 whether a great Council of the English Peers, to meet at York 
 on the 24th of September, might not suffice ; but, before that
 
 jEtat. 54-55. THE SCOTS IN ENGLAND. 
 
 333 
 
 Council had met, he had to succumb to the worst, and sum- 
 mon a new Parliament to meet at Westminster on the 3rd of 
 November. 
 
 Meanwhile the Scots, distributed through the Northern 
 Counties, with Newcastle as their head-quarters, but with other 
 towns quietly occupied and garrisoned, had been waiting the 
 inevitable Treaty. It began' Oct. 16th at Ripon in Yorkshire 
 between sixteen English Lords, as commissioners for the King, 
 and a deputation of the Scottish leaders. Certain preliminary 
 articles were agreed upon, and were signed by the King at York 
 Oct. 27 ; and on the following day the great Council of Peers 
 was broken up, that the King and the Peers too might be in 
 London before the opening of the Parliament. The King would 
 fain have had the Treaty completed first, and the Scots out of 
 England ; but that could not be. Even had the Scots been 
 willing, the English Lords engaged in the Treaty, most of whom 
 were of the popular or Puritan party, would have taken care, in 
 the interests of England itself, that the Scots should not re-cross 
 the Tweed too soon. Their continued presence in England was 
 the surest possible guarantee that the new English Parliament 
 which was about to meet would be enabled to enter on the long- 
 postponed and now almost measureless business of England's 
 own grievances, and would not be dissolved, as its predecessors 
 had been, prematurely and without results. The Treaty with 
 the Scots, accordingly, which had been adjourned from Ripon 
 to York, stood farther adjourned to London, to be concluded 
 there in a leisurely manner, by the appointed Commissioners of 
 both nations, under the direct inspection of the new Parliament ; 
 and meanwhile, by one of the preliminary articles, it was pro- 
 vided that the Scottish Army should remain in the North of 
 England on the footing of invited guests, at an allowance of 
 ,£850 a-day, with perquisites, to be paid by the English when- 
 ever they should find it convenient to close the friendly 
 
 account. That was the result, for Charles, of his Second 
 
 Bishops' War with the Scots. It brought him, with his hands
 
 334 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 tied, face to face with the famous Long Parliament of 
 England. 
 
 For the Scots the result, so far as appeared, had been a 
 deliverance from all chance of farther molestation from the 
 King, an absolute triumph of the National Covenant, and a 
 confirmation of the restored Presbyterian system against any 
 possible future effort for the re-introduction of Bishops. And at 
 what a small cost this great success had been won ! Scotland had 
 been arming for two years, nerving herself for a struggle in which 
 it seemed probable that thousands of her population might 
 lose their lives, and her poor resources otherwise might be 
 racked to the last ; and lo ! all that had been necessary had 
 been one bold march into Northumberland, and a single fight 
 near Newcastle, in which about a dozen Scotsmen had been 
 killed. At this slight puncture all the King's large-blown power 
 had collapsed, and England herself, avowing her true dispo- 
 sition, had agreed to regard the invasion as a neighbourly 
 service, instead of resenting it as an injury, and had taken the 
 rest of the labour thankfully into her own hands. 
 
 Perhaps it was this very smallness of the cost to the Scots, in the 
 ordinary form of killed and wounded on the battle-field, thatfasten- 
 ed so much of their attention at the time on one tragical accident 
 of the war, the scene of which was not within English ground, 
 but in the part of Scotland occupied by Leslie before he had 
 begun his English march. This was the blowing-up of the 
 Castle of Dunglass in Haddingtonshire, where the Earl of 
 Haddington (Sandy Hamilton's nephew), who had been en- 
 trusted by the Committee of Estates with the general charge of 
 that county, was in station with a small garrison. The ex- 
 plosion occurred on Sunday, August 30, the day after Leslie 
 had entered Newcastle, and when there was thanksgiving from 
 all the pulpits of the Scottish border for the news of the victory 
 of Newburn. No one could tell precisely the origin of the 
 disaster ; but the conjecture was that it was the wilful act of an
 
 jEtat. 54-55. LETTER TO THE EARL OF PERTH. 335 
 
 English page of the Earl of Haddington's, who had access to 
 the gunpowder stored underneath the Castle. The loss of life was 
 frightful. The Earl himself, two of his brothers, several 
 important Hamiltons besides, with a son of the Earl of Mar, 
 Sir Gideon Baillie of Lochend, three or four persons of local 
 consideration, and fifty-four servants and soldiers, perished in 
 the explosion ; and about thirty more escaped with loss of limbs 
 or other injuries. What was supposed to be the arm of the 
 poor wretch who had done the mischief, with an iron spoon still 
 grasped in the hand, was the only relic of him found among the 
 ruins. 
 
 There was a possibility, it seems, that Drummond should 
 have been one of the victims of this dreadful accident at 
 Dunglass. So at least we may interpret a phrase in the follow- 
 ing letter of his, though the reference in it to the accident is 
 rather obscure, and may imply only that he was ordered to the 
 scene of the accident, for inquiry or other activity, after it had 
 happened. In any case, the letter is an interesting account of 
 the nature of Drummond's personal services through the crisis 
 of the Second Bishops' War, and of the spirit in which he had 
 performed them. It is addressed to his family-chief, the Earl 
 of Perth, who appears to have been living on his Perthshire 
 estates, exempt from direct duty in the field, in consideration of 
 the ample contribution he had made in the person and equip- 
 ment of his son-and-heir, Lord Drummond. The Earl seems 
 to have invited Drummond to come and stay with him for a 
 while, just as the Marquis of Douglas had done at the same 
 point of the First Bishops' War ; and this was the answer : — 
 
 " To the Right Honourable the Earl of Perth. 
 
 " My Noble Lord, 
 
 "In the storm of the State I had resolved 
 to set my affairs in order, exposing all to the hazard of what 
 might fall forth, and fly to the shadow of your Lordship, 
 finding at this time that saying not to prove true, Minima
 
 336 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 parvitate sua tida sunt ; for the humility of my fortune and my 
 retired and harmless mode of living could not save me from 
 being employed to serve here the ambition of the great masters 
 of the State. As if I had no more to do with time, I was 
 appointed to spend it in attending the Committee of the Shire. 
 At my first initiation, charged to be at that fatal service and 
 horrible execution of Dunglass, they directed me to ravage and 
 plunder the more peaceable neighbours about. This Trojan 
 Horse laboured to give me a command over horses. All 
 which employments, being contrary to my education and 
 estate, knowing that pareil sur pareil a nulle ptiis sauce, and that 
 they were not my lawful masters, I shunned, and performed no 
 more than pleased me ; which acquired me no small spite. 
 If the Parliament of England, and matters since fallen forth, 
 had not a little cooled this fervency or phrenzy, I knew not 
 where to have found sanctuary, save with -your Lordship ; nor 
 knew I what thanks to render your Lordship for your gracious 
 protection and many courtesies offered me. If I should 
 sacrifice my fortunes, liberty, and life, I would rather lose them 
 for your Lordship than for any Democracy. Your Lordship's 
 favours shall ever be remembered, and sought to be deserved 
 in what is within the compass of performing and the power of 
 
 "Your Lordship's Humble Servant, 
 
 "W. Drummond. 
 " Hawthornden : December i, 1640." 
 
 When this letter was written, the Long Parliament had been 
 sitting for a month, and very important matters had " fallen 
 forth" there. Strafford had been arrested, impeached, and 
 committed to the Tower; Laud, Windebank, and the other 
 chief instruments of Charles's English tyranny had been 
 denounced ; Pym had signalized his leadership by his great 
 opening survey of the grievances of the English nation and 
 programme of the work to be done ; Cromwell, Hampden, and 
 others, had made their first speeches ; the two Houses had 
 ascertained their strengths respectively, their relations to each 
 other, and their practical unanimity in a sweeping course of 
 reform that should include not only many changes in the civil
 
 JEtat. 54-55. THE ENGLISH LONG PARLIAMENT. 337 
 
 and judicial system of England, but also the abolition of the 
 Laudian Episcopacy, and a great reduction of Episcopacy of 
 any kind, in the English Church. Little wonder that, on such 
 news from England, the " fervency or phrenzy " in Scotland, in 
 respect of her own particular questions, should have been 
 "cooled" considerably by the sudden sense of so vast a 
 partnership. What had Scotland to expect more for herself? 
 Her little revolution was over ; her sky was clear ; the thunder- 
 clouds had rolled away to the south. What remained for her 
 but to settle down in the enjoyment of the Presbyterian 
 liberties, and the Presbyterian restrictions of other liberties, 
 which she had fought for so gallantly, and had won, as it 
 seemed, in certain perpetuity ? There was still, to be sure, the 
 unfinished treaty, dragging itself on in London ; and, till that 
 treaty should be concluded, and Leslie's army brought home 
 honourably, Scotland could not consider herself quite out of 
 the meshes. Nor, apart from that selfish interest, could 
 Scotland be indifferent to the struggle, so much like a possible 
 repetition of her own, which she had herself set agoing between 
 the King and his English subjects. At least sympathy was 
 due to the English People; if opportunity should occur, and 
 the English People should make the request, something more 
 substantial than sympathy might be due. These, however, 
 were questions for the future.
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 FIRST ACTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LONG PARLIAMENT : CHARLES'S 
 SECOND STATE-VISIT TO SCOTLAND : DRUMMONDISM AN ALIAS 
 FOR SCOTTISH CONSERVATISM : THE EARL OF MONTROSE AND 
 HIS RELATIONS TO DRUMMOND : MONTROSE IN PRISON : EDIN- 
 BURGH INCIDENTS OF THE KING'S VISIT : BALAAM ENDING 
 OF THE VISIT : DRUMMOND'S CHAGRIN AND MONTROSE'S 
 DESPAIR : DEATH OF ARTHUR JOHNSTON : SCOTSTARVET's NEW 
 PROJECT: CHARLES BACK IN ENGLAND: OUTBREAK OF THE 
 ENGLISH CIVIL WAR. 
 
 1640 — 1642. 
 
 A FTER the meeting of the Long Parliament on the 3rd of 
 November, 1640, Scotland, as we have said, ceased to be 
 the leader of the political movement which she had so gallantly 
 initiated for the British Islands, and became only the spectator, 
 the fervid little ally, and, too soon, alas ! the crotchety critic 
 and all but throttling encumbrance, of the larger nation to 
 which the farther conduct of the controversy had been trans- 
 ferred. Events in Scotland are henceforth only tributary to 
 the greater whirl and rush of events in England. 
 
 Under the date "March 28, 1641," I have found this entry 
 in the death-registers of Lasswade parish : "Richard Drum- 
 mond, son to Mr. Wm. Drummond, of Hawthornden, and 
 
 Logane his spous." It is the record of the death of Drum- 
 
 mond's fourth son, whom we saw baptized on the 22nd of
 
 jEtat. 55-57. CHARLES AGAIN IN SCOTLAND. 339 
 
 August, 1639. The little fellow had lived only a year and 
 seven months. With that small incident thrown in, we may 
 leap at once to the autumn of 1641, when Charles paid his 
 second State-visit to Scotland. He arrived in Edinburgh on the 
 14th of August, and he remained there, or in the neighbourhood, 
 till the 1 8th of November. 
 
 How different this visit from the Coronation Visit of 1633! 
 Then Charles had come, in full and ostentatious majesty, into 
 a semi-Episcopal land, to take formal possession of it, scowl at 
 its short-comings from perfect and ideal Episcopacy, and arrange 
 for its complete conversion to that model. Now he re-appeared, 
 more in the guise of a penitent and suppliant, among subjects 
 who had thwarted him, made war with him, beaten him, swept 
 away not only his forced improvements on their former semi- 
 Episcopacy, but even that detested semi-Episcopacy itself. 
 Then Laud had been with him, to look after the coronation 
 ceremonial, and lecture the Scottish Bishops as to their garb, 
 and the right conduct of service in the Chapel-Royal, or in the 
 High Church, when his Majesty should be present. Now 
 there was not a bishop or a half-bishop to act as chaplaia at 
 Holyrood, and the King had to be courteously content with 
 the attendance, in that capacity, of the arch-Presbyterian of 
 
 Scotland, Alexander Henderson. Nevertheless, Charles had 
 
 not come to Scotland without a purpose. The Long Par- 
 liament of England had sat for nine months, and they 
 had been nine months of thunder and lightning. Strafford 
 had been beheaded ; Laud had been impeached and sent 
 to the Tower ; the other most unpopular ministers, with 
 some of the Bishops, were under indictment, or had fled 
 abroad. Monopolies, the ship-money grievance, the Court of 
 Star-Chamber, the Court of High Commission, illegal institutions 
 and jurisdictions of all sorts, had been abolished ; a Bill had 
 been passed making the existing Parliament indissoluble except 
 with its own consent, and another Bill securing regular triennial 
 Parliaments for ever after. Nor was this all. Petitions for
 
 34° 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 Church-Reform had come in abundantly, and the only question 
 now was whether such Church-Reform should consist in the 
 abolition of English Episcopacy, root and branch, which was 
 what many urged, or whether, as the more moderate hoped, 
 Episcopacy might not be preserved in a restricted and modi- 
 fied form, by excluding the Bishops from the House of Lords 
 and State-offices, compelling them to act even in Church 
 matters by the advice of diocesan councils of their clergy, and 
 confiscating or curtailing the revenues of Deans and Chapters. 
 
 In this revolution, larger and more gnarled by far than that 
 which had occurred in Scotland, inasmuch as England was a 
 wider and more composite body-politic, Charles had been 
 helpless. He had struggled and buffeted, but only as a man 
 borne along on a resistless tide. At length, however (June 
 and July 1641), there had come signs of a reaction in his 
 favour. On various questions of farther change, and especially 
 on the Church question, a Conservative party, or Party of 
 Authority, had formed itself in the two English Houses, led in 
 the Peers by a coalition of such men as the Duke of Richmond, 
 the Marquis of Hertford, the Earl of Bristol, and Lord Digby, 
 and in the Commons by Hyde, Colepepper, and Lord Falk- 
 land. With the exception of the Duke of Richmond, who was 
 the King's kinsman and a Royalist of the absolute type, all 
 these had hitherto been identified more or less with the 
 reforming activity of the Parliament, and some of them had 
 been among the most zealous for the death of .Strafford, and 
 the fiercest in the attack on Bishops and the abuses of 
 Episcopacy. Their reforming energy, however, had begun to 
 abate, and they had become Conservatives in the sense of 
 desiring to steady the throne and other institutions in the 
 condition of things that had been reached. Now, Charles had 
 entered into relations with this party, with a view to convert it 
 into that agency of absolute counter-revolution which he wanted. 
 In this he was to succeed remarkably. Men who rally round 
 Authority must rally round the Authority that is. As it moves
 
 jEtat. 55-57. ENGLISH POLITICAL CRISIS. 3 4I 
 
 they must move, even should the direction be backward. And 
 so it happened in a short time that the independent Conserva- 
 tive Party in the English Parliament, whose original intention 
 was to make a stand for compromise and rest when they 
 thought Reformation had gone far enough, transmuted itself 
 into the Cavalier Party, adhering to the King in everything, 
 and combining in its ranks men who had voted for Strafford's 
 death, and helped^to pull down Laud with military desperadoes 
 who would have massacred London to save Strafford, and with 
 the utmost believers in extinct Laudism. This lay as yet a 
 little in the future ; but by June or July 1641 Charles had 
 found reason to persuade himself that, by a proper management 
 of the Conservative party in the Parliament in alliance with 
 wilder elements, an English counter-revolution might be 
 possible. 
 
 Now, Charles's object in revisiting Scotland was to see what 
 could be done there towards promoting a Scottish counter- 
 revolution in connexion with the English. On this subject he 
 was already in possession of secret information from Scotland 
 itself. The information was of such a nature that the visit to 
 Scotland had for some time been determined on, and the only 
 question had been as to the time. Had it been made as early 
 as the beginning of June, something extraordinary might have 
 come of it, and Charles had reason to know that by the delay 
 beyond that time his best opportunity had been missed. Still 
 even in August important results might be netted out of the 
 visit ; and indeed what had happened in Scotland in the two 
 intervening months made the visit a matter of duty for him, if 
 he would save some of his best Scottish friends, and the chances 
 depending on them. Moreover, he had now a better pretext 
 for the visit than he could have had in June. The Scottish 
 Treaty which had been all this while going on in London, at 
 the doors of the Long Parliament, between the two sets of 
 Commissioners, English and Scottish, had at length been 
 brought to a satisfactory close ; and, precisely in the beginning
 
 ; 4 2 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 of August, the Scots had received, with the thanks of the 
 Parliament, their indemnity and arrears for the expenses in- 
 curred by the stay of Leslie's Army in the North of England, 
 and that Army had returned home disbanded. This in itself 
 was a fact of hope for the Conservative reaction in England. 
 What had mainly tied the king's hands hitherto in his dealings 
 with the English Parliament was the presence of that Scottish 
 Army in the north, judiciously detained there by the Parlia- 
 ment, to prevent the King from using, for any violent purpose, 
 the remains of Conway's English Army, still undisbanded in 
 the Northern Counties. Both Armies, however, being now 
 disbanded by the treaty, and the two nations happily unlinked 
 from the entanglement into which the Second Bishops' War 
 had brought them, what more natural than that the King 
 should have a desire to revisit his native land, and see how its 
 hills looked when tinged with the gold of the new Treaty. 
 ' The English Parliament did not like the proposal, suspected 
 something under it, but had to waive objections and see him 
 depart. They took the precaution, however, of sending after 
 him five Commissioners of their own body, to observe his 
 proceedings among the Scots. Of these Mr. John Hampden 
 was one. 
 
 The King's visit to Scotland, we have said, was actuated by 
 information which he had received. This needs explanation, 
 the rather because the explanation will enlarge our ideas of 
 Dmmmond's function at this time in Scotland, and his relations 
 to some of his most eminent Scottish contemporaries. 
 
 Scotland, underneath all her apparent unanimity for the 
 Covenant during the last two years, and her exultation in the 
 new Presbyterian order of things, yet contained, as may be 
 readily guessed, a good deal of lurking or diffused Drummo?idism. 
 That was not the name by which it was known at the time ; it 
 was called Malignancy by the Covenanters, and Loyalty and 
 the like by its professors ; but Drwnmondism is the best name
 
 .&tat. 55-57 DRUMMONDISM IN SCOTLAND. 343 
 
 for us, and we are quite entitled to introduce it into the language 
 of this portion of Scottish History. For, though Drummond 
 was only a private man, no one had expressed, or was capable of 
 expressing, so eloquently and energetically as he had done, in 
 his Irene and subsequent tracts, the very essence of all the 
 antipathy to the established order of things existing anywhere 
 among his countrymen. These tracts were, in fact, the best un- 
 published manifestoes, if such a phrase may pass, of the scattered, 
 diffused, and suppressed discontent. All the disaffected in 
 Scotland were virtual Drummondists. So far as words went, 
 Drummond was their universal representative. 
 
 Not with Drummond scribbling in his study, however, nor 
 with Drummondism as mere diffused sentiment in the com- 
 munity, were the Covenanting Government called upon to 
 grapple. It was overt Drummondism that they had to guard 
 against, Drummondism in high places and with public powers 
 of mischief. Well, that danger had at length become real. 
 Just two months before the King's visit, the Covenanting 
 Government had discovered the nucleus of what seemed to be 
 a widely-ramified conspiracy of Drummondists of rank and in- 
 fluence, including not a few who had till then been high in the 
 lists of the Covenant. Through June and July 1640 all Scot- 
 land had been in agitation with the story of these discovered 
 "Plotters," an>l with the question what was to be done with them. 
 The Plotter-in-chief, the very soul of the conspiracy, was the 
 daring young Earl of Montrose ; and his closest colleagues were 
 his brother-in-law and former guardian, the veteran Lord Napier, 
 his friend and cousin Sir George Stirling of Keir, and Sir 
 Archibald Stewart of Blackhall, one of the Lords of Session. 
 In these, and others associated with them, what we have called 
 Drummondism had become overt and rampant. 
 
 Montrose, from his first junction with the Covenanters, had 
 been a most restless and incalculable member of their fraternity. 
 Always anxious to be conspicuous, and ready for the wildest or 
 most desperate work they chose to, put him upon, whether
 
 344 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTIIORNDEN. 
 
 dragooning the Aberdonians into submission, or leading a 
 forlorn hope in battle, he seemed still to have shibboleths and 
 aspirations of his own, derived rather from Plutarch's Lives or 
 Pagan Poetry than from Calvin's Institutes or any homelier 
 manual of Presbyterian Theology. It was a career of glory that 
 he wanted, how or where he hardly cared ; and he had plunged 
 into the Covenant for lack of a better opening. But a career 
 of glory among the Covenanters had become less and less likely 
 for him. He would fain, it was thought, have been commander- 
 in-chief for the Covenant in the First Bishops' War ; and, when 
 the more experienced Leslie had been appointed, that was one 
 disappointment. Nevertheless, he had gone through the First 
 Bishops' War with credit, and only in the interval between that 
 war and the second (June 1639— Aug. 1640) had he broken 
 bounds. "He had then been corresponding privately with the 
 King, hinting his discomfort among his associates of the 
 Covenant, his desire to be of use to his Majesty, and his views 
 of methods. He had conceived the most intense personal 
 hatred to the Earl of Argyle, the political head of the Cove- 
 nanters, and had been going about in the Highlands and Low- 
 lands saying the most savage and unreasonable things of that 
 grave Earl. He was an ambitious, wily, squint-eyed impostor ; 
 he wanted to make himself Dictator, or even King of Scotland ; 
 it was a disgrace to the Scottish nobility to be managed and 
 ruled by that traitorous Campbell and the crew of seditious 
 preachers that were partly his sycophants and partly his masters ! 
 Such energy of remonstrance to this effect was there in the 
 young fellow, such power of inspiring more sluggish natures, 
 that, on the very eve of the march into England in the Second 
 Bishops' War, he had induced nineteen other Scottish nobles to 
 join him in a kind of sub-Covenant among themselves, called 
 " The Band of Cumbernauld," the object of which was to break 
 down the supremacy of Argyle and the rest of the Presbyterian 
 oligarchy. The Earls of Marischal, Wigton, Kinghorn, Hume, 
 Athole, Mar, and Perth (Drummond's patron Earl) had joined
 
 -^'«'- 55-57- MONTROSE AND THE PLOTTERS. 345 
 
 him in this Band, with Lords Boyd, Erskine, Drummond (the 
 Earl of Perth's son), and even Lord Almond, Leslie's appointed 
 second in command. It was actually, one may say, with this 
 Band in his pocket, that Montrose had waded across the Tweed, 
 the first man of Leslie's army to set an invading foot in England. 
 The Covenanters, though not aware of that formidable fact, or 
 of the extent of Montrose's insubordination otherwise, had come 
 to know of his secret correspondence with the King ; and it was 
 only to avoid scandal in their ranks that they let him go through 
 the Second Bishops' War without being brought to a court- 
 martial. That war over, though the Band of Cumbernauld did 
 then come to light (Nov. 1640), they were generous enough to 
 overlook even that organized meeting, only requiring the chief 
 Banders to disown any intention of divisive courses in what 
 they had done, and giving them to understand that there must 
 be no more sub-Covenants. " No more sub-Covenants !" 
 echoed Montrose, and went on caballing more vehemently than 
 before, though with greater secresy and concentration. Through 
 the winter of 1 640-1 and the spring of 1641, while the Long 
 Parliament was creating a new England round King Charles, 
 and the Scottish Treaty was dragging itself on in London, and 
 Argyle and his Presbyterian oligarchy were absolute masters of 
 Scotland, Montrose, Lord Napier, Stirling of Keir, and Stewart 
 of Blackhall, meeting often together in Edinburgh or elsewhere, 
 had constituted themselves into a little committee or secret 
 society for scheming the means of a counter-revolution in Scotland, 
 and communicating their ideas to the King in mysterious letters 
 in cipher, addressed to the Duke of Richmond and the refugee 
 Traquair. Their great idea was that the King should come to 
 Scotland himself as soon as possible, so as to facilitate operations. 
 In that case, if he would be guided by their advice, they could 
 
 promise him ! Well, they would not say what ; only let his 
 
 Majesty be assured that never had a country been so over-ridden 
 by any animal as poor Scotland now was by the Dromedary 
 (i. <?., Argyle = Campbell = Camel = Dromedary), and let his
 
 346 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Majesty also excuse the present writers for suggesting that 
 perhaps he had hitherto trusted too much in Scottish affairs to 
 the Elephant (i.e., the Marquis of Hamilton ; but why called 
 " Elephant " one does not know, unless because you could not 
 make out, if. you were short-sighted, which end was his head). 
 
 ■ By all this, Charles had been so much impressed that he 
 
 ^(/resolved on the journey to Scotland. Unfortunately, how- 
 ever, he had delayed it rather too long. The Dromedary had 
 got on the track of Montrose's meetings and cipherings ; his 
 delinquencies for a year past had all come out in one fell 
 inquiry; and, on the nth of June, 1641, he, Napier, Keir, 
 and Blackhall, had been committed to Edinburgh Castle. 
 
 Montrose and Drummond, it will now appear, ought to be 
 associated more closely than they have hitherto been in Scottish 
 recollections of their period. Call Drummond a passive or 
 theoretical Montrose, and Montrose a rampant or practical 
 Drummond, and you will have expressed very exactly the re- 
 lationship of the two men to each other. They were 
 perhaps the only two men of their time in Scotland that we 
 should now unhesitatingly call men of genius; and it so happens 
 that Scottish Conservatism or Royalism can claim them both. As 
 Drummond was so much the senior, and had been an established 
 celebrity long before Montrose came on the scene, Montrose 
 might, by possibility, have been his political pupil. It might even 
 be a fair guess that the nobleman to whom we saw Drummond 
 sending a copy of his Irene in the end of 1638, with the striking 
 and subtle compliment, "Force hath less power over a great heart 
 than duty," was no other than Montrose, then in his first ardour 
 for the Covenant. But no direct suasion from Drummond 
 had been necessary for Montrose's conversion. So far as a 
 political Mentor had been necessary for the young Telemachus, 
 such a Mentor was already provided in the person of his 
 brother-in-law Lord Napier, who was as much his senior as 
 Drummond was, and had long reasoned out, and even been in 
 the habit of expressing on paper, views of Scottish politics which
 
 ALlat. 55-57. DRUMMOND AND MONTROSE. 347 
 
 were much the same as Drummond's. From Napier it is not 
 unlikely Montrose had, first of all, imbibed these views ; and, 
 as Napier and Drummond were probably quite cognisant of 
 their agreement with each. other in all essential principles, this 
 was much the same as if Drummond had been the Mentor. 
 Indeed, what we have called Drummondism, in compliment to 
 its most eloquent expositor, was the form of political thinking 
 natural to all the Scottish Conservatives of that time, and into 
 which scores of men throughout the country must have reasoned 
 themselves independently, though few could have articulated it 
 in writing like Drummond and Napier. But, when Montrose 
 had taken it up, that mode of articulation was not likely to 
 remain the only one. With the advantages of his Earldom to 
 start from, and with the energy of his genius, and his conscious- 
 ness of military capacity, to carry him through, he would show 
 how it might be articulated in a very different fashion. He 
 would be the leader and commander henceforward ; others 
 should but follow in his train. Curiously enough, however, in 
 preparation for this open display of a standard of Conservatism 
 or Counter-Revolution in Scotland, Montrose had himself ex- 
 pressed his ideas in a speculative Essay. It seems to have been 
 written late in 1640, or early in 1641, and is in the form of a 
 " Letter to a Friend ;" which Friend, according to the best con- 
 jecture of Montrose's latest biographer, Mr. Mark Napier, may 
 have been actually Drummond. If so, Drummond must have 
 read with peculiar interest a political sketch which was so much 
 like a repetition or sequel of his own Irene. For that is a fair 
 general description of the Montrose document. It is Drum- 
 mondism on the spring for action. There is, first of all, an asser- 
 tion, very like that which Drummond had always been making, of 
 the principle of Authority as paramount in States. Then there 
 is a view of the actual state of Scotland, as utterly astray from its 
 proper allegiance and far gone in anarchy and chaos. Here 
 also the language might have been Drummond's. There is the 
 same strain of invective against the ambition and self-seeking of
 
 348 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 individual nobles, with implied reference to Argyle as the chief ; 
 and one detects also the same especial horror of that Plague of 
 Black Beetles, or universal influence of the Presbyterian Clergy 
 in State matters, with which, in the opinion of both, Scotland 
 was then too sorely afflicted. 
 
 Though thus at one in their political notions, Montrose and 
 Drummond were distinguished by such differences in other 
 respects that a union of their fates was impossible. Drummond 
 was in his fifty-sixth year, while Montrose was only in his 
 twenty-ninth ; Drummond was but the private laird, while 
 Montrose was the great Earl ; Drummond was the passive 
 student and theorist, while Montrose was rampant for war and 
 heroic action ; Drummond had vowed to keep out of con- 
 spiracies and avoid martyrdom, while Montrose had vowed to 
 go on conspiring, with the gibbet in sight, until conspiracy 
 should flash out in lieutenancy for the King and the generalship 
 of armies. Hence it has happened that, while Montrose has 
 left so Avondrous a blaze of himself in Scottish History, 
 Drummond remains but discernible in the background, 
 and has to be tracked and sought out. One comfortable 
 consequence, however, of his rule to be passive only, he had 
 already realized at the time with which we are now concerned. 
 But for that rule, he might have been, and probably would 
 have been, one of Montrose's secret conclave of " Plotters," 
 scheming the overthrow of the existing Government, and 
 denouncing the Dromedary and the Elephant in cipher-letters 
 to the King. Then, instead of being quietly in his house in 
 Hawthornden as he now was, free to welcome the King's visit 
 and observe what came of it, he would have been for the last 
 two months a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, with Montrose, 
 Napier, Keir, and Blackhall, expecting the results of the King's 
 visit with a much more personal interest. 
 
 On the King's Coronation Visit, it will be remembered, 
 Drummond had written a great deal of verse and prose, to go
 
 <<£tat. SSS7- INTENDED " SPEECH." 349 
 
 along with Jameson's pictures in the splendid pageant of the 
 royal entry. There was no such pageantry this time. The 
 ceremonial of the visit was comparatively sombre ; and all that 
 Drummond wrote in anticipation of it was a certain Speech for 
 Edinburgh to the King, which lies unread among his prose 
 writings. It can have been for Drummond's private satisfaction 
 only. It is by no means the kind of address to his Majesty 
 which the Covenanting Government would have adopted or 
 permitted. This will be seen from a specimen : — 
 
 "There is no Kingdom, State, or Republic, which hath not 
 had its Revolutions, people often travailing to find their surety 
 and rest in the factions of war, as infants theirs in the motions 
 of their cradle, which the way of sloth and a long calm of peace 
 might have brought insensibly to their ruin. To settle things 
 so under the Moon, and strive to keep them at such a constant 
 stay, that they should not vary and change, were to reverse 
 that order which God hath established by his eternal decrees 
 upon the Earth. The whole Continent, at least of Europe, at 
 this time having suffered such earthquakes of civil broils and 
 seditions by their diversity of opinions and division of minds, if 
 at last the neighbouring Isles should shake and be partakers of 
 the trembling, should it be held as strange ? Nay, the whole 
 spheres of States about us whirling, it had been miracu- 
 lous if we had not undergone some trepidation. Thus a fatal 
 necessity, contrary to our minds, did force us unto many things. 
 . . . Doubts now are resolved, all damps and mists cleared, 
 and we hope that saying shall prove true, Amantium irce amoris 
 redintegratio. This assurance is wrought in us by that con- 
 fidence we have in your Majesty's clemency, which is more 
 proper to you than to any Prince living. You are the common 
 father of your people, we are your children ; ingratitude of 
 children towards their father is execrable, and cruelty of fathers 
 towards their children unnatural. . . . We confess you are 
 our Sovereign Lord, and we swear and declare we will live and 
 die loyal subjects to your Majesty, acknowledging you are 
 ordained and placed over us by Almighty God, the King of 
 Kings, who, lest he should dazzle our weak sight by His 
 exceeding brightness, did not here below establish the throne 
 of His Excellency,- but granted us to look upon it by the
 
 35° 
 
 DRUM MO ND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 representation of one Sun in the Heaven and one Prince in the 
 Commonwealth. . . . Protect us, save us, relieve us from 
 that miserable subjection and captivity which seem to threaten 
 and thrall us ; remove us from those pitiful lists upon which we 
 were entering. Giants of State would serve themselves with 
 mystical pretexts of Liberty, to the overthrow of all Liberty 
 and destruction of the country, not caring in the tomb of the 
 Commonwealth to entomb themselves. Unite the dispersed 
 members of this your Kingdom, restoring them to a healthful 
 and sound temper; suffer not Religion to be a chariot to 
 Ambition : all which cannot be acquired but by Obedience to 
 you their Sovereign, and an inviolable observing of laws already 
 established. Make Peace, Truth, and Justice interchangeably 
 embrace and kiss one another." 
 
 When Charles arrived in Edinburgh, the Scottish Parliament 
 was in session, having met on the 15th of July. During the 
 previous month, while they were yet ignorant of the King's in- 
 tended visit, their business had been very various. Much of it 
 had related to the Treaty then being concluded in London ; but 
 a great deal of it had related to " The Plotters," and to another 
 class of delinquents, called " The Incendiaries." The Plotters 
 were, of course, Montrose, Napier, Keir, and Blackball ; the 
 Incendiaries, or older criminals, were Traquair, Sir Robert Spots- 
 wood, ex-Bishop Maxwell, and others (the Lauds, Straffords, 
 and Windebanks of Scotland), regarded as chiefly responsible for 
 those misinformations and evil advices to the King which had 
 brought about either of the Bishops' Wars. As only two 
 of the Incendiaries were in Scotland, the proceedings against 
 them were mostly proceedings in absence ; but there had been 
 almost daily communications of a judicial kind with the Plotters 
 in Edinburgh Castle, and at least once they had appeared per- 
 sonally at the bar of the House. 
 
 After the King's arrival, Parliament could hardly do less than 
 begin over again, in compliment to his personal presence, all 
 business that had not already been concluded. For he appeared 
 among them in the most gracious of tempers, as if it were a 
 positive pleasure to him to be in a Parliament of his loyal and
 
 jEtat. 55-57. CHARLES IN EDINBURGH. 351 
 
 native Scotland after his recent experience of what a Parliament 
 might be in England. " The end of my coming is shortly this," 
 he said in his opening address on the 17th of August, " to per- 
 " feet whatsoever I have promised, and withal to quiet those 
 " distractions which have and may fall out amongst you ; and 
 " this I mind, not superficially, but fully and cheerfully, to do ; 
 " for I assure you that I can do nothing with more cheerfulness 
 " than to give my people content and a general satisfaction.'' 
 As if to prove that these were not mere words of course, and 
 that his Majesty had no intention now of questioning the 
 Covenant or disturbing the Presbyterian Establishment, nine 
 noblemen of conspicuous Royalism who had hitherto kept clear 
 of the Covenant signed that document publicly in Parliament, 
 with his Majesty's approval, within the next two days : viz., the 
 Duke of Richmond (Duke of Lennox in the Scottish Peerage), 
 the Marquis of Hamilton, and the Earls of Morton, Perth, Rox- 
 burgh, Lanark, Annandale, Galloway, and Dumfries. Nor was 
 the good humour temporary only. For eight weeks the King 
 attended the House with much regularity, taking part in the 
 business of all kinds, and always with studied courtesy. Only 
 on two subjects was there any sign of ruffle between him and the 
 House. One was the subject of the Plotters and the Incendiaries. 
 Charles was, of course, anxious about both classes of delinquents; 
 and he must have been especially anxious about Montrose and 
 his fellow-plotters, by whose invitation he was now in Scot- 
 land, though unfortunately he could not see them, as he had 
 hoped to do, in their places in Parliament, or at Holyrood, 
 ready for that grand stroke in his service which they had pro- 
 mised, but only as prisoners brought in for interrogation. Had 
 he not come as a peace-maker? Would not the Parliament, 
 for his sake, quash the proceedings against both classes of 
 delinquents, so that he might be happy in seeing all distractions 
 among his Scottish subjects at an end? On this subject the 
 Covenanting Chiefs did not at first find that they could gratify 
 his Majesty ; but, at length, it was pretty well understood that
 
 352 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 the King would have his wish. The other difference was as to 
 the constitution of the Government or Ministry that should 
 succeed the somewhat irregular and fluctuating one that had 
 subsisted in Scotland during the last three years. Charles, of 
 course, wanted to fill up anew all the great State offices, and re- 
 constitute his Privy Council, so as to leave Scotland under a 
 complete and legitimate administration. To this the Cove- 
 nanters had no objection; only they disputed the absolute 
 prerogative of the Crown to nominate the persons who should 
 fill the State offices. On this subject there was considerable 
 stubbornness on both sides, and the difficulty seemed greater 
 than in the other. Still there was no reason to anticipate that 
 the difficulty would not be overcome. In short, till Tuesday 
 the 1 2th of October, all seemed to go well. Daily, or almost 
 daily, the King was in the fine new Parliament Hall in the 
 High Street; and at night dear old Edinburgh, "mine own 
 romantic town," slept securely, conscious of her sovereign's 
 presence in her, beside the twinkling lights of Holyrood. 
 
 But then, O then, what a fortnight ! No one could tell what 
 was in it; no one to this day can tell what was in it. In 
 Scottish Histories it is called mysteriously The Incident ; in 
 more modern language it may be called The Frustrated Coup 
 DEtat. — The alarm first burst upon Edinburgh on the 12th of 
 October in the form of news that, in the preceding night, the 
 Earl of Argyle, the Marquis of Hamilton, and the Earl of 
 Lanark, had fled from the city to a country-house of the 
 Marquis's, twelve miles off, in consequence of information they 
 had received of an intended plot affecting their lives. The 
 plot, as reported, was that they were to be seized at Holyrood 
 in the King's presence and carried to a ship in Leith Roads, 
 there to remain in custody, or to be killed if escape seemed likely; 
 that a regiment lying ready near Edinburgh was then to be 
 marched into the City for the arrest of other leading 
 Covenanters, and the suppression of any rising of the citizens ; 
 that Montrose was to be released from the Castle to take the
 
 & iat - 55-57- " TH E INCIDENT:'' 
 
 353 
 
 command for the King ; that the signal for a counter-revolution 
 was to be sent through the land; and that the King was to 
 remain in Scotland to see his authority re-established and 
 Argyle and the rest impeached and sentenced for all their 
 misdemeanours. Tremendous was the first commotion in the 
 Parliament and the City over this news. For a day or two the 
 King and the Parliament faced each other in the strangest 
 opposition of moods — the King protesting with oaths, shedding 
 tears of offended dignity, breaking out in passionate reproaches 
 of Argyle and the Hamiltons for the insult done to his honour ; 
 and the Parliament listening dubiously, and not knowing what 
 to think. Then, the City having been made perfectly safe by 
 Leslie's arrangements, the excitement passed into something 
 like an inquiry into the real substance of the reported Plot, but 
 with such vague and intangible results that one suspects a 
 cautious Scottish desire not to go too deep, and imagines how 
 differently Pym and the English Parliamentarians would have 
 probed a similar matter. That there had been a Plot was 
 undoubted ; that three or four Scottish desperadoes of the 
 Montrose connexion, including two Earls and a Colonel, had 
 been designing something dreadful against Argyle and the 
 Hamiltons was thought to be ascertained ; that Montrose 
 himself was directly responsible could not be asserted, for he 
 was in the Castle under lock and key ; that Will Murray, one 
 of the King's attendants, had had access to Montrose in the 
 Castle, and had conveyed letters from him to Holyrood was 
 nevertheless a fact ; that this Will Murray, and also the Duke 
 of Richmond and Lord Almond, were quite immaculate was 
 difficult to believe ; but that the King himself had had 
 anything to do with the Plot was held to be entirely disproven. 
 In some such muffled and confused set of conclusions, and the 
 arrest of one or two of the desperadoes, the excitement died 
 away, the King and the Parliament settling back into working 
 relations with each other, but Argyle and the Hamiltons still 
 remaining absent. The very fact that the Plot had been against
 
 i54 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHOKNDEN. 
 
 them in the first place (i.e. against the Dromedary, the 
 Elephant, and the Elephant's young brother) suggests that it was 
 in reality a missfire of that great coup d'etat for the purposes of 
 which Montrose had implored the King to come to Scotland, 
 and which Montrose himself would have superintended had he 
 been at large. 
 
 On the 27 th of October there was no meeting of the 
 Parliament, and the King was playing at golf on Leith Links, 
 when a packet of letters was put into his hands. It contained 
 the news of the Rising of the Roman Catholics of Ireland four 
 days before, and the beginning of the Massacre of the Irish 
 Protestants. It could not then be foreseen what a tremendous 
 and protracted complication of the great struggle which already 
 involved England and Scotland was to arise from this Irish 
 Rebellion; but, even on the first flush, the business was dread- 
 ful enough. For one thing, as it required the King's return 
 to London, it hastened the conclusion of affairs between him 
 and the Scots. 
 
 Having failed to extract out of his visit any of those means 
 towards a counter-revolution which he had promised himself, 
 Charles had no alternative but to carry out that general pacifi- 
 cation which was the avowed purpose of his visit. This 
 intention having been made duly apparent, and the Parliament 
 reciprocating the King's graciousness to the utmost, and Argyle 
 and the Hamiltons having come back, and the relics of the 
 frustrated coup d'etat having been huddled up, the visit of three 
 months ended accordingly. There was a round of embracings and 
 shakings of hands. Montrose, Napier, Keir, and Blackhall, with 
 the two Incendiaries in custody, were liberated on good 
 behaviour, with the assurance that the proceedings against them 
 for past offences would now be formal only. Such pardon and 
 relegation into private life was all that they could expect, and 
 all the rewards and honours fell to the faithful and prevailing 
 Presbyterians. To obliterate every sign of ill-feeling between
 
 &*at. 55-57- END OF CHARLES'S VISIT. 355 
 
 the King and Argyle, and to stamp Argyle's continued 
 supremacy in Scotland with the King's most emphatic approval, 
 that nobleman was, in the most public and respectful manner, 
 created a Marquis ; Loudoun, who had so nearly had his head cut 
 off in the Tower, was promoted to an Earldom ; Field-Marshal 
 Leslie, who had baffled the King twice in the Bishops' Wars, 
 was made Earl of Leven ; Lord Almond, who had commanded 
 in the Second Bishops' War under Leslie, was made Earl of 
 Callander ; four other peerages were bestowed on deserving 
 Knights; and among the rest there was flung a handful of 
 Knighthoods, of which Johnstone of Warriston, the paragon of 
 Presbyterian lawyers, picked up one. Nay, Johnstone of 
 Warriston became not only Sir Archibald Johnstone, but by 
 courtesy " Lord Warriston ;" for, one of the necessary arrange- 
 ments being the reconstitution of the Court of Session, and four 
 delinquent judges having been ejected from their places, 
 Johnstone was appointed to one of the vacancies, taking his 
 place among the fifteen Lords of Session, the rest of whom 
 were of a sufficiently Presbyterian type, and one of whom was 
 Scot of Scotstarvet. , But how about the Government proper, or 
 Ministry and Privy Council ? Well, the Marquis of Huntley, 
 and seven Earls of the Montrose persuasion, or of bad antece- 
 dents otherwise, having been struck out of the list originally pro- 
 posed by the King, this was how it was left : — 
 
 Chancellor of the Kingdom (nominal head of the Government) — The Earl 
 of Loudoun. 
 
 lords Commissioners of the Treasury — Loudoun, the Marquis of Argyle 
 (real head of the Government), the Earl of Glencairn, Lord Lindsay, 
 and Sir James Carmichael (Treasurer-depute). 
 
 Lord Privy Seal — The Earl of Roxburgh. 
 
 Secretary of State — The Earl of Lanark. 
 
 Clerk Register— Six Alexander Gibson of Durie. 
 
 King's Advocate — Sir Thomas Hope of Craighall. 
 
 Justice- Clerk — Sir John Hamilton of Orbiston. 
 
 Master of Requests — Sir James Galloway. 
 
 General Body of the Privy Council — The Duke of Lennox and Richmond 
 (non-resident) ; the Marquis of Hamilton ; the Marquis of Argyle ;
 
 356 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Earls Marischal, Sutherland, Mar, Eglinton, Cassilis, Glencairn, Mur- 
 ray, Perth, Dunfermline, Wigton, Kinghorn, Seaforth, Lauderdale. 
 Kinnoull, Lothian, Southesk, Wemyss, Dalhousie, Findlater, Leven, 
 and Callander ; Lords Angus (eldest son of the Marquis of Douglas), 
 Lindsay, Yester, St. Clair, Elphinstone, Balmerino, Burleigh, and 
 Balcarras ; Sir Robert Gordon, Sir Patrick Hepburn, Sir William 
 Douglas of Cavers, Sir James Dundas, Sir Thomas Myrton, Sir David 
 Graham, Sir John Erskine, Sir Robert Graham, Sir Robert Innes, 
 Knights ; and the Provost of Edinburgh. 
 
 Such was the general government of Scotland as reconstituted 
 by Charles at the close of his visit. It was Presbyterian and 
 Covenanting in mass and at the core, though with a sprinkling 
 of milder Drummondists left in it for fonn's sake. An impor- 
 tant special body for sub-government, created under the name 
 of The Commission for Conservation of the Peace between the two 
 Kingdoms, and including some twenty of the Privy Councillors, 
 with the addition of some lairds and representative burgesses 
 of the chief Scottish towns, exhibited the same preponderance 
 of the strict Presbyterian element. And so, all things having 
 been cordially settled, and there having been a splendid farewell 
 meeting with the Parliament, wound up by Henderson's conclud- 
 ing sermon, the King left Edinburgh, on his return to London, 
 Nov. 1 8, 1 64 1. 
 
 During the King's visit to Scotland, or, at all events, in the 
 same year 1641, there had died Arthur Johnston, the King's 
 physician, the acknowledged chief of the Scoto-Latinists of his 
 day. He died at Oxford, at the age of fifty-four, while on a 
 visit to a married daughter there. Drummond must have heard 
 of the fact with some concern, for he and Johnston had been 
 correspondents. " To his much honoured friend, Dr. Arthur 
 Johnston, Physician to the King," is the address of one of 
 Drummond's letters still extant, but of unknown date. It is in 
 reply to some request of Johnston's for Drummond's opinion 
 on the state and prospects of Poetry in Britain ; and, as it proves 
 the resolute classicism or conservatism of Drummond's tastes 
 on this subject too, the substance of it may be now quoted : —
 
 Mtat. 55-57. DEATH OF ARTHUR JOHNSTON. 357 
 
 " Amongst all these rare ornaments of the mind of man 
 Poesy hath had a most eminent place, and been in high esteem 
 not only at one time, and in one climate, but during all times, 
 and through all parts of the world where any ray of humanity 
 and civility hath shined. So that she hath not unworthily 
 deserved the name of the Mistress of human life, the height of 
 Eloquence, the quintessence of Knowledge, the loud trumpet 
 of Fame, the language of the Gods. There is not anything 
 endureth longer. Homer's Troy hath outlived many Republics 
 and both the Roman and Grecian Monarchies. She subsisteth 
 by herself, and after one demeanour and continuance her beauty 
 appeareth to all ages. In vain have some men of late, trans- 
 formers of everything, consulted upon her reformation, and 
 endeavoured to abstract her to metaphysical ideas and 
 scholastical quiddities, denuding her of her own habits and 
 those ornaments with which she hath amused the world some 
 thousand years. Poesy is not a thing that is yet in the finding 
 and search, or which maybe otherwise found out; being already 
 condescended upon by all nations, and as it were exhibited 
 jure gentium amongst Greeks, Romans, Italians, French, and 
 Spaniards. Neither do I think that a good piece of poesy 
 which Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch, Bartas, Ronsard, Boscan, 
 Garcilasso, if they were alive and had that language, could 
 not understand, and reach the sense of the writer. Suppose 
 these men [the innovators] could find out some other new idea 
 like Poesy, it should be held as if Nature should bring forth 
 some new animal — neither man, horse, lion, dog, but which had 
 some members of all, if they had been proportionably and by 
 right symmetry set together. What is not like the Ancients, 
 and conform to those rules which have been agreed unto by all 
 times, may indeed be something like unto Poesy ; but it is no 
 more Poesy than a monster is a man." 
 
 Even more concerned by Johnston's death than Drummond 
 must have been Scot of Scotstarvet. Johnston, as we may re- 
 member, had been conspicuously associated with Scotstarvet in 
 the production of the Deliticz Poetarum Scotorum in 1637. He 
 had, indeed, been virtually co-editor with Scotstarvet of that 
 collection ; he had furnished the prefatory epistle and verses, 
 eulogistic of Scotstarvet's liberality in projecting the book and 
 bearing the expense ; and he had been the largest contributor to
 
 !58 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 the body of the contents. Grateful for all this, and knowing 
 that Johnston's contributions to the Delitice, though they included 
 most of what he had previously published in various forms, 
 were but a portion of the total quantity of Latin poetry he had 
 written, Scotstarvet had no sooner heard of Johnston's death 
 than he resolved on doing farther honour to his memory in the 
 most appropriate way possible : viz., by bringing out a complete 
 separate edition of all his Latin poems. This was the more 
 creditable to Scotstarvet because he was then engrossed with 
 another business of a purely patriotic nature, taxing him in time 
 and money. 
 
 Since the publication of the Delitice, Scotstarvet had been in 
 busy correspondence with the same printer, Blaeu of Amster- 
 dam, over the project of a Scottish Atlas, or complete set of 
 general and county maps of Scotland, according to the best 
 surveys, to form a volume of the magnificent universal Atlas, or 
 Theatrum Mitndi, which the Blaeus were bringing out, but to be 
 purchaseable separately by those who did not want the whole 
 of that great work. Materials had already been furnished to 
 the Blaeus in the shape of a number of maps drawn a good 
 many years before by a Timothy Pont of Edinburgh, which 
 Scotstarvet had acquired after that geographer's death ; but 
 much more was needed, and Scotstarvet had been labouring and 
 negotiating for the supply of the same. Precisely at the time 
 of the King's visit to Scotland he succeeded in arranging the 
 scheme to his satisfaction. The Blaeus, at his instigation, 
 had applied formally to Charles for his help and countenance 
 in their contemplated issue of an Atlas of Scotland ; and in a 
 royal letter, dated from Holyrood House, Oct. 8, 1641, Charles 
 had committed the business, with earnest wishes for its success, 
 to Robert Gordon of Straloch, Aberdeenshire (1580-1661), the 
 best genius in geographical matters then alive in Scotland. He 
 was, in fact, the man whom Scotstarvet had fixed on for the 
 business, and had induced to undertake it ; and, now that it 
 was in his hands, it was sure to go on prosperously. Much,
 
 sEtai. 55-57. SCO TSTAR VET'S NEW PR OJE CT. 359 
 
 however, depended on the assistance Scotstarvet could still 
 give to Straloch, either by his own assiduity, or by pressing into 
 the service friends in different parts of Scotland, who knew 
 anything of maps and map -drawing, or even of the topography 
 of their own localities. There is evidence that Drummond took 
 an interest in this enterprise of Scotstarvet and Straloch, and 
 did what little he could to forward it. 
 
 It was the more creditable, I say, to Scotstarvet that, while 
 he was thus engrossed, he did not neglect the memory of his 
 favourite Scoto-Latinist, Arthur Johnston. He was very prompt 
 in that affair. Either, however, because he found Dutch print- 
 ing cheaper than Scottish, or for some other reason, the Edition 
 of Johnston's complete Poetical Works for which he had given 
 instructions, and the expense of which he is said to have paid, 
 appeared only as an importation with this foreign title-page, 
 " Arturi Jonstoni, Scoti, Medici Eegii, Poemata Omnia, Middelb. 
 Zelatid, ex officina Mouleriana, 1642." It is one of the tiniest 
 and most densely printed little volumes I have ever seen, the 
 press-work not nearly so good as that of the DeliticB, which 
 Blaeu of Amsterdam had printed ; but, holding it in one's 
 ringers, one possesses, in 443 pages, the whole of Arthur 
 Johnston. There are reprinted in it all the pieces of 
 Johnston in praise of Scotstarvet and other Scottish friends 
 that had already appeared in the Deiitice, and, among 
 them, this Epigram on Drummond, preferring him even 
 to Buchanan : — 
 
 " DE GULIELMO DRUMMONDO. 
 
 "Quaesivit Latio Buchananus carmine laudem, 
 
 Et patrios dura respuit aure modos. 
 Cum posset Latiis Buchananum vincere Musis 
 
 Drummondus, patrio maluit ore loqui. 
 Major uter ? Primas luiic defert Scotia ; vates 
 
 Vix inter Latios ille secundus erat." 
 
 In the end of 1641, or the beginning of 1642, Drummond 
 was in no mind for caring about the reprint of such compliments
 
 360 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 to his poetical genius. For him, as for others, the Balaam end- 
 ing of the King's visit had been a great disappointment. Whether 
 he had presented himself at all at Holyrood during the visit 
 may be doubted. Charles did not trouble himself much with 
 express searches for men of merit, and indeed had a singular 
 faculty for overlooking merit close to him ; and, as things had 
 turned out, Drummond was again safe, at all events, from any 
 offer of knighthood. He and Johnstone of Warriston could 
 hardly have been dubbed knights together. Small loss that 
 was in Drummond's reckoning ; but the general issue of the 
 visit was most mortifying to him. A Montrose coup (Tttat, 
 indeed, throwing Scotland back into universal turmoil, would 
 have been too much for Drummond ; and he was probably as 
 well pleased that the plot for seizing the Dromedary and the 
 Elephant, and letting slaughter loose in Edinburgh in the King's 
 name, had not taken effect. But, as is shown in his imaginary 
 Speech for Edinburgh on his Majesty's arrival, he had certainly 
 expected from the visit some restoration of the royal authority, 
 and some diminution of the power of Argyle and the ultra-Pres- 
 byterian oligarchy. He had looked forward to such a state of 
 things that he could, at least, openly publish his Irene, which 
 he justly regarded as his political master-piece, and the circula- 
 tion of which among his countrymen might contribute greatly to 
 the cause of Conservatism. And now! To be left, by the King's 
 own act, under a government more stringently Presbyterian than 
 ever, with Argyle a-top of it as a new-made Marquis, others of 
 the same crew promoted to be Earls, Barons, and Judges, and 
 the best and most loyal men flung aside as criminals with 
 tickets of leave ! It was enough to make a man forswear loyalty 
 itself! So Drummond seems to have felt; for this is the com- 
 ment on the whole affair which he jotted down in his note- 
 book : — 
 
 " Behold, O Scots, the reveries of your King ! 
 Britons, behold the extravagance of our King ! 
 Those he makes Lords who should on gibbets hing."
 
 ^/W. 55-57- CHARLES BACK IN ENGLAND. 361 
 
 If Drummond was in chagrin, young Montrose was in 
 despair. What was he in Scotland now, under the established 
 Argyle-Loudoun Government (or let us call it the Coalition 
 Government of Argyle and Loudoun with the Hamiltons), but 
 the convicted criminal-in-chief, flung aside with his ticket-of- 
 leave ? What career for him now remained open ? Reconcili- 
 ation with the existing Government on a basis of forgiveness 
 for the past and promises of future submission was a degradation 
 to which he would never stoop. Even to live in a Scotland 
 governed by Argyle and his black adjutants seemed intolerable. 
 His thoughts, therefore, were of migration abroad — to Germany, 
 or wherever else some war was a-foot ; and, till that should be 
 arranged, he would hide his moodiness in one or other of his 
 country-estates, occupying himself as best he could. Soldier 
 and would-be politician though he was, he could dash off his 
 feelings now and then in a piece of verse ; and in the following, 
 written about this time, the reader will recognise a more 
 passionate misery than in Drummond's just-quoted triplet : — 
 
 " Then break, afflicted heart ! 
 
 And live not in these days, 
 When all prove merchants of their faith, 
 
 None trusts what other says • 
 For, when the sun doth shine, 
 
 Then shadows do appear ; 
 But, when the sun doth hide his face, 
 
 They with the sun retire." 
 
 Meanwhile Charles, caring less about the misery of the 
 , Scottish Drummondists in the discomfiture in which he had left 
 them than about the effects of that discomfiture upon his own 
 regal chances, was back in London, renewing his grapple with 
 the English Long Parliament. What need here to dwell on the 
 tale of his non-success ? In England, no less than in Scotland, 
 he was baulked of his hopes of a counter-revolution. He was 
 baulked in that attempted coup cTtitat of January 1642, called 
 " The Arrest of the Five Members," which was, in fact, the
 
 362 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 English equivalent to Montrose's projected plot in Scotland. 
 Then he left London in disgust, sent his Queen abroad, and 
 withdrew himself into the North of England, not yet utterly 
 breaking with the Parliament, but, on the contrary, letting the 
 Parliament sweep on at will, and even passing the Bill, on which 
 they insisted, for the exclusion of the Bishops from the House 
 of Lords. In March 1642 he took up his head-quarters at 
 York; and, after having gathered his adherents there, and 
 avowed his rupture with the Parliament on the Militia Question, 
 he at last, on the 22nd of August, moved southwards in arms, 
 and unfurled the standard of the English Civil War.
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 SCOTTISH ALLIANCE SOLICITED BY THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT : 
 DIVISION OF OPINION : THE HAMILTONIAN OR ROYALIST 
 PARTY: DRUMMOND'S SKIAMACHIA: ITS ANTI-CLERICAL 
 SPIRIT AND INVECTIVES : REFLECTIONS ON THE SAME : 
 THE SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT : DRUMMOND'S USELESS 
 REMORAS TO IT : SCOTTISH AUXILIARY ARMY IN ENGLAND : 
 PROGRESS OF THE WAR AND OF AFFAIRS GENERALLY IN 
 ENGLAND TILL NASEBY : DRUMMOND'S CONTINUED MOODI- 
 NESS : MORE SQUIBS AND EPIGRAMS : HIS INTENDED DEFENCE 
 BEFORE THE CIRCULAR TABLES : VACANCY IN LASSWADE 
 PARISH, AND CHOICE OF A NEW MINISTER : MONTROSE'S 
 OUTBLAZE AND TRIUMPH : DRUMMOND IN HIS RETINUE : BAT- 
 TLE OF PHILIPHAUGH, AND EXTINCTION OF THE BLAZE : 
 KING'S FLIGHT TO THE SCOTS, AND CONCLUSION OF THE 
 CIVIL WAR IN BRITAIN : MONTROSE'S FORCED EXILE : HIS 
 FAREWELL TO DRUMMOND. 
 
 1642 — 1646. 
 
 HP HE English Civil War had been in progress for four 
 months. The whole of England had been mapped out 
 into districts, in some of which the Royalists were in the ma- 
 jority, and the Parliamentarians oppressed and harassed, while 
 in others the Parliamentarians preponderated and the Royalists 
 were under control. The battle of Edgehill (October 23, 1642), 
 and the alarm of London by the advance of the King's army as
 
 364 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 near to it as Brentford (November 12), had been the main 
 incidents of the war hitherto, apart from the miscellaneous 
 fighting and skirmishing everywhere ; but nothing decisive 
 either way had occurred, and the King had retired to Oxford, 
 to make that city his centre while the war should last. 
 
 From the first outbreak of the war, and indeed while it was 
 yet only in prospect, the King and the Parliament had competed 
 with each other for the support of Scotland. More and more 
 it had become evident to the Scots themselves that they could 
 not rest in neutrality, but must openly declare for one of the 
 sides. For the King there were all those who, whatever parts 
 they had taken in Scotland's own revolution, could now find 
 reason for sympathising with him in his English difficulties. 
 The open form of their argument was to the effect that Scotland 
 had obtained from the King's grace all that was needed for her 
 own happiness and quiet, that this war between the King and 
 his English subjects was a different kind of thing altogether 
 from the recent war between him and the Scottish Covenanters, 
 and that the honour of Scotland was concerned in the mainten- 
 ance of the dignity of her native Prince against the ruthless Eng- 
 lish revolutionists. On the other side, the argument was more 
 effective, because better founded. If gratitude were to be the 
 motive, whether was the gratitude due to the King, from whom 
 the Presbyterian settlement had been wrung grudgingly and at 
 the last gasp, or to the English people, who had from the first 
 yielded their sympathies to the Scots, and had been helpful 
 even after the Scots had become ostensibly an invading enemy? 
 If the English, even while nominally Prelatists, had behaved so 
 generously to a neighbour nation struggling for Presbyterianism, 
 what would be thought of that nation if, now exulting in Pres- 
 bytery for itself, it looked on coldly on the English when they 
 too were casting off Prelacy ? For the question of questions 
 in England too was that of Church-reform. It was against 
 Prelacy that the English Parliament were fighting : all other
 
 jEtat. 57-61. THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR. 365 
 
 questions of the English Civil War were but sprouts of that 
 main one. The utter abolition of Prelacy in England, the 
 assimilation of England to Scotland in matters of Religion — 
 was not that an object to stir a Scottish heart? Nor was the 
 prospect vague or distant. Had not the English Parliament, in 
 communications with the Scots, avowed their resolution to 
 prosecute the Church-question to the uttermost, and recipro- 
 cated the expressed desire of the Scots for a conformity in Faith, 
 Worship, and Church-discipline between the two kingdoms? 
 Had they not, before the outbreak of the war, taken steps for 
 the convention of a great Synod of English Divines to advise 
 Parliament as to the future Constitution of the English Church, 
 and were not some Scottish Divines to be invited to that 
 Synod ? The Synod had been postponed, but undoubtedly it 
 would meet soon. Let the Scots but do their duty, pierce 
 through all sophistications to actual facts, and signify that, if 
 the King would not make peace with the English Parliament, 
 they must declare for the Parliament. Let them do this, and 
 what less was within sight than an extension of Scottish Pres- 
 bytery, or of some modification thereof, over the whole of Eng- 
 land, with Ireland to follow in time ? 
 
 On this great question, occasioned by the English Civil War, 
 the division of Scottish opinion had at length manifested itself 
 in a split of the Argyle-Hamilton Coalition Government. The 
 Scottish Clergy going universally for the English Parliament, 
 and the bulk of the Scottish People agreeing fervidly with their 
 Clergy, it was the part of Argyle, Loudoun, and others, who 
 were the approved heads of the popular or thoroughly Presby- 
 terian party, to represent their policy in the Privy Council, and 
 regulate, if possible, all public acts accordingly. In the Privy 
 Council, however, opinions were much more nearly balanced 
 than in the country at large. All the pseudo- Presbyterians of 
 that body, all who were Presbyterians because they could not 
 help themselves, started up in the new character of Presbyterian 
 Royalists. They would live and die, of course, for the Presby-
 
 5 6 6 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 tery now established in Scotland ; but they would maintain the 
 King's cause against the English Rebels. Here, as might be 
 guessed, the Elephant had parted company with the Dromedary. 
 In other words, the leading champions for the King in the 
 Scottish Privy Council, against Argyle and his following, were 
 the Marquis of Hamilton and his brother Lanark. To them, 
 indeed, the King had at this time absolutely entrusted the 
 charge of his interests in Scotland. Nothing could exceed the 
 zeal of the two brothers. On the whole the chances were 
 considerably in their favour. Despite Argyle's influence, they 
 drew many, if not most, of the Privy Councillors and other 
 Edinburgh officials around them ; and, as this was a case in 
 which all Scottish Royalists must sink their minor differences 
 and accept the lead that offered, adhesion to the Hamilton 
 party in the government became, for the nonce, the duty of all 
 the Conservatives of Scotland, under whatever subordinate de- 
 nominations of Traquairists, Drummondists, Montrosists, pseudo- 
 Covenanters, non-Covenanters, or anti-Covenanters. The 
 Argyle party, on the other hand, called also the Kirk party, 
 included all the more resolute Presbyterians, and nearly all the 
 populace. Had you lived in Scotland between January and 
 August, 1643, you would have had to choose between the 
 Dromedary and the Elephant. 
 
 Drummond, of course, went passionately with the Elephant ; 
 and in January 1643 ne na d an opportunity of appearing 
 publicly, as one may say, on the very back of the beast. The 
 precise occasion was as follows : — 
 
 The English Parliament had appealed to the Scots expressly 
 for armed help in a Declaration dated November 17, 1642, and 
 the King had sent a counter-Declaration to the Scottish Privy 
 Council, dated December 6, with an order that it should be 
 published. At a Council meeting, about the 20th of December, 
 one-and-twenty members being present, there was a vehement 
 debate as to the propriety of publishing the King's Declaration
 
 j&lat. 57-61. PARTIES AMONG THE SCOTS. 367 
 
 unless that of the Parliament were to be published also. Some 
 were for printing both, some for printing neither, some for 
 printing the King's only, and one thoroughgoing gentleman 
 was for printing the Parliament's and suppressing the King's. 
 The vote came to be on the King's Declaration simpliciter, 
 print or not print, and on this question the Hamilton party beat 
 the Argyle party by eleven to nine. Immediately, however, 
 surrounding popular opinion was up in a phrenzy, employing as 
 its organs two public bodies existing in Edinburgh side by side 
 . with the Privy Council. One was that Commission for the 
 Conservation of the Peace between the two Kingdoms which 
 had been appointed by the last Scottish Parliament, and which 
 was, in fact, another edition of the Privy Council, only with 
 more of the Argyle or Presbyterian ingredient in its composition. 
 The other was the so-called Commission of the Kirk, a some- 
 what unconstitutional body of delegates, both ministers and 
 lay-elders, always appointed by the last General Assembly to 
 superintend Kirk affairs till the meeting of the next Assembly. 
 While, therefore, petitions from Presbyteries and shires were 
 coming in direct to the Privy Council, remonstrating with that 
 supreme body for their publication of his Majesty's message by 
 itself, what was to prevent "some Noblemen, Barons, and 
 liurgesses occasionally met in Edinburgh" [i.e. a private gather- 
 ing of the Argyle adherents) from applying to the Commission 
 of the General Assembly (where Argyle and his adherents were 
 all-powerful) for the concurrence of that venerable body in a 
 great joint-petition to be addressed to the Commission for the 
 Conservation of the Peace ? No sooner said than done ; and, 
 early in January 1643, the great joint-petition was duly pre- 
 sented to the Conservators of the Peace, with visible effects 
 upon that body. The Privy Council had done wrong in pub- 
 lishing the King's Declaration, and the blunder could be 
 rectified only by making it clear that the publication did not 
 imply approbation, and by also publishing impartially the 
 Declaration of the English Parliament ! So said the Conservators
 
 ^68 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 of the Peace between the two Kingdoms, pronouncing on a 
 matter clearly within their commission. By this time the 
 Privy Council were quite prepared to acquiesce so far in the 
 popular demands, the Hamiltons having instructions from the 
 King to that effect; but meanwhile the question had been 
 widened by the assiduity of the Marquis of Hamilton in getting 
 up what was called a Cross-Petition, i.e. a Petition to be pre- 
 sented to the Privy Council of a directly contrary tenor to that 
 sent in to the Conservators of the Peace. This Cross-Petition, 
 concocted and penned by the Marquis in consultation with 
 Traquair, and signed by a great many "Noblemen, Barons, 
 Gentlemen, and others " — i.e. by all the Drummondists within 
 easy reach of Edinburgh — was received by the Privy Council 
 on the ioth of January. Immediately the Conservators of the 
 Peace, the Commission of the Kirk,, and the original lay 
 Petitioners of the Argyle party, rose in wrath against these 
 Cross-Petitioners, execrating them as public enemies. The Kirk 
 Commissioners not only threatened Kirk-censures against the 
 Cross-Petitioners, but prepared a "thundering" declaration 
 against them, and circulated the same, with an order that it 
 should be read from all the pulpits of Scotland ; and the Con- 
 servators of the Peace, on the 18th of January, approved of 
 this Declaration of the Kirk-Commissioners, and pronounced 
 an official condemnation on the Cross-Petition as prejudicial to 
 their own authority and tending to the detriment of the State. 
 There were growls in defence of the Cross-Petition ; but, on the 
 whole, the Hamilton party in the Privy Council had been 
 checkmated. 
 
 One of the subscribers to the Cross-Petition must have been 
 Drummond. From him, at all events, came by far the most 
 formidable growl over its failure. It took the form of a 
 tract of considerable length, entitled "2/aaymxia [Fighting with 
 Shadows) ; or a Defence of a Petitioti tetidered to the Lords of 
 the Council of Scotland by certain Noblemen and Gentlemen, 
 January, 1643." After the Irene, it is the most trenchant of
 
 Attat. 57-61. DRUMMOND'S "SKIAMACHIA." 369 
 
 Drummond's political tracts. It is so trenchant that one cannot 
 suppose it to have had more than a clandestine circulation. 
 The Hamiltons and Traquair may have induced him to write it ; 
 and, indeed, from the very form of the tract one infers as much. 
 It embodies verbatim the Cross Petition itself, which Hamilton 
 and Traquair had penned. But, though the Hamiltons might 
 be glad to see such a tract on the King's behalf, they can 
 hardly have adopted it openly. For it transcends in out- 
 spokenness the Cross-Petition which it reproduces and defends. 
 That is a very muddled document, with as much of professed 
 respect for the English Parliament in it as could be intro- 
 duced hypocritically in connexion with the main purpose. 
 Drummond's defence is more like what Montrose would have 
 sanctioned, and lashes for the King without reserve. Though 
 called a Defence of the Cross-Petition, it is rather a reply to 
 the Declaration against the same by the Commissioners of 
 the Kirk. These reverend gentlemen, who had ordered the 
 clergy all over the land to read the Declaration from their 
 pulpits, are the Shadows with whom Drummond fights; and, as 
 they had spoken most severely of the Cross-Petitioners, so 
 Drummond throws co-equal vigour into his reply. Nay, the 
 vigour is more than co-equal. The Scottish clergy had able 
 penmen among them ; but they had provoked an abler penman 
 than any of them, unless it might be Alexander Henderson at 
 his best. 
 
 The following will be a sufficient sample of the language of 
 the Skiamachia respecting the English Parliament, and on the 
 main subject of Scotland's duty in the English Civil War : — 
 
 " These men, if we will give credit to the Declaration of a 
 Prince, or give faith to deeds, rather than words, are not a 
 Parliament, but a number of men whose hatred and malice to 
 the King's person is implacable, and their contempt of him and 
 his authority visible and notorious, supported by the insolence 
 and licentiousness of the people. . . Neither are they in 
 number considerable; for of above 500 members of the House 
 
 2 A
 
 37° 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 of Commons there are not there now above 80 [Drummond is 
 wrong : about 290 altogether took the side of Parliament, though 
 many of these were away from the House on military duty], and 
 of above an hundred of the House of Peers [132 is the correct 
 number] not above 15 or 16 [it should be 28 or 30] — all which 
 are so awed by the multitude of Anabaptists, Brownists, and 
 other persons, desperate and of decayed fortunes [Drummond 
 takes all his facts, and some of his phrases, from the King's 
 manifestoes], that their consultations have not the freedom and 
 liberty of a Parliament. These men, it is true, sit in the place 
 of the Parliament, as the Antichrist sitteth in the Church of God, 
 excommunicating, proscribing, pursuing by fire and sword the 
 true Church, governing as the Thirty Tyrants did the people of 
 Athens. At their best, they are but servants usurping the chairs 
 of their masters, and give us leave to cry to them O Saturnalia! 
 These men pretend one thing, and intend another. They make 
 the gross people, and the rude Scot, believe their aims are 
 altogether Religion and a Reformation of the abuses of the 
 Church, to uphold their desperate attempts ; but their intentions 
 are quite astray. . . Brethren, whose subjects are ye? Hold 
 ye your estates, offices, places, and lands, of any English man ? 
 Did ye swear your oath of fidelity, homage, and supremacy to 
 the distempered heads of Kimbolton, Hampden, Pym, Strode, 
 Haselrig, Marten, Wylde, Toll, Sir John Wray, Sir Giles Goose- 
 cap [an imaginary member], Sir Henry Vane, or others of such 
 calibre ? ... If the King doth adore any other God but 
 whom he should, if he aspire to any other Heaven, embrace any 
 other belief, any other Baptism, if he be an idolater, if an heretic, 
 if a despiser of God and man, let us take arms against him ! 
 If he be an oppressor, if he hath embrued our scaffolds with 
 innocent blood, if he hath dishonoured our wives, ravished our 
 daughters, robbed us of our riches, lands, and possessions, let 
 us take arms against him ! If he hath denied the meanest of 
 all his subjects justice, if he hath not granted us more than any 
 of his ancestors (what city, nay private honest man, sought any- 
 thing which was lawful, and what he might give, who departed 
 with a sad countenance ?), let us take arms against him ! But, 
 if he be more devout than the most religious of his subjects ; if 
 he be more free of the great and roaring sins of his kingdom 
 than any of his subjects ; if he hath laboured to maintain the 
 true Protestant Religion to the uttermost of his power ; if he 
 hath never offered offence to any man, either in his estate or
 
 Mtat. 57-61. DRUMMOND' S " SKIAMACHIA." 371 
 
 person ; if he be the best man in all his dominions, and vere 
 magnus quia bonus; why should we hear the whispering of 
 taking arms against him ? Why should we not arise in arms 
 for him ?" 
 
 What is most interesting in the tract, however, is the unsparing- 
 heartiness with which Drummond exhibits in it his hatred of the 
 new domination of the Presbyterian Clergy. As it was the 
 Commissioners of the General Assembly that had challenged 
 him to the tract, by their interference in a matter of State- 
 politics, and by their sudden call upon all the pulpit-power of 
 the land to aid the Argyle policy in the Privy Council, and 
 crush the Hamiltonians or Cross-petitioners, so now Drummond 
 speaks out all that wrath against the Clergy collectively which 
 had long been in his mind. One of his habitual feelings since 
 1638, as we have seen, had been his horror at what, trying to 
 fancy things exactly as he did, we ventured to call the Plague 
 of Black Beetles, then so visibly brought back into Scotland. 
 Never, however, had he described and denounced this plague 
 so vehemently as now. The denunciation pervades the whole 
 tract; but a few sentences will suffice for quotation : — 
 
 " Among all the sorts of people on the face of the 
 earth, Christians should be of the most mild and peace- 
 able disposition, humble, gentle, merciful, bountiful, and 
 charitable, not only towards those of their own profession, 
 but even to such who are without, and to all men in 
 general. Amongst all Christians, they who bear a public 
 charge in the Church of God, and who are advanced to 
 teach and govern His people, should be eminent, as in their 
 places, so in these Christian virtues, and in the practice of 
 every pious duty towards all men. They should not be lifted 
 up with pride, double-tongued, strikers, brawlers. Of their 
 holy endeavours glory ariseth to God and peace to men. But, 
 so soon as they who bear a public charge in the Church, and 
 should be examples and precedents of holiness to others, begin 
 to breathe great matters, altogether estranged from their voca- 
 tion, or contrary to it, and strive to prostrate princes and people 
 to their will and pleasure, seek to prescribe laws to all as if all
 
 372 
 
 DRUM MO ND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 were their subjects, confound holy and profane things together,, 
 and, instead of the mild doctrine of our master Jesus Christ, 
 and being ambassadors of the glad tidings of salvation, become 
 heralds of war, of preachers turning soldiers, and for gowns de- 
 lighting to glance in steel and arms, then everything turneth 
 upside down, and divisions, discords, tumults, not only arise and 
 multiply in kingdoms, but in every city, nay almost in every 
 family. The Fire and Air, put out of their natural places, make 
 not more horrible shakings of the body of the Earth than these 
 men do of the politic bodies of Kingdoms and Commonwealths, 
 confounding the inhabitants of this world. . . . Brethren, ye 
 labour to prove your proposition because that, when ye, the 
 Great Commissioners of the General Assembly, Inquisitors of the 
 Faith, and men of unerring spirits (for it hath been disputed in 
 the schools of Spain if the Fathers Inquisitors may err), were 
 sitting concerning matters meddled with in our Petition, we 
 private persons did not so much as acquaint you with our in- 
 tentions. Petitions to the Lords of Council, and to the Com- 
 missioners for the Treaty of Peace, which are not first presented 
 to the Commissioners of the General Assembly, they then in 
 their Consistory sitting, are against the unity of Religion and the 
 work of God in the land, cause diversions and disturbances, 
 imply contempt, usurpation, and division ! This is too great 
 an dirrjixa or demand to be granted to you. And, since ye have 
 not any Act of your Assemblies for it, nay though ye had, we 
 refer it to your probation, requiring you to answer us if ye think 
 Lords of Parliament and State, who tendered this Petition, but 
 only private men. If ye value yourselves so high that no peti- 
 tion may be tendered by private men to a Council or Judges, 
 except they first be presented to you and have your approbation, 
 we hold you usurpers upon the Laws of this Kingdom, and con- 
 temners of royal authority, and men who would take unto them- 
 selves a vast unlimited seditious jurisdiction, by the exercise of 
 an arbitrary power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the 
 lieges of this kingdom, and who strive not only to be above 
 men, but mankind. Did ever the Spanish Inquisition arise to 
 this presumption ? ... If the alteration and reformation ye in- 
 tend, and which ye think necessary, both in Church and State, 
 must be made by blood, we are of different minds and opinions 
 from you, and we entreat you not to harbour such outrageous 
 and cruel thoughts. ' Repent and pray unto God, if perhaps 
 the thought of your hearts may be forgiven you ; for ye are in
 
 jEtat. 57-61. DRUMMOND'S " SKIAMACHIA." 373 
 
 the gall of bitterness and bond of iniquity.' For, where by- 
 blood ye shall make three proselytes, ye shall make a hundred 
 hypocrites, epicureans, and men of no religion, who neither 
 care for Presbyterian nor Episcopal government of the Church ; 
 and, by establishing or lessening some supposed forms of super- 
 stition in our neighbour county, ye shall plant and increase 
 Atheism. . . . Brethren, these times require other meditations 
 and calmer thoughts. Take a view of the map of the Earth, 
 and there ye shall find that the Kingdom of Scotland is not all 
 the Earth, and that England and it together make but one, not 
 immense, Isle. Now, being so blessedly contented with your 
 Reformation as ye are, why seek ye to involve yourselves in the 
 debates and quarrels of another kingdom ? Ye are men of 
 great faith if ye believe the English will enslave their under- 
 standings and opinions in points of Religion to the Scots (the 
 receiving of Religion, in the politic consideration, being holden 
 a point of servitude), and establish our Presbyterial forms in 
 their Church. . . . Presumptuous Churchmen in most parts of the 
 kingdoms of Europe have proven worse than the foxes of Sam- 
 son. They but burnt the corns when the fields were white for 
 the harvest ; but these have burnt whole towns, male and female 
 children and old men, guilty or not guilty, holy or profane, 
 turning all under the law of their spoil and licentiousness; dyed 
 the white fields in blood ; turned them into a Golgotha, as in 
 our own country that one battle of Pinkie can testify, where a 
 Churchman was both the loss of the field and Commonwealth. 
 They are firebrands of strife, trumpets of sedition, the Red 
 Horses whose sitters have taken peace from the Earth. There 
 is no Christian country which hath not by their devices been 
 wrapped in wars ; they carry the common people, like hawks, 
 hooded, into dangers and destruction ; make them believe the 
 mountains shake when the moles do cast up. . . They have 
 turned men's estate at this time so desperate that the living envy 
 the dead, and may wish they had never come on the theatre of 
 this world, to draw the air of anguish and calamities ; to be 
 partakers of the barbarous dissensions amongst Christians, who 
 are spiritual brothers, and should live in amity and perfect love 
 together, whilst now any Christian should live in greater safety 
 amongst the Turks, Jews, and Infidels, than he can live and 
 draw out this miserable span of mortality amongst men pro- 
 fessing one Jesus Christ with him : the Christian Religion being 
 brought by these men to consist in outward shows and cere-
 
 374 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 monies, rites, songs, springs, babblings, and tautologies, 
 regarding rather sonantia quatn solida, tumultuary learning, 
 disputations of more labour than profit, and in an ambition to 
 live backward to the Religion of Rome ; and what remains 
 being blind obedience to some General Council or Assembly, 
 for insurrection against Princes, tumults, murders, plundering of 
 men who think not their thoughts, have not the like desires, 
 judgments, and opinions with them ; publishing Declarations 
 one against another ; fighting first by pens, then with pikes and 
 muskets, to the great affrightment of all who are not of their 
 faith, especially of the Jews, who resolve rather to keep their 
 ancient rites than to be partakers of Christian dissensions." 
 
 This is clearly the language of one who had become, univer- 
 sally and indiscriminately, a clergy-hater. It is the language 
 of one to whom Churchmen of all denominations, Roman 
 Catholic, Episcopalian, or Presbyterian, had begun to seem 
 but diverse forms of one perennial pest, though the particular 
 form of the pest that then afflicted Scotland seemed about the 
 worst. 
 
 Really, in this last particular, there was much to excuse 
 Drummond. To a man of his temperament and culture, not to 
 speak of his political principles, there could hardly have been 
 a more irritating form of the Plague of Black Beetles than that 
 which then troubled Scotland. There they were, swarming 
 everywhere, intruding themselves into every house, tumbling 
 into everything. What every man, and every man's wife, did, 
 said, or thought ; how they spent their Sundays ; how their 
 household was managed ; how their children were educated ; 
 whether the manremembered his Covenant obligations ; whether 
 he interpreted them rightly ; whether he was zealous enough in 
 his public appearances for them : the oversight of all this was 
 the professional care of the Presbyterian Clergy. The mental 
 and moral discipline of Scotland belonged to them by the divine 
 right of their office ; and woe to them if they were lax in it ! 
 And so, the moral passing inevitably into the political, they had 
 assumed the universal social regulation, comfortable enough 
 guides for the vast majority, who went with them willingly and
 
 jEtat. 57-61. THE PLAGUE OF BLACK BEETLES. 375 
 
 admiringly, but dreadful inquisitors and torments for all who 
 passed in any respect beyond prescribed bounds, or per- 
 sisted too much in thinking for themselves. There have 
 always been, under all difficulties, men of this last class in Scot- 
 land, and in no country does one see more manly, courageous, 
 and strongly-original faces ; but it might be a fair speculation 
 whether in the " pawky" type of physiognomy which is -often 
 to be marked in Scottish streets, conjoined with the soft walk, 
 the sleek black gloves touching each other in front, and the 
 evasive or sidelong glance, there is not a relic of that old 
 ecclesiastical tyranny which drilled a considerable percentage 
 of Scotsmen through several generations into a look of 
 acquiescence in propositions known to be untenable. 
 
 And yet, on the other side, how much might be said ! That 
 phrase, "The Plague of Black Beetles," which I have used 
 several times, to convey as strongly as possible the disgust with 
 which Drummond and others regarded the all-dominant activity 
 of the Scottish Presbyterian Clergy of their day, is a phrase 
 not to be retracted perhaps, but to be greatly qualified. 
 Those Presbyterian Clergy, it will be found on due enquiry, 
 intolerant and meddlesome as they were to the last degree, 
 were yet, all in all, the sincerest men in Scotland, the most 
 disinterested, the most anxious to do right. Compared with 
 the best of them, the nobles associated with them, were, with 
 some exceptions, very poor creatures. But more than this. 
 The Scottish Clergy had but set themselves with unusual energy 
 to the performance of a duty which had been claimed till then 
 by the clergies of all times and lands — the duty of thinking in 
 all matters of high moment for the community within which they 
 were lodged ; and it may be said that the thinking provided for 
 the Scottish people by their clergy was not only good average 
 thinking in itself, but also in due accord with the popular 
 instincts. Through the healthy Presbyterian device of lay-elder- 
 ships and lay-votes in all ecclesiastical assemblies, it was even 
 furnished in part by what the persistent and impudent sacer-
 
 376 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 dotalism which still governs our European vocabulary continues 
 to call the " lay" mind. 
 
 In the immediate question of national policy, at all events, 
 the Presbyterian Clergy of 1 643 were far more deep-seeing than 
 Drummond, far more truly the consistent Scottish patriots. 
 Drummond, indeed, was theoretically ahead of them, and of any 
 other clergy that Britain had yet seen, in the conception of a 
 toleration of religious differences as necessary and proper in 
 every community, whatever might be the form of the Established 
 Church. His eloquent protests for such a toleration in several 
 of his writings come home to us now, and are much to his credit. 
 But, when we consider with what other tenets in his political 
 creed this Toleration tenet was associated, we can see that it was 
 practically worthless in the wear and tear of the actual con- 
 troversy. Had Drummond gone heart and soul with his 
 countrymen in their general struggle with King Charles, and 
 then unfurled his Toleration tenet among them, despite the 
 Presbyterian Clergy, with a view to teach them the right use of 
 their victory, he would have been a Scottish Phoenix, and we 
 should now have looked back upon him with all the greater 
 admiration. But there was nothing of the sort. On the 
 contrary, passive obedience to the King was still Drummond's 
 one ultimate rule of politics. Turmoil and carnage caused by 
 the persistence of people or clergy in what they desired were 
 inexcusable and merely hideous ; turmoil and carnage caused by 
 the persistence of one crowned gentleman in any crotchets of 
 his whatever were regrettable, punishable perhaps after a long 
 cycle at the bar of Heaven, but legitimate for the time upon 
 Earth. And so, criticising Charles privately, jotting down in 
 his note-books phrases about Charles which show that he 
 thought him a narrow-brained bigot, unfit for his post, Drum- 
 mond had nothing better to do publicly than maintain this 
 bigot, and join his fine voice to the chorus of praises that had 
 begun to be raised over him. We like Drummond for his 
 Toleration tenet, and it was his honourable distinction from the
 
 sEtat. tf-b\. REQUEST FOR SCOTTISH HELP. 377 
 
 Presbyterian Clergy; but where could he fancy that tenet com- 
 ing into operation ? A Toleration tenet propounded only as a 
 hopeful accident of this King's, or some King's, future will, a 
 Toleration tenet suggested in small letters as one item in a 
 political creed the paramount doctrine of which, written in 
 capital letters, was absolute obedience to the Prince, was a 
 pretty intellectual curiosity, but not worth twopence for service. 
 The Scottish Presbyterian Clergy, without any Toleration tenet 
 at all, but only with their rough general sagacity, were much 
 more in the right than Drummond. While we remember their 
 faults, therefore, and even picture them as "black beetles " if 
 we like, let it never be forgotten that it was they that kept 
 Scotland, in that crisis of British History, firm to the permanent 
 cause of truth and liberty, because firm to the alliance of the 
 English Parliament. 
 
 For they succeeded. The Black Beetles and the Drome- 
 dary succeeded together. In vain did Hamilton, created a 
 Duke by the King for his zeal (April 12, 1643), toil on in the 
 effort to draw Scotland to the King, or even to keep it neutral. 
 August 1643 was the decisive month. The assistance of the 
 Scots had then become more desirable than ever to the English 
 Parliament, because the Parliamentary Generals, Essex, Man- 
 chester, and Waller, had been managing but poorly, and the King 
 had had the best of it in recent battles. Fortunately also for the 
 chance that the assistance could now be obtained, the English 
 Parliament had committed itself irrevocably by recent proceed- 
 ings to a root-and-branch abolition of Episcopacy, and a recon- 
 struction of the Church of England on some other model, and had 
 convoked the long-promised Assembly of English Divines at 
 Westminster, to assist in considering what that model should 
 be. This famous Westminster Assembly had actually met 
 (July 1). In such circumstances it was that Commissioners 
 from the Parliament, one of whom was Sir Harry Vane, 
 accompanied by two Commissioners from the Westminster 
 Assembly, came to Edinburgh, to arrange, if possible, for a
 
 378 DR UMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 definite agreement with the Scots. The Scots, on their part, 
 were then quite ready. A Convention of the Estates had met 
 at Edinburgh, June 22, assuming, in spite of all the protests of 
 Hamilton and his party, the full powers of a Scottish Parliament; 
 and on the 2d of August the General Assembly of the Kirk had 
 also met, the fifth regular annual assembly after the famous revo- 
 lutionary one of Glasgow. Treating with these bodies, the 
 English Commissioners found no difficulty, if only the English 
 Parliament would consent to one condition. What was that? 
 It was that the Treaty between the two nations for mutual 
 co-operation through the rest of the Civil War should not be a 
 civil compact only, but also a religious one. On this the Scots- 
 insisted; and, to show what they meant, they produced a 
 Solemn League and Covenant, in which they proposed that the 
 two nations, both by their governments and by general subscrip- 
 tion throughout their communities, should at once concur. 
 The English Commissioners, having examined the document, 
 suggested some modifications ; and, these modifications having 
 been accepted by the Scottish Convention of Estates, and by 
 the Scottish General Assembly (August 17), it only remained 
 to be seen whether the English Parliament and the English 
 Assembly of Divines at Westminster would ratify the document 
 on the English side. There was no reason to doubt that they 
 would. For, though the document pointed to the establishment 
 of Presbytery in England, it by no means tied up the English 
 to that conclusion. It pledged both nations, certainly, against 
 a return either to Popery or to Episcopal Government; but, for 
 the rest, it only pledged them to mutual fidelity to each other's 
 privileges and liberties, to efforts after more moral and Christian 
 lives than hitherto, and to a continued " endeavour to bring the 
 Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunc- 
 tion and uniformity in Religion, Confession of Faith, Form of 
 Church Government, Directory for Worship, and Catechising." 
 Let the English Parliament but accept the document, and 20,000 
 Scots or more would cross the border as an auxiliary army
 
 JEtat. 57-61. " SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT." 379 
 
 against the King. In earnest of these, and in faith that the 
 English Parliament would accept the offered Covenant, the 
 Scottish General Assembly at once nominated five Scottish 
 Divines (Henderson, Baillie, Douglas, Rutherford, and Gillespie) 
 and three Scottish lay-elders (the Earl of Cassilis, Lord Mait- 
 land, and Sir Archibald Johnstone) to act as representatives of 
 Scotland in the Assembly at Westminster. 
 
 With some slight additional modifications, the English Parlia- 
 ment, after consultation with the Westminster Assembly, did 
 enthusiastically accept the Solemn League and Covenant, 
 the two Houses issuing an ordinance that it should be pub- 
 lished, and subscribed and sworn to by all the inhabitants of the 
 English realm, and themselves setting the example by subscrib- 
 ing and swearing to it in mass (Sept. 25). Scotland, which had 
 been waiting for this result, then duly followed, the Committee 
 of the Convention of Estates ordaining (Oct. 22) that the Cove- 
 nant should be subscribed to universally throughout Scotland, 
 under pain of confiscation of goods and other punishments. 
 Thus, in addition to the National Scottish Covenant of 
 1638, binding on Scotland only, there was, from October, 
 1643, another document, called The Solemn League and 
 Covenant, of Scottish origin, but common to the two king- 
 doms, and linking them together. 
 
 This Solemn League and Covenant was even a more des- 
 perate dose for the Scottish Royalists than the National 
 Covenant had been. They must have been nearly frantic over 
 it, and only the suddenness of the transaction can account for 
 the small amount of reclamation against it made among them 
 at the time. Among Drummond's papers, however, is one en- 
 titled Remoras for the Natio?ial League between Scotland and 
 England. It must have been written in or shortly after October, 
 1643, when the Covenant was past recall, and the signing of it 
 all over Scotland and England had made considerable progress. 
 Remoras (" delays " or " stops ") is therefore hardly the proper
 
 380 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 name for the paper : it is rather a bitter secret protest against 
 an act already done. It consists of thirteen paragraphs, twelve 
 of which are reasons of protest; and it so happens that the 
 opening words of each paragraph give its essence, thus : — 
 
 "No subjects under a monarchy and ancient sovereignty, 
 without their sovereign's consent, may enter into a League or 
 Covenant with a stranger nation. 
 
 " Those who have subscribed the Scottish Covenant, or Con- 
 fession of Faith, without being perjured, cannot swear to this 
 League. There the defence of the king's honour and person, 
 with the maintenance of the prerogatives of his crown, are sworn 
 unto; and here, in this League, the privileges of the Parliament 
 of England solemnly are sworn to : which two cannot well 
 subsist together, it being one of the terriblest privileges of the 
 Parliament of England to depose their kings at their pleasure 
 [Historical precedents of deposition of kings in England are 
 here mentioned]. . . 
 
 " By this League we are sworn to defend the Religion of Eng- 
 land in Catechism and Discipline [rather a misrepresentation]; 
 and yet we know not what they are. . . 
 
 "It is a great folly to make a people swear to maintain the 
 liberties of stranger nations, of which they are ignorant. . . . 
 
 " It is of no small difficulty to understand that this oligarchy 
 now assembled in London is a Parliament, having neither King, 
 Spiritual Lords, nor a competent number of Peers. [Drummond 
 silently retracts his former reduction of the English Commons 
 to a residue of 80, having doubtless heard that at least 220 of 
 the Commons House had already taken the Covenant]. . . . 
 
 " This League will plunge us into an eternal war, of which 
 none living can have assurance of the event. . . . 
 
 " The Church of God is not established by human policy 
 and wit ; neither is Religion to be established or upholden by 
 arms. . . 
 
 " This League, though sworn and subscribed, concerneth no- 
 thing the oligarchy assembled at London; for the subscribing 
 and swearing to maintain the liberties of a Parliament is to 
 swear to maintain the liberties of the Three Estates of the 
 Kingdom. . . 
 
 " It is fearful, and includeth a repugnancy in itself, to swear 
 men for amendment of their lives, and that each one shall en- 
 deavour to go before others in example of goodness and a real
 
 Ailat. 57-61. DRUMMOND'S "REMORASr 381 
 
 reformation, and then to raise them up in arms against their 
 own countrymen. 
 
 " What a folly it is to swear men to the extirpation of orders 
 out of the Church, as if Bishops, Arch-Deans, &c, an i an aris- 
 tocratical government, were not lawful amongst Christians: which 
 they shall never be able to prove by Scripture or reason, but 
 only by their armed ruffians and the mad ban-dogs of the ras- 
 cality. ... 
 
 " The penalty of not subscribing is not Christian, and more 
 beseeming the Turks and Cannibals than any professing the 
 name of Jesus Christ. . . . 
 
 " If the substance and matter of the Oath be lawful, an honest 
 man will keep it without an oath ; and, if it be not lawful, the 
 Oath bindeth no man to it." . . . 
 
 Some of these reasons of Drummond against the Solemn 
 League and Covenant are very sound. Some of them are 
 the very reasons which led not a few of those extreme English 
 Revolutionists whom Drummond would have stigmatized as 
 the worst of " the mad ban-dogs of the rascality " — John Lil- 
 burne, for example — to refuse most stubbornly to take the Cove- 
 nant, and which led some of the most forward English Parlia- 
 mentarians who did take it fervently — Cromwell and Milton, for 
 example — to doubt afterwards whether it had not been a blunder. 
 But, unfortunately, Drummond had not put himself into the 
 only predicament that would have entitled him to plead those 
 objections of his which were ethically the most valid. What 
 right had he to stand on the sacredness of individual liberty ? 
 The King had imposed Covenants, was imposing Covenants, 
 would impose Covenants to the end of the chapter, as stringent 
 as this one, though of a contrary sense. Not a murmur from 
 Drummond against these. He found his objections to Cove- 
 nants, or at least expressed them, only when the particular 
 Covenant he did not like came to his own door ; and, had the 
 opposite kind of Covenant been going round to other people's 
 doors in the King's name, he would have been silent. He is 
 not so much to be pitied, therefore, if he had to undergo the 
 pain of subscribing to this new Solemn League and Covenant as
 
 382 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 he had subscribed to its predecessor, the National Scottish Cove- 
 nant. That he had to do so there can be no doubt. He 
 would not have minded that so much, if he could have seen 
 the new League baulked of its substantial effect. But, at length, 
 on the 19th of January, 1644, Leslie and his 21,500 Scottish sol- 
 diers did march into England. 
 
 They were not of much use to the English Parliamentarians 
 after all. They assisted in the great battle of Marston Moor 
 (July 2, 1644), the first really smashing blow that the King 
 received ; but, after that, they sank into an inactivity which 
 was thought discreditable. This inactivity was partly caused 
 by the political state of things in England. For, while fighting 
 against the King, the Parliament had been discussing various 
 public questions, and especially the Church Question ; and in 
 this Church Question a great division of opinion had presented 
 itself, remembered now as the strife between the Presbyterians 
 and the Independents. 
 
 The Westminster Assembly, deferring much to the advice of 
 the few Scottish Commissioners included in it, had declared 
 itself almost unanimously for a reconstruction of the English 
 Church on the system of pure and simple Presbyterianism, after 
 the Scottish model. In Parliament also the partisans of 
 Presbyterianism pure and simple were greatly in the majority ; 
 and the mass of the English nation, with the City of London to 
 lead, tended the same way. The dissentients were the so-called 
 Independents. By this name had come to be known a con- 
 siderable minority of persons, both in London and scattered 
 through the provinces, who were as resolute against a Prelacy 
 as the Scots and the English Presbyterians were, but whose 
 ideas of the proper constitution of a Church were derived rather 
 from those native Separatists, Sectaries, or extreme religious 
 opinionists, who since Elizabeth's time, had maintained a 
 smothered existence in England, distinct from the ordinary 
 body of the English Puritans, more unrelentingly persecuted by
 
 Mtat. 57-61. CHURCH-QUESTION IN ENGLAND. 383 
 
 the authorities, and indeed regarded by these authorities, and 
 by the more moderate Puritans themselves, as dangerous vermin. 
 These early Separatists or Sectaries had not contended merely, 
 like the ordinary body of the Puritans, for an abatement of 
 Prelatic rigour, a simplification of ceremonies, and a more 
 effective Calvinistic teaching in the National Church; they had 
 objected to any organised National Church whatsoever. They 
 had objected, by implication, to any Church that should be 
 governed by Presbyteries and Synods, as much as to the actual 
 Church which was governed by Bishops. Their notion of the 
 proper Christian Church in any land had been that it should 
 consist merely of such congregations of believers as might 
 naturally and spontaneously form themselves in that land, each 
 independent within itself, and having no connection with others, 
 except what might arise from voluntary and brotherly inter- 
 course. 
 
 When the English Revolution broke out at the opening of the 
 Long Parliament, there was more of this old native leaven of 
 Independency in England than appeared. On the whole, how- 
 ever, what with the strong bent towards Presbyterianism already 
 inherent in the general body of the English Puritans, and what 
 with the influence of Scottish precept and example, this Inde- 
 pendency had hitherto been powerless in the all-essential debate 
 as to the future constitution of the English Church. In that 
 debate Presbyterianism had carried all before it. There were, 
 indeed, five Independents, of a very mild type, among the 
 Divines of the Westminster Assembly ; but all that they had 
 been able to do was to object to various points of the Presby- 
 terian theory as they came up in debate, and keep the Assembly 
 disagreeably aware of the fact that there was a rival theory of 
 Independency or Congregationalism which might have something 
 to say for itself. Accordingly, by these divines themselves, as 
 well as by the Independents and Sectaries of a more pronounced 
 type scattered through England, and also by Cromwell, Vane, 
 and others, who were the recognised Parliamentary representatives
 
 384 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 of Independency, and responsible for the leadership, all idea of 
 making a stand absolutely for the Congregationalist theory in 
 opposition to the Presbyterian had been given up. That the 
 Church of England must be reconstituted on the Presbyterian 
 system they had accepted as a fact. But, while accepting this 
 fact, they had thrown their whole strength into a most momen- 
 tous controversy affecting the extent of legal power to be 
 vested in the new Presbyterian Establishment. The contro- 
 versy took various forms, each tending to a relaxation of the 
 proposed new English system of Presbytery from the strictness 
 of the Scottish model. By far the most important demand of 
 the Independents, however, was the demand for a guaranteed 
 Toleration of Dissent under the new Establishment. Let the 
 new Presbyterian Church be the State Church, with all the 
 emoluments and advantages belonging to such an institution ; 
 but let there be no compulsion to membership of it ; let 
 Englishmen and Englishwomen who had scruples about its 
 doctrines or its forms be free to associate in congregations for 
 themselves ! 
 
 A very moderate demand, surely ; but O what an uproar it 
 raised ! The 1 Presbyterians, to a man, with the Scottish divines 
 conspicuous among them, rose against any Toleration whatsoever. 
 They condemned Toleration, or Liberty of Private Conscience, 
 both name and thing ; they denounced it as the error of errors, 
 the blasphemy of blasphemies, the arch-invention of the Devil. 
 The suppression of sects and heresies, the compulsory con- 
 formity of every man, woman, and child, in England to 
 the Presbyterian Church about to be set up, was, they 
 maintained, the only perfect, lawful, Scriptural, possible, 
 expedient, rational, desirable, or endurable consummation. It 
 was implied in the Solemn League and Covenant, they said, 
 that there should be no Toleration, no Liberty of Private 
 Conscience. The Independents, on the other hand, denied 
 that this was in the Covenant, declared that they had never 
 understood it to be in the Covenant, but practically did not
 
 j&tat. 57-61. SCOTTISH ARMY IN ENGLAND. 385 
 
 care whether it was in the Covenant or not. There should be 
 Toleration and Liberty of Conscience, more or less in amount, 
 in England, or forty thousand Englishmen would know the 
 reason why ! For by this time Independency, in the sense of a 
 general desire for freedom in Religion, rather than of mere 
 pragmatical attachment to the Congregationalist principle, had 
 become rife in the Parliamentary Army, and Cromwell, as the 
 most popular man in that Army, had a power at his back 
 additional to all his power in Parliament. There was plenty 
 Presbyterianism in the English Parliamentary Army ; but the 
 mass of the Army had become Cromwellian or Independent, 
 indignant at the prospect of a new Presbyterian tyranny in 
 England in place of the abolished Prelacy, angry at the wrong- 
 headedness of the English politicians that seemed to be working 
 to that end, and sick, above all, of the pestering intrusiveness 
 of the Scots, with their everlasting appeals to the Covenant, 
 their acquired dictatorship in the Westminster Assembly, and 
 the encumbrance of their useless and expensive auxiliaries on 
 English ground. 
 
 That the Scottish Auxiliary Army had been so useless was 
 partly owing to the fact that Leslie had had to adjust his 
 strategy to the peculiar interests and desires of his countrymen 
 in the complex state of the English Church-controversy. To aid 
 in beating the King with a view to the establishment of Scottish 
 Presbytery in England, and precisely so far as might favour that 
 issue, was virtually the task prescribed to him by the Scottish 
 Government ; and one can see how, in trying to fulfil this task, 
 he should have found his faculty of caution most in request. 
 The English Presbyterians, at least, did not complain of him 
 on that ground. To them, no less than to the Scots, the beat- 
 ing of the King in such a way and to such an extent as should 
 ensure the Presbyterian settlement, the suppression of the 
 Independents and Sects, and the extinction of the Toleration 
 heresy, had become the aim and rule of the war. Victory in 
 the vague, victory to be followed by a Church-chaos, was a 
 
 2 B
 
 3 86 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 prospect from which they shrank with horror. Nay, in the 
 minds of many of them, and especially of the Presbyterian 
 leaders in Parliament, and the chief Presbyterian commanders 
 of the Army, a wider fear had begun to mingle with the direct 
 solicitude for a strictly regulated Church. What if Monarchy 
 itself should go down in the Civil War, Monarchy and all the 
 institutions of aristocratic privilege connected with it ? Little 
 wonder that, in this state of mind, the war was carried on, so far 
 as it depended on the English Presbyterians, if not with Leslie's 
 cautious inactivity, at least with a very respectable amount of 
 lethargy. Not to ruin the King utterly, but to win and maintain 
 such a superiority over him by occasional battles as should bring 
 him to treat — this had become the Presbyterian policy. Hence 
 a distinction between the Presbyterians and the Independents 
 in the matter of soldiering, developed logically enough 
 out of their primary difference on the question of religious 
 freedom. The Independents, as the more extreme revolu- 
 tionists, were troubled with none of those compunctions in 
 fighting the King which impeded the Presbyterians. They 
 threw more heart into the war, wanted to end it as swiftly and 
 crashingly as they could, and were by no means particular as 
 to the precise shape of things that should come out at the other 
 end of the crash. If Royalty should be conserved, well and 
 good : they had no wish to destroy Royalty, if it could co-exist 
 with more general interests. If it should please the fates that 
 there should be a State Church in England on the Scottish 
 Presbyterian model, they would not seriously object: nay, if 
 there were to be a State Church at all, that model was as good 
 as any, because it would gratify the largest number. Only, so 
 far as in them lay, Royalty should emerge from the war well 
 begirt by constitutional checks, and in the charter of the new 
 Presbyterian State Church there should be an ample guarantee 
 for liberty of dissent and the rights of private conscience. 
 
 Always in a state of war valour and energy are sure of the 
 preference. However strong the demarkation of a community
 
 Mtat. 57-61. EVENTS IN ENGLAND: NASEBY. 387 
 
 into two parties, there are always masses so loosely attached to 
 either side that a phrase, an incident, a sudden gust of sentiment, 
 will whisk them to the other. Accordingly, when, in the weari- 
 ness of the long war, it had begun to be observed that little 
 success had been achieved anywhere except by Cromwell and 
 his Independents, and when many who had hitherto called 
 themselves Presbyterians had begun consequently to say "After 
 all, the Independents are the fellows for fighting," it was but a 
 step to concede farther that the Liberty of Conscience which 
 these "fighting fellows" wanted was nothing so very unreason- 
 able. Even in Parliament the Presbyterians were not all so 
 decidedly Presbyterians and nothing else but that there could 
 be fluctuations of feeling in favour of the Independents ; and it 
 was in one of these fluctuations, aided by some startling recent 
 successes of the King, that Cromwell and the other Independent 
 Chiefs carried two ordinances of incalculable consequence. 
 These were the Ordinance for New- Modelling the Army (Feb. 
 15, 1645), that is, for weeding, recasting, and consolidating the 
 English Parliamentary Army into a compact and manageable 
 force, and The Self-Denying Ordinance (April 3, 1645), by which 
 all members of either House, including Essex, Manchester, and 
 Waller, were deprived of their military commands, and the New 
 Army was entrusted to Fairfax as Commander-in-Chief, with a 
 tried body of officers under him, most of whom were Inde- 
 pendents. Cromwell himself, by special and necessary waiving 
 of the second ordinance in his case, having been appointed 
 Lieutenant-General to Fairfax, the results were immediate. 
 The newly-officered Army at once began operations in the most 
 emphatic style; and, on the 14th of June, 1645, there was the 
 memorable Battle of Naseby. By this battle the King's cause 
 was utterly shattered. There was to be a year more of the war, 
 but only by way of dealing with Royalism in its dispersed 
 fragments. 
 
 Through those two years of events in England Drummond
 
 388 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 had been watching and wishing. His position was that of a man 
 whose prayers in secret were for the success of the King, but 
 who, as a subject of the Argyle-Loudoun Government, and him- 
 self pledged to the Solemn League and Covenant, was nominally 
 at war with Charles, and fighting against him through the agency 
 of Leslie's Auxiliary Army. In such circumstances, one can 
 well believe the information of his old biographer that " there 
 " were a great many particular papers wrote against the chief 
 " ring-leaders of the Rebellion, which, after his death, in those 
 " very severe times, were thought fit to be destroyed, for fear of 
 "doing harm to his friends or family." One can guess the 
 nature of these lost diatribes ; but it would have been interesting 
 to possess personal portraits or caricatures by Drummond of 
 Argyle, Loudoun, Leslie, Henderson, Johnstone of Warriston, 
 and any of the contemporary Englishmen included in his satires. 
 Among his preserved scraps in verse is this on the death of 
 Pym, the great English Parliamentary leader (Dec. 8, 1643) : — 
 
 " When lately Pym descended into hell, 
 Ere he the cups of Lethe did carouse, 
 What place that was he called aloud to tell ; 
 To whom a devil, 'This is the Lower House.'" 
 
 A longer piece is entitled The Character of an Anti- Covenanter 
 or Malignant, and may be taken as a genuine sketch of Drum- 
 mond himself, though the form is ironical. A Covenanter is 
 supposed to be the speaker, and begins thus : — 
 
 " Would you know these Royal knaves 
 Of free men would turn us slaves, 
 Who our union did defame 
 With Rebellion's wicked name, 
 Read these verses and ye'll spring them : 
 Then on gibbets straight cause hing them." 
 
 Accordingly, the Anti-Covenanters or Malignants are described, 
 Hudibrastically, thus : — 
 
 " Neglect they do our Circular Tables, 
 Scorn our acts and laws as fables ;
 
 sFJat. 57-61. MORE SQUIBS AND LAMPOONS. 389 
 
 Of our battles talk but meekly ; 
 
 With four sermons pleased are weekly ; 
 
 Swear King Charles is neither Papist, 
 
 Arminian, Lutheran, or Atheist, 
 
 But that in his chamber-prayers, 
 
 Which are poured with sighs and tears, 
 
 To avert God's fearful wrath, 
 
 Threatening us with blood and death, 
 
 Persuade they would the multitude 
 
 This King too holy is and good. 
 
 They avouch we'll weep and groan 
 
 When hundred Kings we serve for one ; 
 
 That each shire but blood affords 
 
 To serve the ambition of young lords, 
 
 Whose debts ere now had been redoubled 
 
 If the State had not been troubled. 
 
 Slow they are our Oath to swear, 
 
 Slower for it arms to bear ; 
 
 They do not concord love and peace, 
 
 Would our enemies embrace, 
 
 Turn men proselytes by word, 
 
 Not by musket, pike, and sword." 
 
 Again :- 
 
 " He who says that might is right, 
 That cripple folk walk not upright, 
 That the owls into the spring 
 Do not nightingales outsing, 
 That the seas we may not plough, 
 Ropes make of the rainy bow, 
 That the foxes keep not sheep, 
 That men waking do not sleep, 
 That all's not gold doth gold appear, 
 Believe him not although he swear. 
 To such sirens stop your ear ; 
 Their societies forbear. 
 Ye may be tossed like a wave ; 
 Verity may you deceive ; 
 Just fools they may make of you ; 
 Then hate them worse than Turk or Jew. 
 Were it not a dangerous thing 
 Should we again obey the King ? 
 Lords should lose their sovereignty; 
 Soldiers haste back to Germany; 
 Justice should in our towns remain ; 
 Poor men possess their own again ; 
 Brought out of Hell that word of " Plunder," 
 More terrible than Devil or thunder,
 
 39° 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 Should with the Covenant fly away, 
 And charity among us stay ; 
 Peace and plenty should us nourish, 
 True Religion "mongst us flourish." 
 
 Having thus warned people against the Malignants and their 
 plausibility, the supposed Covenanting speaker concludes : — 
 
 "When you find these lying fellows, 
 Take and flower with them the gallows ; 
 On others you may too lay hold, 
 In purse or chest if they have gold : 
 Who wise or rich are in this nation 
 Malignants are by protestation." 
 
 However warily such things were circulated, they were easily 
 traced to Drummond, and one is not surprised to hear that 
 he was called to account for them. " Being a reputed 
 " Malignant," says his old biographer, " he was extremely 
 " harassed by the prevailing party, and, for his verses and dis- 
 " courses, frequently summoned before their Circular Tables, as 
 " we may see by a Discourse which he designed to have spoken 
 " to them." The discourse in question would not by itself bear 
 out the assertion that he had been " frequently " summoned 
 before the Circular Tables. What it does prove is that, 
 some time or other,— and the present date is as likely as any, — 
 Drummond, whether he had made acquaintance with the 
 Circular Tables before or not, had reason to expect a summons 
 from them. A Speech of the Authors when he should have been 
 questioned for some Papers before the Circular Tables is the title 
 of the piece : i.e., it is a draft of what he thought it would be fit 
 to say in an expected conference with the chiefs of the Presby- 
 terian Government or their agents. He meant to be very 
 brave, as will be seen from the following extract, containing 
 the marrow of the whole, and interesting both for its personal 
 details and for the plea for the Liberty of the Press which it 
 includes : — 
 
 " In these late troubles ye have taken the Daughter against
 
 jEtat. 57-61. INTENDED SELF-DEFENCE. 39I 
 
 the Father, Religion against Authority. For it is written that 
 the Church (that is Religion) shall have Kings for her Fathers 
 and Queens for her Mothers ; and if ye have not made Religion 
 chase away Authority, if not kill her, let Posterity, which without 
 flattery will determine of all actions, be judge. Those who 
 have followed Authority, spoken or written anything for it (as 
 the Lords in the Reign of King James IV. did), ye have turned 
 fugitives, forced to live banished, begun to use all manner of 
 proscriptions and forfeitures against them ; and, with their wives 
 and little children, they are compelled daily to leave the 
 kingdom: a proceeding not only against Christian Religion, 
 but against humane Society and the practice of many civil 
 Heathens. Ye say the fault is their own, who would not 
 adhere to your faction and embrace your opinions. And why 
 rather is not the fault yours, who will not be content to live as 
 ye did in the time of the last reign? The King's Majesty's 
 servants, Officers of State and Crown, many gentlemen in the 
 country and cities, live by his Majesty's benevolence, munificence, 
 and bounty ; and these are the men ye would have to deny their 
 master, and take arms against him. They may learn that much 
 policy of you, not to forsake and quit that by which they are 
 upholden. These ye have a mind to proscribe, if they run not 
 your ways, and do not as you do. 
 
 "In truth, my Lords, the interest / have in any of the 
 factions of this kingdom, by way of gain or advantage, is none. 
 But, out of that duty a subject oweth to his Sovereign, I ever 
 favoured the party of Authority, knowing it to be a main-beam 
 of the state ; which being once shaken, the whole frame built 
 on it is ready to be overtumbled. Besides, I know that, how- 
 ever faction prevailed for a while, it was but a fire of straw; 
 that the subjects, either now out of necessity, after they had been 
 sore galled with excises, taxes, loans, and maintenance of 
 armies, and their estates impoverished and taken from them, or 
 of their own free will, would return to the obedience of their 
 Sovereign Lord : and I would not, after my death, have the 
 name of a Rebel set over my grave. At last, after I had found 
 that apud furentem midtitudinem parum tuta est Majestas sine 
 viribus, being loth to banish myself from my country in my 
 weaker age, I went with you, and obeyed what ye commanded ; 
 for, after ye had made yourselves masters of Crown, Sceptre, 
 and Sword, and had invested the King's Castles, no private 
 man had a disgrace in saying as ye said : Minima quceque
 
 39 2 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 parvitate sua tuta sunt. Should I meet a number of madmen, 
 and they were to have me to dance with them, I were the 
 occasion of my own destruction if I opposed them. Oportet 
 stultitiam imperantis ferre. But that I allowed of your proceed- 
 ings, it was never in my thoughts. Ye say I do as ye do, asserf 
 and advance all your proceedings. Compelled and forced 
 obligations are null in law, much more what any subscribeth 
 under pain of being prosecuted if he do not. But I will not 
 enter into this sea. 
 
 " I am called hither to make answer, and to hear a charge for 
 scandalous and seditious papers sent abroad, and supposed to 
 have come from my pen, since the beginning of the troubles of 
 this kingdom. That I have been writing I cannot deny ; but 
 that any of my writings should prove seditious or scandalous, 
 except to distempered brains, is more than I can perceive. 
 The History which I have written of the Lives of the Five Kings 
 of Scotland may, by some monarchomachists, be challenged as 
 scandalous. That they are for the suppression of Rebellion 
 against monarchs I cannot deny, being written under a monarch, 
 and Monarchy, for anything I could learn by a long-continued 
 reading of books, being in my judgment the best form of 
 government. But it is perhaps a Remonstrance which, for the 
 peace and concord of the People of this Isle, I have written 
 which is challenged [the Irene\ ; which none, except men guilty 
 of the crimes there taxed, can accuse me of. Sacrilege, ambition, 
 and discord, are there branded ; and, considering the miseries 
 which by these vices we have fallen into, why should they be 
 flattered and farded, to shine like beautiful virtues? Honeste 
 sapit qui non servivit malo publico. 
 
 Some other pieces of State have passed under my pen which 
 require rather an answer of strong and solid reasons than a 
 personal reprehension and rebuke of the author. Verity is that 
 which so long time ye have been praying for; Truth is that 
 which ye have these years past been fighting for; and this is not, 
 nor cannot be acquired, except a fair pass and safe-conduct be 
 granted of arguing, and both parties be judicially heard before 
 the tribunal of Reason ; and such men as labour to suppress 
 remonstrances and writings which concern the weal of the 
 Commonwealth prove themselves to be altogether seditious 
 and factious, malicious opinionatives, and that they reject every 
 thing which is not of their own forge. The Romish Church 
 was condemned fearfully, that they would not give way to
 
 Mtat. 57-61. LASSWADE PARISH VACANT. 393 
 
 reasoning and hear our first Reformers ; and some of ourselves 
 are fallen into that same mire. Histories lately are come abroad, 
 allowed and approved by the present rulers of the State, which 
 to read in the days of Queen Elizabeth and King James was 
 treason and capital, being forbidden by the laws of the Kingdom 
 and Acts of Parliament ; and now for trampled Monarchs none 
 dare publish a sheet of paper ; or, if any do, they are Malignants, 
 and ecclesiastical and committee censures pass upon them." 
 
 All things considered, the Argyle-Loudoun government seem 
 to have behaved more leniently to Drummond than might have 
 been expected. There was certainly no pen in Scotland more 
 formidable to them than his ; but then, as they knew he worked 
 with the pen alone, and was not likely to engage himself prac- 
 tically in plots or conspiracies, they do not seem to have 
 thought it expedient to risk a public prosecution of a man of 
 his high literary reputation. On the whole, therefore, through 
 the years 1643, J 644, and the beginning of 1645, he lived at 
 Hawthornden, or went and came between Hawthornden and 
 Edinburgh, freely enough. One hears of him at this time 
 in connection with an event of parochial interest. 
 
 In the end of 1643, Mr. Porteous, who had been the parish- 
 minister of Lasswade since 16 16, died ; and, as in all Scottish 
 parishes on such occasions, there was a good deal of excitement 
 on the question who should be his successor. There was going 
 about in Scotland at that time, in the character of a poor 
 broken-down parson, sorely in need of a living, but who had 
 been rejected by several parishes already, a certain Mr. James 
 Fairly, A.M., of whom we have already heard (see p. 54). When 
 it is mentioned that he had been Bishop of Argyle for about a 
 year and a half in the by-gone days of Episcopacy, and so 
 zealous in that capacity for Laud's Liturgy that he had tried to 
 officiate with it in Grayfriars Church in Edinburgh on the day of 
 the Jenny Geddes riot in the High Church of the same city, the 
 reason for his unpopularity will seem sufficient. With all the 
 other Scottish bishops, he had been deposed by the Glasgow
 
 394 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 Assembly of 1638 ; but he was one of those who had escaped 
 with deposition only, while most were punished also with ex- 
 communication. Baillie was surprised at this leniency to 
 Fairly. " He seemed as worthy of censure as any : in his small 
 " time he had shown good will to go the worst ways of the faction, 
 "far contrar to the opinion that all men had had of his ortho- 
 " doxy and honesty : he was ane urger of the wicked oath on in- 
 " trants, ane obtruder of the Liturgy upon them, an oppressor of 
 " his vassals, a preacher of Arminianism, a profaner of the Sab- 
 " bath, and beginner to do all that Canterbury could have 
 " wished." Nevertheless, afterwards, when the ex-bishop humbled 
 himself to his brethren of the restored Presbyterian Kirk, and 
 was forgiven and readmitted to the office of the ministry, Baillie 
 began to pity him. " The case of Mr. James Fairly, late 
 " Bishop of Argyle," says Baillie in his report of the proceedings 
 of the General Assembly of 1641, "was much regretted : that, 
 "he having given so long ago all satisfaction, yet no place could 
 " be gotten for him, to deliver him from that extremity of poverty 
 "wherewith long he had been vexed." Two years more had 
 passed, and still no living had been found for the poor penitent. 
 "Mr. Ja. Fairly," writes Baillie in 1643, "had oft been a sup- 
 " plicant for some place in his great necessity : when, after long 
 " delays, there did no possibility appear of any flock who would 
 
 "be entreated to receive him,"at'last " providentially, Baillie 
 
 proceeds to explain, there had come an opening. The minister 
 of Largo, in Fifeshire (the birth-place of the future Alexander 
 Selkirk, the original of Robinson Crusoe), had been promoted 
 to another living ; and the patronage of Largo parish was in the 
 hands of the Lord Chief Register, Gibson, the younger, of Durie ; 
 and the Lord Chief Register had been a pupil of Fairly' s ; and 
 the appointment was made ; and all seemed right. Alas ! no. 
 The Largo people would have no such man for their minister, 
 and made resolute demonstrations and gesticulations to that 
 effect in their fishy streets ; the Presbytery of St. Andrews took 
 part with the people ; and, though the chiefs of the Kirk did
 
 Mtat. 57-61. CASE OF MR. FAIRLY. 395 
 
 all they could from Edinburgh for Mr. Fairly, they failed. By 
 the General Assembly of 1643, when the case came up, it was 
 " remitted to the Presbytery ;" which meant, of course, that the 
 Largo people must have their way. " The man," says Baillie, 
 " hath long been in extreme misery ; he was sure his remitting 
 " to the Presbytery was the loss of the cause, and his assured loss 
 " of all the churches of the land, for no appearance that any 
 " people would ever accept of him. Many tears shed he before 
 " us ; vehement was Durie for him ; but there was no remede. 
 " Presbyteries and parishes might not be wronged." Some 
 months more had passed when, by the death of Mr. Porteous 
 of Lasswade, that parish was vacant. By way of a last effort to 
 provide for the buffeted ex-bishop, the Commission of the 
 Assembly recommended him for the place. Would the Lass- 
 wade people, accustomed as they had so long been to the 
 ministrations of a faithful Presbyterian like Mr. Porteous, accept 
 the rejected of even fishy Largo? They had tenderer hearts, 
 it appears, than the Largo people, or there was more adroit 
 management. After various meetings and consultations, they 
 accepted Mr. Fairly as their pastor, March 3, 1644; " where- 
 " upon they subscribit a supplication to the Presbytery [of Dal- 
 " keith], and ordainit the Lairds of Polton and Ffawthornden, 
 "with And. Lawder, to goe with the same; whilk was accordingly 
 "done." It was not, however, till the end of the year, or the be- 
 ginning of the next, that Mr. Fairly was finally settled in the 
 parish. He was then about fifty-seven years of age, and he re- 
 mained minister of Lasswade to his death in 1658, he and his 
 wife, Bessie Nicoll, residing in what had been Mr. Porteous's 
 manse, and having, I find, additional children there.* 
 
 From the fact that Drummond was one of the deputies from 
 the Lasswade people to the Dalkeith Presbytery, to forward 
 Mr. Fairly's appointment, it is to be inferred that he had 
 
 * Baillie's Letters as dated ; Scott's Fasti Eccles. Scot., Dalkeith Presby- 
 tery, Lasswade Parish ; Lasswade Parish Registers in Register House, 
 Edinburgh.
 
 396 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 been active in his behalf. Fairly was of a literary turn, and 
 had contributed two pieces of Latin verse to the Muses' Welcome 
 to King James in 1617, which contained also Drummond's 
 Forth Feasting. Drummond may therefore have known him 
 from of old. At all events, his antecedents would be no dis- 
 credit to him in Drummond's eyes, and he may have been more 
 to Drummond's taste than his predecessor, Mr. Porteous. If I 
 had found that Drummond became one of Mr. Fairly's elders, 
 and so a member of his Kirk-Session, I should not have been 
 surprised ; but I am bound to say that my enquiries in that 
 direction have been fruitless. There were, I may add, as 
 many as 600 communicants in Lasswade parish in Mr. Fairly's 
 
 time. One thing more I may note as a local curiosity. If 
 
 the Dalkeith Presbytery now contained an ex-bishop in the 
 person of Mr. Fairly of Lasswade, it contained something more 
 extraordinary still, though nobody then knew it, in the person 
 of a future Archbishop. Since December 1641 the minister of 
 the parish of Newbattle, by the appointment of its patron, the 
 Covenanting Earl of Lothian, had been Robert Leigh ton, A.M., 
 the son of that Scottish Dr. Alexander Leighton who had 
 suffered so horribly at Laud's instance in London in 1630 for a 
 book against Episcopacy, and had recently been released and 
 rewarded by the Long Parliament after his long imprisonment. 
 There could surely have been no safer Presbyterian choice for 
 Newbattle than the Earl of Lothian had made ; and, while 
 Leighton remained minister there (which he did till 1653), there 
 was no more serious charge against him than that he did not 
 show the same excess of Presbyterian zeal as his brethren did, 
 was too tolerant and easy on all disputed points, and of too 
 philosophic and speculative ways. The musings and specula- 
 tions were to carry him so far out of the Presbyterian camp, 
 in the changed times that were coming, that he could accept a 
 bishopric and an archbishopric, and yet leave a name to be hon- 
 oured among his countrymen beyond that of any other Scotsman 
 of his century who chanced to be a prelate ; but, for the present,
 
 JEtat. 57-61. DRUMMOND'S MOODINESS. 397 
 
 nothing of this could be foreseen, even by himself. He was 
 now thirty-three or thirty-four years of age. When Drummond 
 went to Dalkeith, with the Laird of Polton and Andrew 
 Lawder, to wait on the Presbytery in the business of Mr. Fairly 1 :-; 
 nomination, Leigh ton was probably in his place at the Presb) •- 
 terial board. It is impossible, at all events, that two such men 
 as Drummond and the thoughtful and tolerant Leighton could 
 have been such near neighbours as they were without knowing 
 each other well. We may add the future Archbishop Leighton, 
 therefore, to the list of Drummond's friends. 
 
 The recent course of events in England must have afforded 
 Drummond food for very mixed speculation. Marston Moor 
 must have staggered him ; and he cannot but have perceived 
 altogether how much larger and more deep-reaching a business 
 was this Civil War in England than the Scottish contests with 
 Charles that had preceded it. The whole phenomenon of 
 English Independency and its peculiar action in the war ought 
 to have had interest and significance for him, if only because 
 of the strangely new conjunction in which it flashed back upon 
 him his own favourite toleration tenet. Here was a new 
 school of thinkers, with a marching army of supporters, who 
 had unfurled in England exactly such a toleration-tenet as he 
 had himself tried furtively to send abroad in Scotland, but who 
 had unfurled it in such circumstances, and in conjunction with 
 views of politics so entirely the reverse of his own, that in their 
 hands it was likely to be no mere toy-flag, but a great conquer- 
 ing banner. Drummond, it is to be feared, was at no leisure 
 for a study of this phenomenon in the spirit in which it deserved 
 to be studied. In his eyes the English Independents, with 
 their cry of " Liberty of Conscience," were a pack of mere 
 vagabonds, worse even than the Presbyterians, inasmuch as they 
 were more democratical, more thorough-going against the King. 
 Their growing power, however, must have arrested his attention, 
 and at length struck him as with a final shock. So long as the
 
 398 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 war for the English Parliament had been carried on by Essex 
 and the rest of the first set of English Generals, in conjunc- 
 tion with Leslie and the Scottish auxiliaries, success had been 
 pretty equally balanced between Parliament and the King, and 
 the King's ultimate triumph might seem fairly possible. But, 
 when the new Army of Fairfax and Cromwell, the Army of In- 
 dependents and Sectaries, had taken the field, and there came 
 the news of Naseby (June 14, 1645), then hope seemed gone. 
 The good old kingly order of things might be reckoned at an 
 end for ever ; and it was a new world, a world of horrid sounds 
 and shapes unholy, that had burst upon one's declining age. 
 
 " Not quite : there is hope yet," Drummond may have sud- 
 denly exclaimed. For, while he was thus ruefully looking south, 
 lo ! at his back, in Scotland itself, a commotion for the King, 
 which had been rolling and growing for nearly a year, and 
 which had now reached such vast dimensions that the Argyle 
 Government was trembling for its safety, and even in Eng- 
 land the Royalists were speculating whether salvation for his 
 Majesty's sinking cause might not come out of that strange and 
 turbulent North which had begun all the mischief. Yes, at the 
 very time when Leslie, with one Scottish army, was serving 
 the cause of Parliament in England, and serving it so ineffectu- 
 ally, another Scottish army, of very different composition and 
 under very different generalship, was raging and storming for 
 the King all through the North of Scotland, and it did not 
 seem impossible that the contribution of Scotland to the Eng- 
 lish Civil War might have to end in the recall of one army to 
 stop the ravages of the other. 
 
 The man who had brought Scotland to this pass was that 
 extraordinary Earl of Montrose, whose relations to Drummond 
 are already well known to us, and whom we have had occasion 
 to characterise as a Drummond rampant. Thirty-eight years was 
 to be he total span of this man's life, and his biographers, to 
 make him complete, have to range over all the thirty-eight ; but 
 the pith of his life, for which he is now remembered as one of
 
 Mtat 57-61. MONTROSE'S OUTBLAZE. 399 
 
 the heroes of Scottish History, lies in his exploits between 
 August, 1644, and September, 1645. In these, if we look to 
 actual effects, he exhausted his genius and daring ; the rest is 
 but prologue and epilogue. 
 
 After the enactment of the Solemn League and Covenant, 
 Montrose had been a Scottish refugee in England, hanging on 
 about the King and Queen, and passionately proposing to them 
 the project. of a Royalist rising in Scotland. At length, he suc- 
 ceeded so far as to impress the King with the idea that the 
 Hamiltons had served him ill, or even treacherously ; and 
 these two brothers were thrown off by the King, the Duke into 
 imprisonment for future trial, and Lanark to find refuge among 
 the Parliamentarians. It was a farther step when the King 
 thought that at least no harm could come of Montrose's pro- 
 posed attempt, commissioned him as his Lieutenant-Gen eral in 
 Scotland, and allowed him to try. He made his first trial in 
 an inroad into Scotland, with a small force, as far as Dumfries, 
 but was obliged to turn back (April, 1644). Then, after Marston 
 Moor, having been meanwhile created Marquis of Montrose for 
 his bravery, he had full permission to try again, if he could do 
 so on his own resources. Enough for Montrose ! A wild band 
 of Irishmen and Islesmen, Macdonalds, Macdonnells, and what 
 not, sent by the Irish Earl of Antrim, had landed in Argyle- 
 shire, according to arrangement between Montrose and the Earl, 
 and were penetrating into the central Highlands. If he could 
 but make his way into Scotland, so as to join them and take the 
 command ! He did make his way into Scotland, riding in 
 disguise through the strictly watched Lowlands, till he reached 
 his familiar Perthshire Highlands of Athole ; and there, falling 
 in with the band of bewildered Irishmen, and adding to them 
 some Athole Highlanders, he raised the King's standard, and 
 began his Lieutenant-Generalship (Aug., 1644). In appearance, 
 he had the raggedest little army to begin with that ever a general 
 reviewed. It consisted of some 2,300 Celts, of two discrepant
 
 4 oo DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 sorts, without cannon, horses, provisions, or any arms in tolerable 
 number, except dirks and broadswords. Highland blood and 
 loyalty and Montrose's leadership were to be trusted for the 
 rest. 
 
 Hardly had the Argyle Government in Edinburgh heard of 
 Montrose's rising in Athole, when they heard of him as out of 
 Athole, with Lord Kilpont and one or two gentlemen of the 
 Drummond clan attached to him on his first march, and his 
 career of victory astoundingly begun. Tippermuir (Sept. i, 1644) 
 Avas his first battle. It scattered the mustered Covenanters of 
 the middle shires from around him, threw open to him the town 
 and supplies of Perth, and procured him a new adherent in his 
 former comrade in the Covenant, Lord Drummond, the Earl of 
 Perth's son. Thence, for a month or two, the eye can hardly 
 follow him on the map, so rapid are his movements, such a 
 maze and repetition of circuits and zig-zags. There were 
 marchings and ravagings to the East and South as far as 
 Aberdeen and Dundee, and marchings and ravagings to the 
 West, varied by crossings and recrossings of the Grampians, and 
 brief rests in Athole and Badenoch. For a while Argyle, at 
 the head of the national force of the Covenanters, had been 
 toiling after him ; and, though Montrose's main purpose in his 
 erratic marchings was the widest possible havoc in Covenanting 
 towns and districts, and the widest possible spreading of revolt 
 among the clans, he seems to have had a peculiar pleasure in 
 mocking and baffling Argyle in the process. For that noble- 
 man, however, the object as he was of Montrose's most impla- 
 cable hatred, more galling insults and more terrible chastisement 
 were in store. The winter had come ; operations for the year 
 were at an end ; and Montrose was supposed to be sure and 
 fast in his favourite central Highlands, till the fresh musters 
 which the Covenanting Government had ordered against him 
 should be ready. Argyle, who had resigned his command-in- 
 chief, that some more military man might be appointed, had 
 gone to his Castle of Inverary, to look after his Argyleshire
 
 JEtat. 57-61. MONTROSE S OUTBLAZE. 401 
 
 domain. There, to all appearance, he was inaccessible, when 
 Montrose and his Highlanders undeceived him. South-west- 
 wards from Athole they moved suddenly, clambering snowy 
 mountains, threading unknown passes, burning and ravaging as 
 they neared the country of the Campbells, till at last they burst 
 in upon that country, and were at Inverary itself. Argyle had 
 fled at their approach. For a whole month they remained in 
 the doomed district, ranging among Argyle's poor people with 
 slaughter and devastation unutterable. Satiated at length with 
 such irrelevant devilry, and more regular work lying before them, 
 they left the scenes of their vengeance, and took their way along 
 the great chain of Highland lakes, leading from Argyleshire to 
 Inverness. Meanwhile Lieutenant-General Baillie had been 
 summoned from his command under Leslie in the Scottish 
 auxiliary army in England, expressly that he might take the 
 chief command against Montrose ; and he and Argyle had 
 agreed upon plans ! They had to deal with one whose war- 
 movements were Mars's own lightnings, and who could laugh 
 at plans. So it was proved at Inverlochy, close to Ben Nevis 
 (Feb. 2, 1645), when Montrose, who had doubled back from his 
 northward march, came unawares upon Argyle's army by itself, 
 routing it utterly, and slaying 1,500 of the Campbells, after 
 Argyle himself had taken refuge in his barge in the adjoining 
 loch. So it was proved during the next month or two by 
 Montrose's repetition, through Morayshire, Nairnshire, Banff- 
 shire, Aberdeenshire, Forfarshire, and Perthshire, in defiance of 
 Baillie and his lieutenant Urry, of that game of extraordinary 
 marches and zig-zags by which he had first baffled and eluded 
 Argyle. So it was proved by his storming of Dundee (April 4) 
 almost within sight of Baillie and Urry, and again in the battle 
 of Auldearn, near the Moray Firth (May 9), in which he and 
 his Highlanders thrashed Urry completely, killing about a third 
 of his force. 
 
 Such was the amount of progress Montrose had made in his 
 
 wonderful Scottish enterprise when Fairfax and Cromwell 
 
 2 c
 
 402 
 
 DRUMMOXD OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 inflicted on the King's cause in England the disastrous blow of 
 Naseby (June 14). After that, we can see now, it little mattered 
 what Montrose or any one else might be able to do for the 
 King in Scotland. The victors at Naseby were not the men to 
 rest till every remnant of Royalism had been destroyed in 
 England ; and what went on in Scotland meanwhile might 
 remain very much Scotland's own affair, till there should be 
 leisure for English attention to it. Though this seems plain to 
 us now, however, it did not seem so plain then. With Montrose 
 himself the idea had all along been that, when he had thoroughly 
 subdued Scotland, he might either receive the King there or at 
 once lead an army into England in the King's support; and 
 the same idea, with necessary modifications, remained in his 
 mind after Naseby, was imparted by him to the King, and 
 influenced His Majesty's varying schemes. Drummond, there- 
 fore, might be excused if, while his look southwards over 
 England could be nothing but rueful after Naseby, he had still 
 some hopeful expectations from what Montrose had done in the 
 North of Scotland and what he might yet do. 
 
 Such hope might well rise into exultation in the two months 
 that followed Naseby. Montrose was victorious in two more 
 battles. On the 2nd of July he defeated General Baillie himself 
 at Alford, in Aberdeenshire; and on the 15th of August he 
 defeated him still more completely at Kilsyth, in Stirlingshire. 
 All the resources of the Argyle Government, all the means of 
 opposing Montrose that could be found within Scotland, were 
 then exhausted; the Government was broken up, and its 
 members dispersed; and the submission to Montrose was 
 universal. Glasgow was taken ; Edinburgh and other cities 
 and towns applied for terms ; Royalist nobles and lairds who 
 had been in prisons were again at liberty ; and such other 
 nobles and lairds as were not too deeply implicated on the 
 other side hastened to make peace with the conqueror at his 
 Leaguer at Bothwell. On the 3rd of September, Montrose held 
 at this place a kind of Court of all his adherents, old and new,
 
 sBtat. 57-61. MOXTROSE'S TRIUMPH. 403 
 
 combined with a great review of his Army. There he produced 
 a new royal commission, appointing him Viceroy and Captain- 
 General in Scotland with the fullest powers ; and thence he 
 issued proclamations for a Scottish Parliament to be held on 
 the 20th of October. With the aid of this Parliament he was 
 to take all farther measures for cleansing Scotland from the 
 effects of her seven years of Covenanterism, and re-establishing 
 the King's authority. The heads of the late Government and 
 the leaders of the Presbyterian Clergy might consider themselves 
 marked out for exemption from any intended general amnesty. 
 The Scottish Auxiliary Army in England found itself also in a 
 peculiar position. It had gone into England to fight against 
 the King ; and now it was barred out, to shift for itself, or be 
 received into the service of the English Parliament. 
 
 Of the Scotsmen of note who gathered round Montrose 
 in his Leaguer at Bothwell, either in joyful welcome of the 
 counter-revolution he had effected, or in feigned submission to 
 the same, a complete list is hardly possible. Among those who 
 had joined his standard in the course of his year of exploits, 
 and assisted him in them more or less, were the Earl of Airlie 
 and his son Lord Ogilvy, Lord Gordon and Viscount Aboyne 
 (two sons of the Marquis of Huntley), Lord Drummond (son of 
 the Earl of Perth), Lord Maderty (also a Drummond), Sir John 
 Drummond, Sir William Rollock, Sir Philip Nisbet, Colonel 
 Nathaniel Gordon, Ogilvie of Innerquharity, Mr. William Murray 
 (brother of the Earl of Tullibardine), and not a few chiefs of 
 Highland clans, with whom may be remembered Alexander 
 Macdonald of Colonsay, Montrose's Major-General throughout, 
 and the commander of his Irish. With the exception of Lord 
 Gordon, who had been killed at Alford, all of these had survived 
 to share in the triumph. Among the adherents of Montrose 
 who would certainly have been with him in the field had they 
 not been in durance till released by his triumph, were his brother- 
 in-law and Mentor Lord Napier, Stirling of Keir (inseparable 
 from Montrose and Napier), the Earl of Crawford, and Irvine
 
 4 o 4 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 of Drum ; while among the more miscellaneous adherents 
 at the last may be mentioned the Marquis of Douglas, the 
 Earls of Annandale, Hartfield, and Traquair, Lords Erskine, 
 Fleming, Seton, and Johnston, Sir Robert Spotswood (who had 
 been appointed Secretary for Scotland by the King in succes- 
 sion to Lanark, and had come from England to attend Montrose), 
 Justice-Clerk Sir John Hamilton, and Archibald Primrose, the 
 Clerk of the Privy Council. All these, and many more, 
 including civic dignitaries from various towns, are to be fancied 
 as presenting themselves at Montrose's Leaguer at Bothwell at 
 one time or another between the Battle of Kilsyth on the 15 th 
 of August and the great Court and Rendezvous of Royalists 
 which he held on the 3rd of September, when his Vice-royalty 
 was inaugurated. Most of them must have made it a point to 
 attend him on this last occasion. 
 
 The name of Drummond, it will be seen, was well represented, 
 in any case, in the circle that had gathered round the new 
 Viceroy ; but one is curious about our particular Drummond. 
 Did he adhere publicly to Montrose ? There is not the least 
 doubt on the subject. Drummond, it appears, was one of the 
 first persons that Montrose thought of in his hour of triumph, 
 when he was counting up his best friends and taking measures 
 for their safety. Here is his protection to Drummond, dated 
 thirteen days after the final victory of Kilsyth. 
 
 " James, Marquis of Montrose, His Majesty's Lieutenant- 
 General of the Kingdom of Scotland : — 
 
 " These are to will and command all officers and soldiers 
 employed in this present expedition for repressing of this treason- 
 able and most unnatural Rebellion, so perversely hatched against 
 his Majesty's sacred person and authority, that none of them 
 trouble or molest Mr. William Drummond of Hawthornden, his 
 said lands, with houses, biggings, yards, parts, pendicles and 
 pertinents thereof, or his men, tenants, cottars, servants, and 
 indwellers thereupon, and their wives, bairns, and families, in 
 their bodies, goods, or gear, directly nor indirectly, as they and
 
 Mtat. 57-61. MONTROSE'S RETINUE : DRUMMOND. 405 
 
 every one of them will answer on the contrary at their highest 
 peril. 
 
 "Given at our Leaguer at Bofhwell, the 28th of August, 1645. 
 
 " Montrose." 
 
 To this Protection, conveyed, we are to suppose, to Drummond 
 at Hawthornden or in Edinburgh, he at once replied thus : — 
 
 " To the Right Honourable the Marquis of Montrose. 
 
 " My Noble Lord, 
 
 "At the beginning of the troubles of this Kingdom, 
 having ever according to my conscience and duty continued 
 loyal to the King's Majesty, I contributed my best endeavours 
 in an Essay of a Remonstrance [the Irene] for persuading his 
 Majesty's subjects to obedience towards him and peace amongst 
 themselves : which I had an intention to have published at his 
 Majesty's being here ; but, finding his Majesty's authority so 
 fearfully eclipsed, and the stream of rebellion swelled to that 
 height that honest men, without danger, dared hardly speak, 
 less publish their conceptions in write, I suppressed the papers. 
 Now, since, by the mercy of God on your Excellency's victorious 
 arms, the golden age is returned, his Majesty's crown re- 
 established, the many-headed monster near quelled, if that Piece 
 can do any service at this time, your Excellency, so soon as it 
 can be transcribed, shall command it, either to be buried in 
 oblivion, if it deserve, or published to the view of the world. 
 So your Excellency, as you have granted me a protection of my 
 fortunes, will be my patron and protector of my papers, and 
 deign to accept of him who will ever remain 
 
 " Your Excellency's most humble servant, 
 
 "W. Drummond." 
 
 [No date: presumably Aug. 29 or 30, 1645.] 
 
 There is nothing in this letter to invalidate our previous con- 
 jecture that the Irene may have been already quite well known 
 to Montrose through an early presentation copy from the author. 
 In addressing His Excellency, it was not for Drummond to 
 assume that fact. And so in his Excellency's response the
 
 4 o6 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 expression is equally formal, the document being, indeed, 
 official : — 
 
 " To Mr. William Drummond of Hawthornden. 
 
 " Sir, 
 
 " We being informed of your good affection to 
 His Majesty's service, and that you have written some Pieces 
 vindicating Monarchy from all aspersions, and another named 
 Irene: These are to desire you to repair to our Leaguer, bringing 
 with you or sending such papers, that we may give order for 
 putting them to the press, to the contentment of all His 
 Majesty's good subjects. 
 
 " Montrose." 
 
 [No date : presumably Aug. 31 or Sept. 1, 1645.] 
 
 The likelihood, therefore, is that Drummond, whether he 
 attended at the ceremonious Court and Rendezvous of Sept. 3 or 
 not (he abhorred bustle), did present himself, with his papers, 
 at Montrose's Leaguer, and have an interview with His Excel- 
 lency. Montrose was then in his thirty-fourth year, and 
 Drummond near the end of his sixtieth. Having given in his 
 adhesion with all his heart to the new Government, Drummond 
 might look forward to being its honorary poet-laureate and 
 historiographer, if he would take no more public post. 
 
 Alas for Drummond's joy over the return of " the golden 
 age " ! The new Government was to have but a brief existence. 
 Leslie's Scottish Auxiliary Army in England was not likely to let 
 itself be barred out of Scotland without a contest with Montrose; 
 and already a powerful detachment from that army, consisting 
 of 5,000 or 6,000 horse, under Leslie's namesake, and third in 
 command, Major-Gen eral David Leslie, was on the march to 
 Scotland, as an advanced force, to try conclusions. Montrose 
 had gone to the Borders, to stir up some nobles and lairds 
 there, and receive expected English reinforcements from the 
 King ; and he was lying rather negligently near Selkirk, his 
 army greatly reduced by the absence of many of his home-sick
 
 jEtat. S7-6i. CONCLUSION OF THE WAR. 407 
 
 Highlanders on furlough, when David Leslie and his horse 
 surprised him in a fog, and the one fell Battle of Philiphaugh 
 (Sept. 13, 1645) annihilated all his splendour. As if his year 
 of exploits had been but a blaze of straw, Scotland at once 
 recovered its Presbyterian composure, the Argyle Government 
 coming together again and resuming power. The trial and 
 execution of such leading adherents of Montrose as had been 
 taken at Philiphaugh formed part of its immediate business. 
 Montrose himself, with other fugitives, had escaped into the 
 inaccessible Highlands. 
 
 . So energetically in the mean time had Fairfax and Cromwell 
 followed up their great success at Naseby, in field-fights here, 
 sieges there, and sometimes terrific stormings of Royalist strong- 
 holds, that the King's cause in England had come to its last 
 agonies, only a few towns and garrisons still holding out for him. 
 Oxford itself, the Royalist capital, and the King's head-quarters 
 throughout the war, was marked out for siege. In this extremity, 
 escape abroad being no longer possible, and the scheme of a 
 junction with Montrose in Scotland past date, all that remained 
 for the King, if he would not be taken in Oxford, was to 
 surrender either to the English Parliamentarians or to the 
 Scottish Auxiliary Army. Not without many hesitations, he 
 preferred the latter alternative; and, on the 5th of May 1646, 
 after ten days of wandering in disguise through several English 
 counties, he presented himself in Leslie's quarters before the 
 town of Newark. Foreseeing* the complications that might 
 arise between the Scots and the English in consequence of this 
 honour done to the Scots, Leslie at once broke up his quarters 
 at Newark, and retired, with the King in his charge, to 
 Newcastle. It was well to have Scotland conveniently near, in 
 case of exigencies. 
 
 One of the King's first acts, after taking refuge with the 
 Scottish army, was to send out orders for the immediate con- 
 clusion of the war by the cessation of all further operations in
 
 4 o8 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 his name and the surrender of Oxford and the other towns 
 and garrisons still holding out for him. There was naturally 
 some reluctance among the King's remaining adherents to 
 obey these instructions till they were perfectly sure there was no 
 mistake. Thus Oxford was not surrendered to Fairfax till 
 June 22, and some remoter garrisons kept the King's flag up 
 till as late as August — in which month the Civil War may be said 
 to have come absolutely to an end. One of the last Royalists 
 to lay down arms was Montrose, who had never ceased, since 
 Philiphaugh, to move about in the Highlands with some small 
 force, trying to promote another rising, and giving the Covenant- 
 ing Government some trouble. Not till repeated commands to 
 desist and disband had reached him from the King would he 
 take them in earnest ; but at length, the Covenanting Govern- 
 ment having agreed to let him go into exile unmolested, he did 
 disband, came in a private manner into the East Scottish 
 Lowlands to settle his affairs, and embarked, with a few 
 followers, at Stonehaven, in a ship bound for Norway (Sept. 3, 
 1646). One of his last letters before leaving Scotland was this 
 to Drummond : — 
 
 " To Mr. William Drummond of Haivthomden. 
 
 "Sir, 
 
 " Having the occasion of this so trusty a 
 bearer, I could not but remember to you all my best respects, 
 and acknowledge your good affection, and all your friendly 
 favours. For which, and your so constant loyalty towards His 
 Sacred Majesty and his service, besides your own so much 
 personal deserving, I must entreat you to believe that, in all 
 times and fortunes, you shall find me ever, 
 
 " Sir, 
 " Your Most Affectionate and Faithful Friend, 
 
 " Montrose. 
 " Montrose : August 19th, 1646."
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 THE KING AT NEWCASTLE : QUESTION BETWEEN THE ENGLISH AND 
 THE SCOTS AS TO THE CUSTODY OF HIS PERSON : DRUMMOND'S 
 PART IN THE DEBATE : KING SURRENDERED BY THE SCOTS. 
 
 1646— 1647. 
 
 ESLIE'S precaution of withdrawing his army to Newcastle, 
 ■^— ' with the King in its custody, had not been unnecessary. 
 No sooner was he there than there began such a dispute as to 
 the relative rights of the English and the Scots to the possession 
 of the King that it appeared far from unlikely there would be 
 a rupture on the subject between the two nations. The dispute 
 was carried on partly at Newcastle, where, though the King 
 was in Scottish custody, Englishmen had access to him ; partly 
 in Edinburgh, where the Governing Committee of Estates re- 
 ceived English messages, and were waited on by English 
 Agents ; but chiefly in London, where Scottish Commissioners 
 were in negotiation with the English Parliament. 
 
 In form, the dispute was one of nationalities. Charles was 
 King of England : what right had the Scots to keep him ? A 
 very good right, they replied, inasmuch as he was also King of 
 Scotland. Yes, but he had been taken within the bounds of 
 England, and in a war which appertained wholly to England. 
 No, it did not appertain wholly to England ; Scotland, too, was 
 engaged ; and, though the King had been taken within English 
 territory, it was by an independent Scottish Army, which was, 
 in fact, a temporary projection of Scotland, with all her rights
 
 4 i o DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 intact, into England, So the argument went on between the 
 two sides ; but, in reality, the dispute was less between the two 
 nationalities, as such, than between the English Presbyterians 
 and the Scots together, forming the Scottish party, and the 
 English Independents, using the language of English nationality, 
 and constituting themselves the English party. The English 
 Presbyterians did not, at heart, object to the Scottish custody 
 of the King ; on the contrary, they thought that, by the lucky 
 accident of the King's surrender of himself to the Scots, there 
 was far more chance of the kind of settlement they and the 
 Scots desired than if he had put himself into the custody of 
 the English Army, composed so largely of Independents and 
 Sectaries. The kind of settlement desired was one that should 
 include, with whatever else, the King's assent to the establish- 
 ment of strict Presbytery in England, and his co-operation for 
 the suppression of Independency and the Sects. All the more 
 vehement, because of their perception of this, were the English 
 Independents, and the English Army, in their protests against 
 the detention of the King by the Scots, and what they called 
 the sycophancy of the English Presbyterians to Scottish 
 arrogance. Standing up for the rights and honour of England, 
 they became even fierce in their invectives against the Scots. 
 What had the Scots done for England in the late war, that 
 they should now be deferred to ? They had lent England an 
 army which had been an impediment rather than a help, which 
 had done nothing, since Marston Moor, but live on English 
 food, and burden every neighbourhood in which it had been 
 quartered ! This, and the importation of their peevish, ultra- 
 Presbyterian crotchets into English affairs, were not much to 
 be thankful for; England would have been better off at that 
 moment had it never seen a Scottish face, or heard a Scottish 
 tongue ! There were money-accounts between the Scots and 
 the English : well, let these be looked into, and let the Scots 
 be satisfied by any reasonable valuation and payment of the 
 debts and arrears owing to them ! Let them, in any case, be
 
 sEtat. 61-62. CHARLES IN SCOTTISH CUSTODY. 
 
 411 
 
 called upon, at once, to surrender Newcastle, Carlisle, and the 
 other places they held in the North of England, and to return 
 to their own country, leaving the King behind them ! Should 
 they refuse, had not the English Parliament an Army that would 
 willingly chase them out, follow them, and take the King from 
 the very midst of them, though they should place him on the 
 top of Ben Muichdhui, and encircle him there with their bluest 
 banners ? 
 
 This controversy, which the king secretly rejoiced in, and 
 out of which he extracted new hopes, came to its fiercest about 
 the month of October 1646. Papers on both sides were printed, 
 some reporting officially the arguments of the Scottish Com- 
 missioners in London and the replies by the English Parliament, 
 others mere pamphlets, or speeches that had been made 
 in Parliament by prominent Independents. In Scotland the 
 agitation was great. The national spirit was up, but various 
 considerations were at work to temper it. On one supposition, 
 the Scots would have been unanimous. If the King would 
 have taken the Covenant on his first coming to Newcastle, and 
 declared himself without reserve for Presbytery in England, 
 they would have stood by him at all hazards ; or rather the 
 hazards in that case would not have been boundless, because 
 the English Presbyterians would then have been at one with 
 the Scots. But, the King having obstinately refused either to 
 take the Covenant or to commit himself to Presbytery, and the 
 English Parliament as a whole having sent to him a large series 
 of Propositions to which they required his assent, and which 
 included many things besides the Church-question, the Scots 
 were grievously perplexed. Their advice to him at Newcastle 
 for the last month or two had been to accept the English Pro- 
 positions, but above all to set himself right even yet by taking 
 the Covenant and declaring for Presbytery — in which case they 
 would do their best to persuade the English to modify the most 
 severe of the other Propositions in their definite treaty with
 
 412 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 him, and might perhaps succeed. Nothing, however, had 
 moved the King. He would not take the Covenant ; he would 
 not commit himself to the entire abrogation of Episcopacy ; he 
 would not commit himself to anything positively. What then 
 could the Scots do? 
 
 On this question they divided themselves. The Duke of 
 Hamilton, released at last from his long imprisonment in one 
 of the King's English garrisons, had forgiven the King that 
 injury ; and he and his brother Lanark were now again the 
 King's mainstays among the Scots. Their advice to him, too, 
 had been to accept the Covenant, Presbytery, and the sub- 
 stance of the Propositions of the English Parliament ; they had 
 reasoned with him earnestly to that effect, and told him that his 
 case would be desperate otherwise. But, when he had rejected 
 this advice, they did not consider themselves released from the 
 duty of doing all they could for him nevertheless, and they had 
 been labouring among the Scots to form a party in his behalf. 
 It is easy to see on what professions such a party might base 
 itself. Without defending the King's conduct, nay professing 
 agreement with all the rest of Scotland in regretting his 
 Majesty's obstinacy, they could yet appeal to national pride, 
 to the affection of the Scots for a sovereign of their own blood, 
 to pity for him in his misguided condition. They could urge 
 that in no case would it be other than monstrous, cruel, a stain 
 on the national scutcheon, to give him up to the English after 
 he had voluntarily trusted himself to Scottish protection. And 
 why should such a foul act be thought necessary ? Why should 
 not his Majesty come into Scotland, and have time and leisure 
 to reflect ? The English might treat with him there ; he 
 would have the best Scottish advice ; time and reflection would 
 bring him round ; he would return to England on right conditions 
 at last, and Scotland would have acquitted herself honourably ! 
 These were the obvious public arguments, whatever were the 
 motives lying beneath ; and it behoved all the Royalists, all 
 the Drummondists, all the relics of the Montrose following, in
 
 A? tat. 61-62. DEB A TE ABOUT CHARLES. 4 , 3 
 
 Scotland, to suppress their deeper sentiments, adhere to the 
 Hamiltons, and adopt, for the nonce, the language of their 
 policy. For Avere not all the Presbyterian clergy up on the 
 other side, with their pulpits, and their other organs of expres- 
 sion and compulsion, at work as usual? Most visibly they 
 were. The Scottish Presbyterian Clergy, though England had 
 not quite answered their first fond expectations, and though 
 their temper had been sorely tried by the vast phenomenon 
 of Independency and the Sects in that country, with their un- 
 repressed advocacy of Liberty of Conscience, yet adhered with 
 unshaken tenacity to the policy of the English Alliance. A 
 King who was God-abandoned must be man-abandoned also ! 
 What could Scotland do with a King who would not take 
 the Covenant, and would still stand out for Episcopacy for 
 himself and for his English realm? To abet such a King by ' 
 receiving him into Scotland would be at once an absurdity 
 intrinsically, a treachery to England, and a false mercy to him- 
 self, by sheltering him from the very chastisements designed by 
 Heaven to convince him. So the Clergy reasoned ; so the 
 people, generally, felt at their bidding; and so Argyle, Loudoun, 
 Johnstone of Warriston, and the rest of the popular party in the 
 Government, had resolved to act. 
 
 Drummond, of course, went with the Hamiltons. Amons 
 his Papers is one entitled, " Objections against the Scots 
 Answered," which must have been written, in or about October, 
 1646, and affords a curious study of his real feelings, in com- 
 promise with the peculiarities of the occasion. It consists of a 
 citation, from contemporary English documents, of eighteen 
 distinct charges made against the Scots, either by the English 
 Parliament collectively, or by the Independents in it, and of 
 answers to these charges numerically, in a corresponding series 
 of paragraphs. 
 
 With one exception, the paragraphs are brief. For example, 
 the answer to No. VI. of the Objections runs thus : —
 
 414 
 
 DRUM MO ND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 "VI. It is objected against us, that we take upon us to 
 interpret the Laws of the Kingdom of England, and to impose 
 propositions upon them according to our understanding of 
 these Laws concerning the Militia, contesting that it is due 
 to the King and Parliament conjunctly. If this be understood 
 of the Laws of England (which William the Conqueror 
 imposed upon that nation, and remain yet stigmata servitutis, 
 muffled up in barbarous Norman), we acknowledge we under- 
 stood them not, being most part cabalistic ; and much good 
 may they do those who boast of them, and are subjected unto 
 them. But, if they opine and conceive that we cannot 
 interpret National, Civil, or honest Municipal Laws, they may 
 be mistaken. That we have joined the Prince with the Parlia- 
 ment in the power of the Militia, we acknowledge • and what 
 God above us all, Islanders, hath joined, let no man separate." 
 
 The Ninth objection from the English standing thus : — 
 " They [the Scots] go about to impose Church Government on 
 this nation by force of arms," — Drummond's dexterity of 
 language is a good deal tried ; but he succeeds in writing so as 
 not to betray himself. Note his we and our, used precisely as 
 if Presbyterianism were the understood Religion of all Scotsmen, 
 and the writer found himself perfectly happy in that fact : — 
 
 " We never entertained such thoughts ; but certain it is, the 
 English required the forms of our Church Government, seeking, 
 by way of Religion, to insinuate themselves in the favour of our 
 nation ; of which when they had taken the advantage, brought 
 to pass and compassed their great ends, the world may 
 clearly see in what a labyrinth they have left and entangled 
 us." 
 
 The answer to Objection X. is still more curious : — 
 
 " X. We will allow no livelihood to tender consciences ! 
 which, as we take it, is, we will not approve and allow a sort of 
 Liberty of Conscience to their Sectaries; which if it be ex- 
 pedient in a settled Commonwealth we leave to the disputes 
 of Divines and Statesmen. But this is none of ours." 
 
 Really, this is a little too clever in Mr. Drummond ! He saves
 
 jEtat. 61-62. DRUMMOND'S PLEA FOR CHARLES. 415 
 
 the toleration tenet of his own private creed by saying nothing 
 about it, and lie makes believe, even to himself, as if this 
 toleration tenet were a much more select and philosophical 
 thing than a certain vulgar " sort of Liberty of Conscience '" 
 he had heard of as advocated by the English sectaries, whereas 
 in fact his tenet and theirs was the same, only their way of it 
 was much the better. He was writing, however, as a quasi- 
 Presbyterian for the moment, and his "This is none of ours" 
 was a neat escape from an inconvenient topic. But how will he 
 get over Objection XIV : "They [the Scots] have done no ser- 
 " vice since the fight at Marston Moor, but have been intoler- 
 "ably damageable to the kingdom"? — 
 
 "We have done no service since the Field of Long Marston ! 
 But, if the Scottish northern forces had not at Philiphaugh been 
 beaten back and discomfited by some of our army then come 
 from England, or if unhappily we had joined with them, the 
 state of affairs in England had fallen to as low an ebb as now 
 they swell in a high tide." 
 
 This is worse and worse. Drummond himself had been 
 morally with Montrose at Philiphaugh ; he would have exulted 
 in Montrose's success there ; it would have been no " unhappi- 
 ness " to him, but the very reverse, if David Leslie's troops, 
 " then come from England," had either fraternized with Mon- 
 trose, or been disastrously beaten by him. And now he re- 
 minds the English of Leslie's annihilation of Montrose at Philip- 
 haugh as a splendid piece of Scottish service, making up for 
 all other deficiencies. Well, one is hard pressed when one has 
 a main object, and must use all means towards it, whatever 
 they are ! — Drummond's main object was to support the 
 Hamiltons, and persuade his countrymen not to surrender the 
 King. In a paper written for that purpose any word of Montrose 
 partizanship would have been fatal. The business of the advocate 
 was to assume the point of view of a good average Presbyterian, 
 jealous of the credit of the Scottish Auxiliary Army, and of the 
 honour of the Scottish nation, and from that point of view to
 
 4I 6 DRUM MO ND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 argue that the Scots had been grossly insulted by their allies, and 
 that, if the insults were pushed to the actual demand of a sur- 
 render of the King's person, then the Scottish Lion must rise 
 in his rage. The longest paragraph of all, consequently, in 
 Drummond's paper, is that in which he addresses himself to the 
 question of the surrender of the King. It comes in as an 
 answer to an English objection worded thus: "They [the 
 Scots] delivered not delinquents that went with the King, being 
 demanded." 
 
 "VII. The Scots are challenged that they delivered not the 
 delinquents who came with the King when they were demanded 
 [Mr. Ashburnham and others who had accompanied or followed 
 the King in his flight from Oxford, when he sought refuge with 
 the Scottish Army]. They might have given them a more near 
 challenge — that they did not deliver the King himself, whom 
 some of them have not doubted to name the greatest delinquent 
 in all the kingdoms ; and let this appeal be to all the courts of 
 earth and heaven. . . . The Scots Army cannot give up this chief 
 and greatest delinquent, King Charles, without his own con- 
 sent, though he should be sought after, and they threatened for 
 keeping of him : — (i) By reason of a twofold oath given by all 
 true loyal subjects of Scotland to their King : the one common 
 oath of homage and fidelity as born lieges ; the other the oath 
 of their Covenants that they shall, to the uttermost of their 
 power, with their means and lives, stand to the defence of their 
 dread sovereign, the King's Majesty, his person and authority. 
 And, unless they would fall under the fearful sin of perjury, 
 they cannot render their Sovereign to the disposing of a nation 
 who intended (as they have given forth in many printed pam- 
 phlets) his deposing, the ruin of his authority, and perhaps of 
 his royal person ; for that nation who struck off the head from 
 the grandmother may make small reckoning to do the same to 
 the grandchild. . . . (2) King Charles was not a tyrant, his 
 errors proceeding most from evil counsel. ... (3) In respect 
 and consideration of the Princes of Europe, confederates, allies, 
 and brethren to King Charles, especially the French. ... (4) 
 In regard of the Prince of Rothsay and Wales, his son ; who, 
 long hereafter, cannot but resent the wrong done to his father, 
 and revenge upon the authors, or their posterity, so heinous 
 a fact. ... (5) The baseness of the deed would be ponder-
 
 jEtat. 6 1 -62. CHA RL ES Si 'RRliNDERED. 4 1 7 
 
 ated. . . . (6). Considering the dangers which may ensue and 
 follow the giving up of the King's Majesty to the English ; for, 
 if, after he were given up (which God forbid !), he should 
 either be imprisoned or deposed, or not honourably and with all 
 due respect and reverence to his Majesty used, the Kingdoms 
 will be involved in greater difficulties than ever, and be farther 
 from any hope of 1 teace or agreement. For there are men great 
 and valiant in the three kingdoms (omitting sjtranger forces)_ who, 
 notwithstanding anything yet brought to pass, may set him in 
 the estate of his progenitors, and restore his former power. . ." 
 
 Drummond, in all his interferences in practical politics, was 
 doomed to be on the losing side. In spite of such reasonings 
 as his, and in spite of the most strenuous efforts of the 
 Hamiltons and their party in Scotland, the conclusion of the- 
 Scottish Nation was that which the Presbyterian Clergy recom- 
 mended, and which Argyle and the other popular members of the 
 Government had seen to be inevitable. Charles remaining 
 obdurate at Newcastle, and it having become known in London 
 with sufficient distinctness that the Scots would not break with 
 the English in his behalf, the fury of the Independents against 
 the Scots abated, and they and their Presbyterian colleagues in 
 the English Parliament united in a calm negotiation with the 
 Scottish Commissioners, so as to settle accounts between the 
 two nations in a business-like manner. It was agreed that 
 ,£400,000 should be paid to the Scots in discharge of all 
 claims ; and one half of that sum, by way of the first instal- 
 ment, was sent off in waggons from London to Newcastle 
 (Dec. 16). Even then there was a final effort of the Hamiltons 
 for the King in the Scottish Parliament, with adjurations, 
 entreaties, and tears ; but, the Commission of the Kirk striking 
 in with a vigorous exposition of the national duty, the Argyle 
 Government stood stern to their resolve. On the 30th of 
 January, 1647, the Scottish Army left Newcastle on its return 
 home, and the King remained there in the hands of the 
 Commissioners of the English Parliament. 
 
 2 D
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 CHARLES IN HIS ENGLISH CAPTIVITY : OMENS IN HIS FAVOUR : 
 THE SCOTTISH ENGAGEMENT AND THE SECOND ENGLISH CIVIL 
 WAR : DIVISION OF THE SCOTS INTO ENGAGERS AND ANTI- 
 ENGAGERS : DRUMMOND AMONG THE ENGAGERS : HIS VINDI- 
 CATION OF THE HAMILTONS : COLLAPSE OF THE ENGAGEMENT 
 AND END OF THE SECOND CIVIL WAR : CROMWELL IN EDIN- 
 BURGH : THE ENGLISH ARMY OMNIPOTENT : EXECUTION 
 OF THE KING. 
 
 1647 — 1649. 
 
 A FTER the King had been surrendered into the possession of 
 the English Parliament, every effort of theirs to come to 
 terms with him failed. Equally at Holmby House, in Northamp- 
 tonshire, where he was confined till June 3, 1647, and afterwards 
 when he was more at large at Hampton Court and other places 
 in charge of the Army, and yet again in his closer durance in 
 the Isle of Wight, from Nov. 13, 1647, onwards, he proved in- 
 tractable. Negotiations with him had gone on in every pos- 
 sible style, and he had had one splendid chance of an agree- 
 ment with the Independents and Army-chiefs which would have 
 saved his scruples about Episcopacy so far as they were per- 
 sonal ; but nothing could bring him to a definite compact. To 
 keep on treating, or appearing to treat, now with the Parlia- 
 ment as a whole, now with the Presbyterians separately, now 
 with the Army and the Independents separately, now 
 with both parties at once, all the while predetermined against
 
 Mtat 62-64. CHARLES IN CAPTIVITY. 419 
 
 any possible issue of any treaty with any of them, and cherish- 
 ing vague hopes of assistance from Ireland, or assistance from 
 France, or assistance from the clouds, had been his policy from 
 the first. 
 
 By sheer persistence in this policy, Charles at length did see 
 events assume an aspect more favourable to him. The strife 
 between the two classes of his opponents, the Independents 
 and the Presbyterians, had become so deadly that it seemed as 
 if either of them would coalesce with him for the vexation and 
 discomfiture of the other. 
 
 The Presbyterians, in particular, in their prolonged anta- 
 gonism to Independency, had begun to doubt whether the ag- 
 gregate demands upon the King had not been too hard, and 
 whether, if he would accept the indispensable condition of the 
 Presbyterian Establishment, the other terms might not be re- 
 laxed. What, above all, had brought them to this state of 
 mind was the continued existence in England of Fairfax's and 
 Cromwell's army, which had resisted every attempt of Parlia- 
 ment to disband it, and now walked about in England, a vast 
 mass of Independents and Sectaries, openly contemptuous of 
 Presbytery, discussing and divulging all sorts of religious heresies 
 and strange political opinions, and more resolute than ever for 
 Liberty of Conscience. What mattered it that England had 
 already been formally Presbyterianized by Parliamentary Or- 
 dinance, that in London and in Lancashire the Presbyterian 
 machinery was already fully at work, and that it might be con- 
 sidered certain that Presbytery would remain for all time coming 
 the form of the English State-Church ? Of what worth was a 
 Presbyterian State-Church without absolute and compulsory 
 conformity to it ; and how could this ever be looked for if the 
 Army of Independents and Sectaries were to be let loose through 
 the community, with all their wild ideas and their phrenzy for 
 a Toleration ? Civil society was in danger, as well as religious 
 and ecclesiastical order. The Independents and the Army had 
 become democrats, many of them avowed Republicans ; the
 
 420 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 throne, aristocracy, established rights of property, traditional 
 forms of magistracy, all would be subverted, or at least dread- 
 fully shaken, if these men were not restrained. They had been 
 speaking already of bringing the King to trial, deposing him, 
 or even executing him. In these circumstances, and in order 
 to conserve monarchy and other valuable institutions, might it 
 not be well to rally round the King, and consent to let him 
 have his own will in almost everything except the Church 
 settlement, if by that means a strong government could be re- 
 established ? 
 
 In Scotland the tendency of the Presbyterians to pity for the 
 King was even more manifest. The Scots were not perplexed, 
 as the English Presbyterians were, by the King's obstinacy on 
 the Militia question and various other questions of purely 
 English reference. The King might be right on these questions, 
 or on some of them ; but, in any case, they were trifles to the 
 Scots in comparison with the establishment of Presbytery in 
 England. That secured, they would willingly see the King 
 humoured pretty largely in other matters. Then, again, the 
 Scots, who had in fact taught the English Presbyterians their 
 horror of Independency, Toleration, and the Sectaries, had 
 worked themselves into a perfect fury on that subject. It was 
 a disgrace to the English not to have put down the Independents 
 and the Sects by this time, and to be contented with a make- 
 believe of a Presbytery, to which those Independents and Sects 
 might yet be able to append a provision for toleration. If 
 England could endure such things, Scotland would not. The 
 credit of the whole Island was at stake ; nay, Scotland was not 
 safe herself, with the pestilence of Sects and liberty of Con- 
 science separated from her only by the Tweed. Then, again, the 
 Scots, despite the affinities with democracy inherent in their Pres- 
 byterian Kirk-system, were all monarchists sentimentally, with 
 a curious lingering affection for King Charles in particular, the 
 107th of their own Scottish Kings, as they were fond of remem- 
 bering, though he was adrift now among the unappreciating
 
 /Etat. 62-64. CHARLES IN CAPTIVITY. 421 
 
 English. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that a 
 longing had arisen in Scotland for some interposition in English 
 affairs that should release the King from his long captivity and 
 give him back some of his royal power. 
 
 The longing, in fact, had arisen, and there were politicians at 
 the centre to manage it and give it shape. The Hamiltons were 
 again on the top of the wave, with all the Drummondists, and 
 old Scottish Royalists of whatever variety, abetting them as 
 before, but with recruits to their party now from the Presby- 
 terian politicians, who had hitherto been led by Argyle. Even 
 the Chancellor Loudoun, the nominal head of the Scottish 
 Government, had persuaded himself that the time had come 
 for a change of the national policy. Scotland had been 
 endeavouring all this while to preserve the English alliance, and 
 to obtain gentler treatment for the King, with more perfect 
 Presbytery in England and a suppression of the Sects, by mere 
 friendly remonstrances with the Parliament urged through 
 Scottish Commissioners in London. Of late she had met 
 nothing but rebuffs in these endeavours, had been more than 
 once insulted, and in effect told to mind her own business. 
 What if Scotland, still as the champion of British Presbytery, 
 were to try another method, by declaring for the King against 
 the Parliament, combining strict Presbytery with the cause of 
 Royalty, and so rousing the English Presbyterians to their 
 •duty, winning even the old Royalists to Presbytery, recomposing 
 three-fourths of England around the King's standard, and 
 leaving only the Independents in the lurch ? 
 
 So sure had the Hamiltons and most of the Scottish official 
 chiefs made themselves of the acquiescence of the Scots in such 
 a policy, that at Christmas, 1647, Loudoun, Lanark, Lauder- 
 dale, and other authorized Scottish Commissioners, being then 
 in the Isle of Wight, and Commissioners from die English 
 Parliament being at the same time there, on a new and very 
 positive mission to the King, these two sets of Commissioners 
 came to open rupture. But that was not all. Before the
 
 422 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 Scottish Commissioners left the Isle of Wight, they signed a 
 secret Treaty with the King, binding the Scots to take up arms 
 for his release and the restoration of his just kingly dignity, 
 on the basis of his assent to the Presbyterian establishment 
 that had been set up in England, and the perfection of the 
 same by the suppression of the Sects. This Treaty is famous 
 in Scottish History by the name of The Engagement. 
 
 The results were not apparent till May, 1648. In that 
 month, and the next, England found herself wrapped again in 
 one vast armed commotion from end to end, all in consequence 
 of the Scottish Engagement. That secret Treaty had been 
 communicated to Queen Henrietta Maria in her exile in France, 
 and to all the heads of Royalism in England and abroad ; and 
 there had been a great organization of means to turn it to 
 account. There were Royalist risings in Wales, in Cornwall, 
 in the Northern Counties, in the Midlands, and in the South- 
 Eastern Counties, close to London. The Fleet of the Parlia- 
 ment revolted, and sailed away to Holland, to be at the disposal 
 of the Prince of Wales; the Prince was expected, either in 
 Scotland, or on the English coasts, with that fleet; Royalist 
 refugees had returned to England in considerable numbers, and 
 more were coming. No one could have thought until now that 
 Royalism was so rife in England, or could array itself so formid- 
 ably for a Second Civil War. 
 
 The English Presbyterians were panic-smitten, many of them 
 inclining to make common cause with the Royalist insurgents ; 
 London, pre-eminently the Presbyterian city, exhibited visible 
 signs in that direction; Parliament itself was in trepidation, 
 and ready to abandon the helm. Only the Independents and 
 the Army stood firm. They, and their principles, were to be 
 the first victims, if this attempt at counter-revolution should 
 succeed ; and so, for the moment, they felt themselves to be 
 all England, and behaved accordingly, steadying the Parliament 
 so far that it did pass all the necessary orders. They under-
 
 jEtat. 62-64. THE SCOTTISH " ENGAGEMENT." 423 
 
 took at once the necessary work of fighting, here, there, and 
 everywhere, with these orders for their warrants. Cromwell 
 was away in Wales, wrestling with the Royalists there ; Fairfax 
 had already struck heavy blows at the Royalist uprising in the 
 South-Eastern Counties, had driven the strength of it into 
 Colchester, and was besieging that town; and Lambert was 
 warily on the watch in the Northern Counties. What men 
 could do these men and their soldiers would ; and, if the 
 Parliament did not actually collapse with cowardice, and the 
 Londoners did not rise for the King, and so give the signal for 
 a universal junction of the English Presbyterians with the 
 Royalists, there was a good probability of their success, so far 
 as England alone was concerned. 
 
 Here, however, was the great cause for alarm. The struggle 
 was not one in which England was to be left wholly to herself. 
 All these risings of the English Royalists, all these stirrings 
 among the Royalist refugees abroad, had been on the faith of 
 the Scottish Engagement with the King, and in the expectation 
 of the invasion of England by a Scottish Army, as promised in 
 that Engagement. This expected Scottish invasion was to be 
 the consummation of the business. Only let 30,000 or 40,000 
 Scots come into England, to turn to account the risings already 
 made there, and to swell the native insurrection to its full 
 dimensions, and would not Fairfax, Cromwell, the Independents, 
 and their little Army, be swallowed up in the vastness of the 
 tumult ? 
 
 The Hamiltons and their party had far more difficulty than 
 they had expected in bringing the Scottish Invasion to bear. 
 No sooner had the fact of the Engagement become public, and 
 the terms of it sufficiently understood, than it had encountered 
 criticism and opposition from that class of the Scottish com- 
 munity whose approbation had been thought most certain. 
 Here again the Scottish Presbyterian Clergy proved themselves 
 the shrewdest, simply because they were the most honest, 
 " advisers of their countrymen. Most anxious they were, as all
 
 424 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 the world knew, that Presbytery in its strictest perfection 
 should be established in England, and the Independents and 
 the Sects put down ; and, if an armed intervention of the Scots 
 could secure these objects, and set up Charles as a repentant 
 and covenanted King in just kingly power among the English, 
 they would be the last to object. But this Engagement was a 
 delusion, a snare, a mere lying device of worldly state-craft. 
 Charles had not taken the Covenant ; there was no proof of 
 any sincerity on his part in his modified promises not to disturb 
 Presbytery in England ; to trust to him would be to lean on a 
 broken reed. Besides, bad as Sectarianism was, why construe 
 the Covenant as if it involved no other duty than confederation 
 against the English Sectaries ? It had been originally framed 
 more against Prelacy, Malignancy, and overt or disguised 
 Popery; and, if the state of England were well considered, 
 might it not appear that the novel plague of the Sects was 
 essentially a less evil than the plague of yet unextirpated 
 Malignancy, Popish and Prelatic? And yet with whom, by 
 this Engagement, were the Scots to be in partnership ? Actually 
 with Prelatists, Papists, Incendiaries, Malignants of every 
 shade, the very men who had been the original causes of all 
 the mischiefs in both nations, and who, if they had the power, 
 would slaughter Presbytery to-morrow, and dance and drink 
 toasts over her buried corpse ! What could come of such a 
 partnership but ruin ? Man's reason revolted from it, and God 
 would curse it ! 
 
 So the Presbyterian Clergy had argued and expounded in 
 public documents through March and April, 1 648, on their first 
 scrutiny of the Engagement, and before those Royalist risings in 
 England which came as practical illustrations of its real meaning. 
 After these, or through May and June, their denunciations 
 were more vehement ; and, the popular common sense agreeing 
 with them, the agitation throughout Scotland, and especially in 
 the southern and western shires, became fearful. There might 
 be discerned even the curious phenomenon of a relenting of the
 
 JEtat. 62-64. THE SCOTTISH " ENGAGEMENT." 425 
 
 ultra-Presbyterian mind in favour of the English Independents 
 and Sectaries, or at least a softening of the previous antipathy 
 to them ; for good ultra-Presbyterians had been heard to say 
 that after all they should not wonder if the .security of Britain 
 in the crisis depended on the much-abused English Army. In 
 short, as opposed to the Engagers or Hamiltonians, there was a 
 vast ultra-Presbyterian combination of Anti-Engagers or Pro- 
 testers, including the mass of the Scottish commonalty and the 
 clergy unanimously or nearly so, and represented in the Govern- 
 ment by such statesmen as Argyle, the Earls of Cassilis, 
 Eglinton, and Lothian, and Johnstone of Warriston. To 
 these even Loudoun, one of the framers of the Engagement, had 
 at length joined himself, recanting and lamenting his error. 
 
 For the first time, however, the Presbyterian Clergy found 
 themselves unable to sway the policy of the Central Govern- 
 ment. Llamilton and his associates were bound in honour to 
 persist ; both in the Committee of Estates and in the General 
 Convention of Estates, or Parliament, they commanded a 
 majority of more than two-thirds ; and so, despite riots and 
 resistance in many neighbourhoods, the levies for the Army of 
 Invasion went on. About the middle of June, as neither old 
 Leven nor David Leslie would have anything to do with the 
 business, the Duke of Hamilton himself was appointed com- 
 mander-in-chief of this Army, with the Earl of Callander for his 
 second. Then ensued the final efforts of the Anti-Engagers to 
 prevent the Army from marching. O what prophesyings of woe 
 from all the pulpits, what clamours of the women in the 
 country-parishes of the south and west, as they saw their sons 
 and brothers all but dragged away for the iniquitous service ! 
 In the Duke's own parish-church of Hamilton, the minister, Mr. 
 James Naismith, gave out this text (Jeremiah xxii. 10), in the 
 Duke's presence, with most unsparing application in the sermon : 
 " Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him ; but weep sore 
 for him that goeth away : for he shall return no more, nor see 
 his native country ;" and the next day, as the Duke was taking
 
 426 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 his leave, there was a crowd about him, with Mr. Naismith in 
 the midst, crying " Hold him, hold him ; or you will never see 
 
 his face again." Off went the Duke, more or less disturbed ; 
 
 and, in the end of the same week (Saturday July 8, 1648) he 
 led his Army across the border. It was not so large as had 
 been expected, falling short of 20,000 ; and even the two Eng- 
 lish armies which Charles had levied for the Bishops' Wars 
 against Scotland cannot have had less heart for that service 
 than this Scottish Army had for the service into which Hamilton 
 was leading them. Nevertheless, as it was joined immediately 
 by the English Royalist forces of the northern counties, as 
 there were fresh Royalist risings in the English Midlands on the 
 news of its approach, and as the Prince of Wales arrived soon 
 afterwards with his fleet, blockading the mouth of the Thames and 
 stopping the London trade, the chances at the end of July were 
 enormously in favour of the King. The Parliament, under re- 
 newed Presbyterian management, was on the point of hauling 
 down its colours, and the Londoners were vociferous that it 
 should. 
 
 That Drummond was one of the Scottish Engagers or 
 Hamiltonians, and that, caring more for the essence of the 
 Engagement than for its Presbyterian pretences, he looked for- 
 ward more fervently than most of his fellow-Engagers to all the 
 eventual consequences of the new Scottish enterprise, are 
 matters of course. His appearance in the character of an 
 Engager, in fact, was less in defence of the enterprise generally, 
 sanctioned as it was beyond question by the public authorities 
 of the nation, than in defence of that particular incident in it 
 which consisted in the appointment of the Duke of Hamilton 
 to the command-in-chief. Some of the more crafty ultra-Pres- 
 byterians, or Anti-Engagers, it seems, failing in their opposition 
 to the enterprise on its own merits, and eager for any argument 
 that would cause doubt or delay, had made it part of their tactics 
 at last to object to the Duke's leadership. A Pamphlet had
 
 Miat. 62-64. DRUMMOND AS AN " ENGAGER." 427 
 
 consequently appeared, purporting to be a Letter from a Royalist 
 in London to his friends in Scotland, and pointing out how unfit 
 the Duke was, in the eyes of all genuine Royalists, to command 
 the Scottish forces at such a crisis, both by reason of his own 
 antecedents, and in recollection of the peculiar part played by the 
 Hamilton family in Scottish History for more than a hundred 
 years. Had not the Hamiltons always been ambitious of the 
 Scottish sovereignty : had not this Duke, eighteen years before, 
 been publicly accused of a design to upset Charles and become 
 King of Scotland himself; had not his whole course of con- 
 duct in the troubles of the two kingdoms been so suspicious that 
 the King, in the beginning of 1644, had discarded him, dis- 
 graced him, and sent him into imprisonment, to be tried when 
 there should be time ? Was it likely that the Duke and his 
 brother Lanark, owing the King this grudge, had been sincere in 
 their professed labours for him since 1 646, or that the Duke, 
 who had been indebted for his release, and perhaps his life, 
 to the success of the Parliamentarians in the first Civil War, 
 would conduct the Second Civil War as a straightforward 
 Royalist ? On the contrary, with the forces of Scotland at his 
 back, might he not act for himself in the confusion, and attain 
 that sovereignty which had so long been the dream of his 
 family ? 
 
 To this pamphlet Drummond wrote a reply, or notes for a 
 reply, entitled, A Vindication of the Hamiltons, and particularly 
 of James, Duke of Hamilton, General of the Scots Army, from 
 those aspersions cast Upon them in a Scandalous Libel or Letter 
 from a Malignant in London to his Friends in Scotland. The 
 main portion of the notes consists of a retrospect of the family- 
 history of the Hamiltons at points where treachery had been 
 imputed to them, Avith especial comments on the utter absurdity 
 of that charge against the Duke in 1630 (originally trumped up, 
 he asserts, by two or three idiots or scoundrels) of which so 
 much had been made. Wholly, however, what Drummond 
 aims at is a strengthening of the Duke's hands in the interests
 
 ;8 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 of the Engagement. One paragraph is all that need be 
 quoted : — 
 
 " There are men of such froward, mischievous, and perverse 
 dispositions, that others' misery is their happiness, and wrongs 
 their delight, and who care not to set their own houses on fire 
 so they may burn up their neighbours'. This may be easily de- 
 monstrated in these late troubles of this Isle, where a number 
 are found to wrong their native country for no other end but 
 that they may, as Nero did in the burning of Rome, sing their 
 tragical verses, and rejoice on the ruins of it. Of this sort of 
 men are they [the anti-Engagers or ultra-Presbyterians of the 
 Argyle clique] who, — when they could not by their laborious 
 pains hinder the States of the Kingdom from the honourable 
 and noble undertaking to relieve their imprisoned King, and 
 vindicate the loyalty of their nation from many aspersions and 
 calumnies cast upon it, and seek reparation of the breach of 
 the Solemn League drawn up between the two nations, and 
 articles condescended first unto and scornfully now broken, — 
 have gone about, after a malicious though silly way, to blame, 
 find fault with, and accuse the judgment of the Lords of Par- 
 liament and Gentlemen for having made choice of such a 
 General to their army. And this, forsooth, they have attempted 
 by way of a letter written from a Malignant ! That it is written 
 from a " Malignant " no honest man can deny, if " Malignancy " 
 be assumption, envy, malice, and lying ; but what Malignant ? 
 ■ None needeth to call in question but that it is come from those 
 same superlative men who have defiled so much paper with 
 declarations, instructions, informations, &c, to pervert the 
 hearts of the people by falsehoods, to estrange them from all 
 truths and honesty, to alienate them from the love of their dis- 
 tressed sovereign, and continue their miseries." 
 
 Before this Vindication of t/ie Hamiltons can well have left 
 Drummond's study, the necessity for distributing it was over. 
 For what was the news that came into Scotland, paling the 
 cheeks of all the Engagers, all the Drummondists, and levelling 
 to the ground their high-built hopes ? Hamilton's Army of 
 conjoined Scots and English met at Preston by Cromwell, and 
 there, in a three days' battle (Aug. 17-19), first shivered, and 
 then whirled into a mere dust-cloud of fugitives in ten direc-
 
 MM. 62-64. C 7? OMll 'ELL IN EDINBURGH. 429 
 
 tions at once over English roads and fields, and all by an army 
 not half its size ! Woe upon woe ! News of tlfe poor fugitive 
 Scots, chased through the English counties, begging and starving 
 in bands, or even in twos and threes, till their very enemies 
 took pity on them; news of the capture of Hamilton himself 
 far to the south ; news of the departure of the Prince of Wales, 
 with his fleet, back to the Continent, giving up the game ; news 
 of the unconditional surrender of Colchester, with all its included 
 Royalists, to Fairfax (Aug. 31); news, in short, of the total 
 collapse of the King's cause in the Second Civil War, as in the 
 first, but with the prospect of a more tremendous consequence 
 now for the King personally ! 
 
 After such news Scotland presented the spectacle of a popula- 
 tion returning slowly to its senses after a fit of delirium. 
 Relics of Hamilton's Army having found their way back, still in 
 arms, there was some attempt on the part of the Hamiltonians 
 to rally ; but the popular demonstrations against them were too 
 strong. The Argyle politicians, therefore, resumed the direc- 
 tion of affairs, and all who had been concerned in the En- 
 gagement found themselves disgraced, shunned, and execrated. 
 Order was not completely restored till the beginning of October, 
 when Cromwell, who had been busy in the north of England 
 since the Battle of Preston, came into Scotland with some 
 troops, to receive explanations of the causes of the recent 
 misbehaviour, and impose such conditions in the name of the 
 
 English Parliament as the circumstances required. "Who 
 
 would have imagined a twelvemonth since that Noll Cromwell's 
 nose could ever have entered Edinburgh without putting it into 
 a combustion?" is the comment on the fact which I find in one 
 of the weekly Royalist news-sheets then vended about in 
 London. Cromwell and his movements were, indeed, now the 
 chief theme of these news-sheets ; and, as Nature had given 
 to the grand face of this most heroic of Englishmen one 
 flagrant feature on which caricaturists could fasten, it had 
 become the habit in these news-sheets never to mention him
 
 43 o DRUM MO ND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 without some laboured variation of scurrility on that endless 
 jest. " The Almighty Nose," or "Nose Almighty," is perhaps 
 the best of some thousands of forms of the one incessant 
 physiognomic nick-name for Cromwell in the Royalist pamphlets 
 of those years. Who could have imagined, the London 
 journalist now asked, that the Almighty Nose, the very king 
 of English Independency, and the champion-in-chief of that 
 Toleration in Religion which the Scots and Presbyterians 
 abhorred, could ever have entered Edinburgh, the head- 
 quarters of Presbyterianism, to be met, not with hissing and 
 stone-throwing, but actually with obeisance and welcome ? Yet 
 it had so happened ; and the event is one of the most memorable 
 
 in the history of Edinburgh. Cromwell, it is known, spent 
 
 four days in Edinburgh (Oct, 4-7), quartered with much state 
 in Moray House in the Canongate, and waited on there most 
 deferentially by the Marquis of Argyle and the other Anti- 
 Engaging Lords. All he required from them was that the late 
 Engagers and Malignants of every kind should be excluded 
 from the Government and from all places of public trust ; and, 
 having received satisfaction in this particular, and signified his 
 good understanding with the chiefs of the new Government by 
 accepting a banquet from them, at which the Earl of Leven 
 presided, he took his departure. Confirmed in office by the 
 visit of the great English chief, and hailed with a general 
 popular welcome, Argyle and his colleagues then set themselves 
 to the business of clearing away all vestiges of the recent 
 backsliding, and restoring the right Presbyterian supremacy 
 throughout Scotland. In this work they were vigorously 
 assisted by the Presbyterian Clergy, now freshly alert in their 
 church-courts, and plying among the late Engagers their whips 
 of ecclesiastical discipline. Whigs or Whigamores was a name 
 then first introduced into the vocabulary of British politics. 
 Originally a nickname for the zealous Covenanting peasantry 
 of Ayrshire and other western Scottish counties, it had been 
 extended, precisely at the time of the collapse of the En-
 
 ALtat. 62-64. EXECUTION OF THE KING. 431 
 
 gagement, to the Scottish ultra-Presbyterians or anti-Engagers 
 generally, with their representative politicians of the Argyle 
 and Warriston school. The most significant fact about Crom- 
 well's visit, therefore, was that it established friendly relations 
 for a time between these Whigs of Scotland and the Indepen- 
 dents of England, as if on an arrangement that Scotland 
 was to persist in unalloyed Presbytery, while England might 
 temper Presbytery with Liberty of Conscience and see what 
 would come of that experiment. Better for Scotland had 
 Cromwell in his visit been able to inoculate the Scottish Whig- 
 gism of 1648 with something more of his peculiar English spirit ! 
 
 Drummond, who had entertained Ben Jonson thirty years 
 before, and who may have seen Hampden and Vane on their 
 visits to Edinburgh in 1641 and 1643, had had the opportunity, 
 had he chosen, of seeing Cromwell also. He had but to go to 
 Moray House in the Canongate on any of the four days of 
 Cromwell's stay in town, and, if he wanted no closer acquain- 
 tanceship, watch in the street, with others, for the great man's 
 coming out. One may be pretty sure he did nothing of the 
 kind. " You, who are a historian, Mr. Drummond, should you 
 not like at least to see the famous physiognomy of this 
 most remarkable of Englishmen ?" one may imagine some 
 one saying to Drummond. "Yes, if I could see a pistol- 
 bullet go through it," would have been the answer. "But, 
 Mr. Drummond, you are a philosopher, and have yourself 
 advocated very much that Liberty of Conscience of which 
 Cromwell is the English representative." " Liberty of Con- 
 science be " ! one hears Drummond replying. 
 
 If Drummond foresaw what was coming, if he divined the 
 full consequence of the understanding that had been come to 
 between Cromwell and the Scottish Whigs of the Argyle con- 
 nexion, his testiness, his carelessness of all mere doctrinaire 
 consistency with his former self, might easily be pardoned. 
 While Cromwell was in the North, the English Parliament were
 
 43 2 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 busy with a last Treaty with the King in the Isle of Wight. In 
 the utterly shattered state of his fortunes it was taken for 
 granted that he would now yield whatever was required of him ; 
 and the one hope of the English Presbyterians on his behalf 
 was that he would see fit to do so. The hope was vain. 
 Charles, in the depths of his adversity, was as inflexible, as full 
 of wiles and reservations, as punctiliously dilatory, as ever. It 
 mattered the less because it was no longer the English Parlia- 
 ment that had the power to decide whether a treaty with him 
 should now be ratified on any terms whatsoever. That power 
 belonged to the victorious English Army, which had made up 
 its mind for some time to a very different mode of dealing with 
 Charles. Accordingly, while Cromwell, on his return from 
 Scotland, remained in Yorkshire, to beat down the last appear- 
 ances of insurgent Royalism there, Fairfax and the other Army 
 Chiefs nearer London had taken the preliminary steps which he 
 approved, and about which he had been duly consulted. They 
 had fetched the King by force out of the Isle of Wight ; they 
 had taken military possession of London ; and they had over- 
 mastered the two Houses of Parliament, and shaped them to 
 their pleasure. When Cromwell arrived in London (Dec. 6, 
 1648), the rest devolved mainly on him; and, though Fairfax 
 and others quailed at the last, there was a phalanx round Crom- 
 well that persisted with him sternly to the conclusion. There 
 came the Ordinance for the King's trial ; there was then the 
 trial itself; and, on the 30th of January, 1649, King Charles, 
 the world half amazed and half frantic around him, was 
 brought to the scaffold in front of Whitehall. England then 
 passed into the condition of a Republic, governed by a 
 Council of State and the Rump of the Parliament. Scotland, 
 on the other hand, preferring monarchy still, proclaimed 
 Charles II. (Feb. 5), and despatched envoys to Holland 
 to persuade that young gentleman to take the Covenant 
 and otherwise conform to the necessary requirements.
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE LAST YEAR OF DRUMMOND'S LIFE. 
 1649. 
 
 A S Charles II. was in no hurry to comply with the invitations 
 sent to him from Edinburgh, the Scots had to get through 
 this whole year without him, governed substantially in the same 
 Republican fashion as their neighbours. The year 1649, in 
 fact, was the time of the most absolute domination in Scotland 
 of the Whig or Argyle-Loudoun-Warriston oligarchy in state- 
 affairs, in alliance with the ultra-Presbyterian Clergy in the 
 affairs of the Kirk ; and the peculiarity was that State-affairs and 
 Kirk-affairs were then more inextricably intermixed than ever 
 before in Scotland within memory. The governing Statesmen 
 were all busy Kirkmen themselves, associated with the 
 Presbyterian Clergy in their purely ecclesiastical courts and 
 conclaves, and there so instructed, lectured, and kept under 
 whip by the clergy, that they could hardly, in their separate 
 committees and councils for state-business, do anything else 
 than translate the sentences and desires of the Kirk into corres- 
 ponding civil enactments. 
 
 The national Presbyterianism, returned to by one vast general 
 vote in 1638, had by this time, it is to be remembered, been 
 systematized, and made duly rigid in details, by law and docu- 
 ment. The Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, invented for 
 the binding of England and Scotland together, but of late in 
 
 rather cold credit in England, had been renewed again and 
 
 2 E
 
 434 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 again in Scotland, and was still (with the prior Scottish National 
 Covenant oi 1638) the grand rule by the text of which all public 
 and private actions were approved or condemned— the inter- 
 preters of the text being, of course, the Clergy in their Church- 
 Courts. It was because the late Engagement for Charles I. 
 was declared by these interpreters to be a violation of the 
 Solemn League and Covenant that all who had been concerned 
 in that Engagement, or had not testified sufficiently against it, 
 now found themselves under ban. But, in addition to the 
 Solemn League and Covenant, Scottish Presbyterianism was 
 now regulated by other formal documents, the application and 
 interpretation of which likewise belonged to the Clergy. The 
 Westminster Assembly's Directory for Public Worship, approved 
 by the General Assembly of the Scottish Kirk in February 1645, 
 had been established in Scotland in the same month by positive 
 enactment of the Estates of Parliament ; and the Confession of 
 Faith, the Larger Catechism, and the Shorter Catechism, so 
 laboriously prepared by the same Westminster Assembly, and 
 already approved and adopted by the Scottish Clergy, received 
 the same final sanction by the Scottish Legislature in February 
 1649. As these three last-named documents had not yet been 
 the subjects of any such complete legislative enactment in 
 England, but only hung there in the air of theory, with a kind 
 of general and modified recommendation attached to them by 
 the Long Parliament, the curious historical fact is that the 
 famous Westminster Assembly, though originally a convention 
 of English Divines, called by the English Long Parliament for 
 English purposes, had existed and laboured, to all practical 
 intents, mainly for Scotland. The signal for the return of 
 Scotland to Presbytery had been given by Jenny Geddes's stool 
 in 1637 ; the traditions then remaining in Scotland of the old 
 native Presbytery of Knox had determined the mode of the 
 re-foundation of the Kirk in 1638; the farther rebuilding from 
 that date to 1643 had been the work of successive Scottish 
 General Assemblies and Parliaments, with the wise and good
 
 Mtat. 64. SCOTLAND IN 1649. 
 
 435 
 
 Henderson as their chief adviser ; but the final fabrication, in 
 the important matters of Directory, Confession, and Catechisms, 
 had been planned by a deliberative body on the banks of the 
 Thames, consisting of about eighty English Puritan Divines in 
 regular attendance, with Henderson and three or four other 
 Scots admitted among them as assessors, and acting as leaders. 
 The fabric so raised was complete in 1649, three years after 
 Henderson's death. It was not, be it remembered, the only 
 fabric of a Presbyterian Church possible or conceivable in the 
 world ; it was merely that fabric of such a Church which 
 embodied the tempers and determinations of men who held 
 fast to an inherited Calvinistic Theology, supposed to be 
 binding and final. Presbyterianism, considered per se, is a 
 system of government only, and does not necessarily imply any 
 one, or any permanent, system of theological tenets, or of 
 moral behaviour, or of ritual, in a Church organized on its 
 principles. It might even be a fair argument for somebody in 
 the present day that, if there is to be an organized national 
 Church at all in a community, the Presbyterian mechanism for 
 such a Church has the merit of combining popular or demo- 
 cratic consent with graduated deliberation and central authority, 
 and so of being the most exact ecclesiastical analogue of that 
 system of Representative or Parliamentary Government which 
 has long been accepted in Britain and elsewhere as the best in 
 civil affairs. In fact, however, Presbyterianism is known in 
 Britain less according to its intrinsic or ideal capabilities than 
 through that one actual example of it which is afforded by the 
 history of the Reformed Scottish Kirk. Now, the year 1640, 
 I repeat, is the year to which the student must even now go 
 back, if he would observe that actual old Scottish Presbyterian- 
 ism in the utmost rigidity of its mechanical perfection. How 
 did it work ? 
 
 The Duke of Hamilton, the political chief of the Engagement, 
 and the main author of the disaster it had wrought, had been
 
 436 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 tried and beheaded by the English in his independent capacity 
 as the delinquent Earl of Cambridge of the English Peerage 
 (March 9). The Scottish Government, who would certainly 
 have been more lenient with that nobleman, were thus relieved 
 from the trouble of considering his case. They found a 
 principal victim more to their mind in the Marquis of Huntley, 
 long the greatest Anti-Covenanting potentate in the north of 
 Scotland, and of late years kept as a prisoner in Edinburgh 
 Castle to answer for his crimes. Him, in spite of all the en- 
 treaties in his behalf made to his brother-in-law, the Marquis 
 of Argyle, by other members of the family, they publicly beheaded 
 (March 22); after which they were content with the infliction 
 of minor penalties on other delinquents. In accordance with their 
 pledge to Cromwell, and indeed with the necessities of the case, 
 all nobles, judges, and other persons of importance, conspicuous 
 among the Engagers, had been removed from their trusts and 
 politically incapacitated ; and there was, of course, amore vigorous 
 use than ever, against older Malignants, of that terrorism by fines 
 and imprisonment which had been practised since the beginning 
 of the rule of the Covenant, and especially since Montrose's 
 rebellion. Till the nth of August, 1649, these and other 
 matters of State business, including the negotiations with 
 Charles II. in his exile, were in the hands of the regular Parlia- 
 ment, which had met at Edinburgh on the 4th of January, and 
 had begun its proceedings by sending Commissioners to the 
 English Parliament to plead for the late King's life, but had 
 since then sat on perseveringly in the assumed name of his 
 successor. It was far from numerously attended ; Argyle, 
 Loudoun, and Warriston, with one or two others, were supreme 
 in it ; and in all their measures they consulted or studied the 
 Clergy. They even succeeded in carrying, in this interest, the 
 abolition of that system of lay-patronage in the Kirk, or the 
 rights of nobles, lairds, and corporations, to appoint ministers 
 to vacant livings, which had long been a grievance to strict 
 Presbyterians, but which the nobles, lairds, and corporations
 
 sEtat. 64. SCOTLAND IN 1649. 437 
 
 had hitherto clung to as hereditary property. Only on the 
 question of Teinds, or the expediency of restoring to the 
 Presbyterian Kirk more of those revenues of the old Popish 
 Church which had been seized by the nobility and lairds at the 
 Reformation, was there a decided flash of fierceness in opposi- 
 tion to the demands of the Kirkmen. " The more ye get the 
 less contented ye are," the Earl of Cassilis had said when that 
 question was mooted ; and Argyle had added significantly, " It 
 is not good to awaken sleeping dogs." The question, however, 
 had been only just hinted at in private, and not publicly 
 pressed. Consequently, when the Parliament rose on the nth 
 of August, it had fully satisfied the Kirk. The so-called Committee 
 of Estates, or acting Central Government, to which it deputed 
 all power till it should re-assemble, was of corresponding 
 composition ; the subordinate Committees of Shires were to 
 match ; even the Militia kept up in Scotland, under the 
 command of the Earl of Leven, and Lieutenant-General David 
 Leslie, to prevent or put down Highland outbreaks, and be a 
 guard against aggression by the dreaded Sectaries of the 
 English Republic, served mainly as a Police for the Kirk, 
 steadying and coercing the population for her doctrine and 
 discipline. 
 
 Her doctrine and discipline ! Can any mortal out of Scot- 
 land, or even in Scotland itself now-a-days, conceive the 
 amazing Scottish reality of 1649, half horrible, half noble, 
 which these words imply ? Whoever is at a loss must construct 
 the imagination bit by bit. Let him imagine first, in every 
 parish, that singular entity called the Kirk-session, consisting of 
 the parish-minister and his group of lay-elders, who knew, or 
 were supposed to know, every man, woman, and child in the 
 parish by head-mark, and had a spiritual and moral charge of 
 them all, in which the functions of teacher, friend, adviser, 
 guide and consoler, were combined with those of day-patrol, 
 night-watchman, official inquisitor, and divorce-court detective. 
 If any family in a parish had neglected church-going or family-
 
 438 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 worship, if there was brawling in any family, if there was 
 Sabbath-breaking in the parish, or promiscuous dancing, or 
 card-playing, or drunkenness, or the singing of profane songs, 
 or if any sallow-faced young man was suspected of reading 
 unorthodox books, — above all, if Venus anywhere in the parish 
 had waved her white hand too wildly, and left shame among 
 the hinds, or in some higher household, — the Kirk-session was 
 bound to be cognisant of it, to interfere in it, to track it out 
 unsparingly, and either to rebuke it in private, if that would 
 suffice, or else to divulge it in public, naming the offence before 
 the full congregation, the culprit or culprits perched in church 
 opposite the minister's finger for a succession of Sundays, and 
 pointed at most miserably. Next in gradation of power after 
 the Kirk-session was the Presbytery, or Court of the conjoined 
 parish-ministers of a district, with representative lay-elders, 
 meeting once a month, or at similar intervals. It was for this 
 body to stimulate the Kirk-sessions, call them to account if 
 they are lax, review their sentences, investigate cases of sus- 
 pected Popery, and take note more especially of any offences, 
 moral or ecclesiastical, among the parish ministers themselves. 
 Then there were the Provincial Synods, or twice-a-year meet- 
 ings of the clergy and lay-elders of whole shires, or groups of 
 shires, supervising the Presbyteries, and hearing appeals from 
 them. All the while, however, there was the central or supreme 
 authority of the whole Kirk, with all the Provincial Synods, 
 and consequently all the Presbyteries and all the Kirk-sessions 
 and parishes of the land, under its inspection, and subject to 
 its criticisms and orders. This central authority had taken two 
 forms, one periodical and the other permanent. In its periodical 
 form, it was the General Assembly, or convention of representa- 
 tive ministers and lay-elders from all the Presbyteries in Scot- 
 land, meeting once a year, for a fortnight or more, in some 
 appointed city (Edinburgh generally preferred), to revise all 
 that was dubious in the proceedings of the inferior Courts dur- 
 ing the past year, decide suits finally, consider new emergencies,
 
 Mtat 64. SCOTLAND IN 1649. 439 
 
 and enact new ecclesiastical laws. In its permanent form, it 
 was the Commission of t/ie Kirk, or that large metropolitan 
 Committee of ministers and elders, members of the last 
 General Assembly, which had been formally empowered by 
 that Assembly to meet when it liked and act for the entire 
 Kirk till the next General Assembly should relieve it, just as 
 the Committee of Estates governed the nation in secular 
 matters between Parliament and Parliament. 
 
 The Commission of the Kirk left in possession by the 
 General Assembly of 1648 was most active in bringing all 
 Engagers and other delinquents under the lash of ecclesiastical 
 discipline, and otherwise asserting for die Kirk that right of 
 universal control, even in civil and political matters, which she 
 had won by the downfall of the Hamilton or Engaging Govern- 
 ment and the re-accession of Aigyle and his Whigs. To 
 give a list of its prosecutions, reprimands, and excommunica- 
 tions, of individuals all over Scotland, either directly or by 
 instructions to Synods and Presbyteries, would be impossible. 
 An instance or two may suggest the rest. Poor Mr. Leighton 
 of Newbattle, who had been getting more and more provokingly 
 quiet and contemplative in his parish, while his brethren round 
 him were waxing fiercer and fiercer in their Presbyterian zeal, 
 had behaved in a very unsatisfactory manner in the crisis of the 
 Engagement. Twice, accordingly, we find him brought under 
 ecclesiastical censure for neglect of duty. On both occasions, 
 in consideration of his eminently saintly character and other 
 merits, he was let off with a "grave admonition" only ; which 
 was on both occasions " modestly taken " by him, with 
 promises " by the grace of God to amend." It is believed 
 that Leighton's patron, the Earl of Lothian, had used his 
 influence to obtain this lenient treatment. But, in fact, 
 the chiefs of the Government could not always obtain 
 lenient treatment for themselves. The Lord Chancellor 
 Loudoun, though he had righted himself at last in the matter of 
 the Engagement, had been one of its original authors and
 
 44 o DRUMMOND OF HA WTHOKNDEN. 
 
 promoters; and for this temporary lapse from the Covenant and 
 Christian duty he had been required, all the more stringently 
 because of his high position, to give satisfaction to the 
 Kirk by a public appearance of humiliation and expression of 
 his repentance. The great Argyle himself, for a different fault, 
 had had, in the previous year, to submit to the same discipline. 
 Having so far forgotten his Christian principles as to have 
 accepted a challenge from the Earl of Crawford, and actually 
 gone out to Musselburgh Links, on a cold winter day, to 
 fight that Malignant nobleman, the Marquis (though the fight 
 had been stopped at the last moment — much to his relief, as 
 people said) was not reinstated in the Kirk's good opinion until 
 he had acknowledged to the Commission the sin and folly of 
 his act. The Assembly of 1648 had, in consequence, passed a 
 strict Kirk law against duelling. 
 
 In hundreds of such ways had the Commission of 1648 
 vindicated the authority of the Kirk before it had to cede its 
 interim powers to the General Assembly of 1649. That vener- 
 able body, meeting at Edinburgh on the 7th of July and sitting 
 till the 6th of August, found plenty to do during that whole 
 month, in addition to what had been already done, in the 
 eight preceding months, by the Commission and by Synods 
 and Presbyteries. Mr. Andrew Ramsay and Mr. William 
 Colvin, two of the ministers of Edinburgh, with a good 
 many other ministers in various parts of the country, were 
 deposed for having approved of the Engagement ; and 
 regulations were made for the professions of contrition to 
 be required from those of the laity whom the Commission had 
 suspended or excommunicated on the same account. Among the 
 acts passed was one against promiscuous dancing. Another was 
 for the appointment of a " Conference of Ministers, Lawyers, and 
 Physicians, concerning the trial and punishment of Witchcraft, 
 Charming, and Consulting." Always in Scotland, more than 
 in England, there had been witch-trials and witch-burnings ; but 
 the eoidemic of witchcraft and other forms of diabolism in 1649
 
 A'.tat. 64. SCOTLAND IN 1649. 441 
 
 seems to have been of unprecedented extent and violence. It 
 occupied the Law Courts ; it occupied the Government ; it 
 occupied Kirk-sessions and Presbyteries ; and the attention 
 to the subject now given by the General Assembly seems to 
 have led to such increased vigilance and severity by the civil 
 authorities as to make the total year the most notorious in 
 Scottish records for the number of its witch-burnings. A less 
 ghastly subject, which occupied the Assembly, was that of the 
 mode to be adopted in the election of ministers to vacant 
 parishes, now that the system of lay-patronage had been volun- 
 tarily abolished by the Legislature. On this subject there was 
 formed and passed a definite Kirk Act, of which it was observed 
 that, though it allowed the people some voice in the election 
 of their pastors, it did not go so far in this direction as had 
 been expected, but reserved a great deal of the real power for 
 the Presbyteries. Indeed, it was provided that, wherever a 
 congregation was " disaffected or malignant," it should have no 
 voice at all in the election of its minister, but should accept 
 the minister that the Presbytery chose. More significant even 
 than such acts of the Assembly were certain general papers or 
 declarations which it sent forth. " The prevailing party of 
 " Sectaries in England," they say in one such paper, " who have 
 " broken the Covenant and despised the oath of God, corrupted 
 "the truth, subverted the fundamental government by King 
 " and Parliament, and taken away the King's life, look upon 
 " us with an evil eye, as upon those who stand in the way of 
 u their monstrous and new-fangled devices in religion and gov- 
 " ernment. . . . Neither is the Malignant Party so far broken 
 " and brought low as that they have abandoned all hopes of 
 " carrying on their former designs against the Covenant and 
 " work of Reformation. Besides many of them in this kingdom, 
 " who are as foxes tied in chains, keeping their evil nature, and 
 " waiting an opportunity to break their cords, and again to prey 
 " upon the Lord's people, there are standing armies in Ireland, 
 ■"under the command of the Marquis of Ormond [&c.]. . . .
 
 442 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " But, which is more grievous unto us than all these, our King, 
 " notwithstanding of the Lord's hand against his father's oppo- 
 " sition to the work of God, and of the many sad and doleful 
 "consequences that followed thereupon, in reference to re- 
 " ligion and his subjects, and to his person and government, 
 " doth hearken unto the counsels of those who were authors 
 " of those miseries to his royal father and his kingdoms ; by 
 "which it hath come to pass that his Majesty hath hitherto 
 " refused to grant the just and necessary desires of this Kirk 
 " and Kingdom. ... It concerns a nation thus sinful and 
 "loaden with iniquity, and involved in so many difficulties and 
 " dangers, by timeous repentance and unfeigned humiliation, to 
 " draw near to God, and to wrestle with Him in prayer and 
 " supplication, that our sin may be pardoned and our iniquity 
 " done away, and that He would establish the land in the love 
 " of truth, and enable every one in their station to do their 
 " duty boldly and without fear, in a humble dependence upon 
 " the Lord, in whom alone is the salvation of his people. . . . 
 " The spirit of error and delusion in our neighbour land, in the 
 " policy of Satan, hath veiled itself in many under the mask of 
 " holiness, and is, in the righteous and wise dispensation of 
 " God, armed with power, and attended with success. . . How 
 " far they may proceed in their resolutions and actings against 
 " this kingdom is in the hand of the Most High. If the Lord 
 " shall suffer that Party to invade this land, it may be the com- 
 " fort and encouragement of all the inhabitants thereof that not 
 " only hath that unlawful Engagement against the Kingdom of 
 " England been declared against and condemned both by Kirk 
 " and State, but also that these men can pretend no quarrel 
 " against us, unless it be that we have adhered unto the Solemn 
 " League and Covenant, from which they have so foully re- 
 " volted and backslidden, and that we have borne testimony 
 " against Tolejation, and their proceedings in reference to re- 
 " ligion and government, and the taking away of the King's 
 " life." After this and other manifestoes in the same strain,
 
 /Etat. 64. DRUMMOND'S GLOOM. 443 
 
 the General Assembly of 1649 broke up ; not, however, without 
 having appointed a Commission of the Kirk to manage affairs 
 till the next meeting of Assembly. It consisted of 96 ministers 
 and 66 ciders, of whom any nineteen (if thirteen of these were 
 ministers) were to be a quorum. Among the lay-elders of the 
 Commission were the Marquis of Argyle, the Earls of Suther- 
 land, Eglintoun, Cassilis, and Lothian, and Sir Archibald John- 
 stone of Warriston. 
 
 Such was the world round about Drummond in the last year 
 of his life. He had lived, as he must have thought, to see 
 Scotland, if not the British Islands generally, at the very worst. 
 For a long while one of the most customary phrases with him, 
 as with his countrymen of all parties, had been " These recent 
 Troubles," " These late Troubles ;" and one discerns a peculiar 
 personal melancholy in his use of the phrase, as if it had become 
 his habit, in the retrospect of his life, to distinguish, with bitterness 
 on his own account, between the good old time of King James, 
 when all went on peacefully, and the whole subsequent reign of 
 Charles, or at least the last twelve years of it, filled as they had 
 been with tumult and distraction. But even in this time of 
 tumult and distraction there had been a continuous progress 
 from the bad to the worse, till at last, in 1649, tne ver y climax 
 of disaster and horror seemed to have been reached. The 
 King of Great Britain, amid the outcries and protests of the 
 mass of his subjects, and with Europe looking on aghast, 
 brought to a public death ; an armed democracy in possession 
 of England ; the very form of rule that one had always detested 
 and dreaded most, a rule of a few nobles coerced by a thousand 
 priests, riveted upon Scotland ! It was as if one had lived all 
 this while only to see the elements confounded, the Earth's 
 basis loosened, the Heavens hung with black. 
 
 No one now can know, indeed, unless by wading through the 
 Royalist weekly news-sheets and other masses of Royalist liter- 
 ature of the year 1 649, what an agony of grief, rage, shame, hatred
 
 444 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 of the Regicides and their Commonwealth, and longing for a 
 desperate revenge, pervaded all ranks of the British Royalists, 
 whether at home or in exile, immediately after Charles's death. 
 He had not been dead a month when he had become that 
 beatified and glorified martyr he continued to be till recently 
 in Anglican tradition, and the object of an established and 
 most wonderful religious cultus. What epitaphs on him ; what 
 elaborate eulogiums on his piety and other matchless virtues ; 
 what woodcuts and engravings of him in his captive condition, 
 his figure in rapt attitudes of resignation, prayer, and forgive- 
 ness of his enemies, his crown lying on the ground by his 
 side with thorns wreathed in it, his Bible open before him, and 
 rays from heaven itself descending on his head ! Take, as an 
 example of this enthusiasm, the metrical vow addressed to 
 Charles's spirit by the exiled Montrose. It was at Brussels 
 that Montrose first received the astounding news of the execu- 
 tion at Whitehall ; and the effect on him was such that he fell 
 down in a fit, his limbs all rigid, so that he seemed to be dead. 
 For two days after his recovery he remained shut up in his 
 chamber ; and on the third his chaplain found a scrap of paper 
 there on which he had written these lines : — 
 
 " Great, Good, and Just, could I but rate 
 My grief with thy too rigid fate, 
 I'd weep the world in such a strain 
 As it should deluge once again ; 
 But, since thy loud-tongued blood demands supplies 
 More than Briareus' hands, than Argus' eyes, 
 I'll sing thine obsequies with trumpet-sounds, 
 And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds." 
 
 We have not from Drummond any such direct lamentation as 
 this over the death of Charles ; but we can see that the event 
 had sunk into his whole mood, causing throughout the year 1 649 
 a deep and settled despondency, which vented itself sometimes 
 in soliloquies like these : — 
 
 " All good hath left this age, all tracks of shame ; 
 Mercy is banished and Pity dead ;
 
 ALtal. 64. DRUMMOND'S GLOOM. 445 
 
 Justice, from whence it came, to Heaven is fled ; 
 
 Religion, maimed, is thought an idle name ; 
 
 Faith to Distrust and Malice hath given place ; 
 
 Envy with poisoned teeth hath Friendship torn ; 
 
 Renowned Knowledge is a despised scorn ; 
 
 Now Evil 'tis all Evil not to embrace. 
 
 There is no life save under servile bands ; 
 
 To make desert a vassal to their crimes 
 
 Ambition with Avarice join hands. 
 
 O ever-shameful, O most shameless, times ! 
 
 Save that Sun's light we see, of good hear telL 
 This Earth we court so much were very Hell. 
 
 Doth then the World go thus ? doth all thus move? 
 
 Is this the Justice which on Earth we find ? 
 
 Is this that firm decree which all doth bind ? 
 
 Are these your influences, Powers above ? 
 
 Those souls which Vice's moody mists most blind, 
 
 Blind Fortune blindly most their friend doth prove ; 
 
 And they who thee, poor idol, Virtue, love 
 
 Fly like a feather tossed by storm and wind. 
 
 Ah ! if a Providence doth sway this All, 
 
 Why should best minds groan under most distress, 
 
 Or why should Pride Humility make thrall, 
 
 And injuries the innocent oppress ? 
 
 Heavens, hinder, stop this fate ; or grant a time 
 When good may have, as well as bad, their prime !"* 
 
 The melancholy, one can perceive, was too deep and hopeless 
 to permit more of those direct political utterances, and com- 
 ments on passing particulars, for which, till now, Drummond's 
 pen had been so ready. Altogether, the mood was that of 
 King Richard in Shakespeare's Play : — ■ 
 
 "Of comfort no man speak ; 
 Let's talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs." 
 
 Graves and Epitaphs had always been familiar topics with 
 Drummond. Through much of his poetry, from the very first, 
 there had run that meditation of Death which is the single and 
 sustained characteristic of the finest of his prose-writings, the 
 
 * These two Sonnets, apparently to be read together, were first printed in 
 the Posthumous London Edition of Drummond's Poems in 1656.
 
 446 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 Cypress Grove. It deserves mention, however, that this brood- 
 ing familiarity of his mind with the thought of Death had shown 
 itself not only in the form of general musings, but also, more 
 largely than with most writers, in the form of express notices of 
 the particular deaths that occurred within the circle of his 
 observation. Some of these notices have already been regis- 
 tered in their proper places in our narrative : e.g., the series of 
 Sonnets and other Poems in which he commemorates the death 
 of his first love ; the Elegy on Prince Henry ; the obituary 
 Sonnet on James I.; the letter about Drayton's death; the 
 Elegy on Sir Anthony Alexander ; and the notes on other 
 deaths in the Alexander family, including that of his friend and 
 brother-poet, the Earl himself. But, besides these and more 
 miscellaneous obituary allusions in his letters, one finds among 
 his poems a considerable number of memorial verses on deceased 
 contemporaries. Some are left wholly anonymous ; but the 
 following refer to known persons : — 
 
 " To the Memory of the most excellent Lady, Jane, Conn less of 
 Perth : " A Sonnet with this title appeared in the first edition 
 of the Flowers of Sion, published in 1621 : therefore this lady, 
 the wife of Drummond's patron and clan-chief, John Drummond, 
 Earl of Perth, must have died before that date. 
 
 11 A Reply to Verses on the late William, Earl of Pembroke. - " 
 The verses themselves are four stanzas, signed " E. P.," on the 
 death, April 10, 1630, of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, 
 one of the most popular English noblemen of his time, and 
 celebrated in literary history as the patron of Shakespeare and 
 Ben Jonson. The Folio Shakespeare of 1623 was dedicated to 
 him and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery, who survived 
 him for many years as Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. 
 The verses of E. P. are in a moralizing strain ; and Drummond's 
 Reply is in three stanzas of the same measure, amending the 
 moral. 
 
 " On the Death of Lady Jane Maitland." This young lady, 
 daughter of John, Earl of Lauderdale, died, in the prime of her 
 youth, in December 1631, and was buried at Haddington. A 
 poem by Drummond, in five stanzas, celebrating her beauty and 
 virtues very affectionately, was subjoined, with about fifty other
 
 yEtat 64. OBITUARY NOTICES. 447 
 
 pieces of verse, in Latin and English, by different friends of the 
 Maitland family, to her funeral-sermon, published in 1633. He 
 wrote also a separate Sonnet to her memory. 
 
 " To the memory of his much-loving and beloved master, 
 Mr. John Ray." This is a Sonnet on the death (circa 1636) of 
 John Ray, who had been Humanity-Professor in Edinburgh 
 University when Drummond was a student there, and had 
 afterwards transferred himself to the head-mastership of the 
 High School. It expresses much respect and affection. 
 
 " To the memory of the Excellent Lady, Isabel, Countess of 
 Lauderdale." This lady, the mother of the Lady Jane Maitland 
 above-mentioned, died in Nov. 1638, seven years after her 
 daughter. Drummond's verses to her are full of praise. 
 
 " A Sepulchral Inscription, partly in prose and partly in verse, 
 for Thomas Dalzell, of L> inns." This gentleman, who was Sheriff 
 of Linlithgowshire, and of the family of the Dalzells, Lords 
 Dalzell and Earls of Carnwath, died Feb. 10, 1642, cetat. 69, 
 leaving, as " successors of his virtues and fortunes, a son 
 renowned by the wars, and a daughter married to William 
 Drummond of Riccarton." The son, so spoken of by Drum- 
 mond, and at whose request he seems to have furnished the 
 inscription, became afterwards Commander-in-Chief in Scotland 
 for Charles II., and famous, among other things, for his immense 
 white beard, which he had kept unshorn in consequence of a 
 vow made at the death of Charles I. 
 
 " Epitaphs upon John, Earl of Lauderdale, his death." Such 
 is the title of three Sonnets on the death, in February, 1645, of 
 John Maitland, 1st Earl of Lauderdale, the husband of the 
 Countess of Lauderdale, and father of the Lady Jane Maitland, 
 above-mentioned. . He was a statesman of great reputation for 
 ability and literary culture ; and, though he went with the 
 Covenanters at length, and was President of the Covenanting 
 Scottish Parliament at the time of his death, yet Drummond 
 hints that his heart had not been thoroughly in the business. 
 Thus the first of the Sonnets runs : — 
 
 " Of those rare worthies who adorned our North, 
 And shined like constellations, thou alone 
 Remainedst last, great Maitland, charged with worth, 
 Second in virtue's theatre to none ; 
 But, finding all eccentric in our times, 
 Religion into superstition turned, 
 Justice silenced, exiled, or inurned, 
 Truth, faith, and charity reputed crimes,
 
 448 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 The young men destinate by sword to fall, 
 And trophies of their country's spoils to rear, 
 Strange laws the aged and prudent to appal, 
 And forced sad yokes of tyranny to bear, 
 
 And for nor great nor virtuous minds a room, 
 Disdaining life, thou shrink'st into a tomb." 
 
 In the other two Sonnets the celebrity of the Maitland family 
 is spoken of, and special mention is made of the fact that "the 
 wisest Prince e'er managed Britain's state," /. e., James I., had 
 been a great admirer of the father of the deceased Earl, John, 
 Lord Thirlstane, Chancellor of Scotland, and on that nobleman's 
 death (Oct. 1595) had honoured him with an epitaph written 
 with his own royal hand. — It appears from one of Drummond's 
 preserved letters that the three Sonnets of Epitaph on the 
 deceased Earl had been sent by him, when they were written, 
 to the Earl's son and successor, John Maitland, 2nd Earl of 
 Lauderdale, afterwards so notorious as the Duke of Lauderdale, 
 but then one of the most active of the Covenanters, and their chief 
 agent and commissioner in London. " Of that duty I owe to 
 " your Lordship, and love to your Honourable Father," he says 
 in this letter, "I have adventured to bear a part in his obsequies, 
 " ■ — a work, I must confess, profuse ; no verses of mine, 
 "or any others, having power to add anything to his noble 
 " memory, being so strongly upholden by your Lordship and 
 " his other excellent children that it is likely to be contemporary 
 "with the world." In a yet later letter to the same second 
 Earl of Lauderdale, afterwards Duke, Drummond reverts to his 
 affection for the first Earl and his esteem for the whole Maitland 
 family. " The merits of your blessed father towards me, and 
 " your own courtesies," is one of the expressions. 
 
 It so happens that three more specimens of Drummond's 
 taste for Epitaphs and obituary commemorations all belong to 
 the year 1649. 
 
 The following will be quite intelligible if we explain that 
 Tranent is about twelve miles from Edinburgh ; that Seton 
 Palace, the mansion of the Seton's, Earls of Winton, was in 
 that neighbourhood ; and that " my Lord of Perth " spoken of 
 as buried in Seton Chapel is not the John Drummond, 2nd 
 Earl of Perth, already so well known to us in connexion with
 
 Mtat. 64. LATEST SCRIBBLINGS. 449 
 
 Drummond (for this Earl lived to 1662), but his elder brother 
 and predecessor, James Drummond, 1st Earl, who had married 
 a daughter of the 1st Earl of Winton, and had died very young, 
 
 as long ago as 161 1. 
 
 " To his worthy and much respected Friend, Mr. William 
 Anster, at Tranent. 
 
 " Much Respected Friend, 
 
 "These are to entreat you earnestly that, when occasion 
 and your leisure serveth, you would be pleased to do me the 
 favour as to take the pains to transcribe the inscription which is 
 upon my Lord of Perth's tomb in the Chapel of Seton. I have 
 drawn up a Genealogical Table of the House of Drummond, 
 with many ornaments, and some garnishing of the persons. In 
 this the Inscriptions of my lord's tomb will serve me for some 
 light. My noble Lord of Winton is descended lineally of this 
 race, and shall not be overpassed in what I can do him or his 
 ancient family honour and service. When this piece is perfected, 
 it must come under your hand, to give it the last lustre. Thus, 
 my commendations remembered, &c, I remain, 
 
 " Your assured and loving friend to serve you, 
 
 " W. Drummond. * 
 "April, 1649." 
 
 From this it is evident that Drummond had resumed in 1649, 
 within three months after the death of Charles I., those researches 
 into the genealogy and history of the Drummond Family which 
 had many years before been a subject of correspondence 
 between him and the Earl of Perth. They may have been a 
 suitable distraction for him at the time • but it is not necessary 
 that we should return to the topic, t 
 
 * Mr. Laing's Extracts from the Hawthornden MSS., Arch. Scot., IV. 98. 
 
 + Drummond's MS. genealogical researches about his family went into 
 the hands of his namesake, kirtsman, and fellow-Engager, William Drum- 
 mond, second son of Lord Maderty, better known afterwards as Lieutenant 
 General Drummond, 4th Lord Maderty and 1st Viscount Strathallan 
 (The Drummonds, Lords Maderty, were cousins of the Perth family.) 
 Continued and enlarged by him in 1681, they took the form of a Genealogv 
 of the most ancient House of Drummond, which, after lying in MS. from his 
 death in 1688, was printed in Edinburgh in 183 1. Few Scottish Genealogies 
 
 2 F
 
 45° 
 
 DHUMMOXD OF 1IA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 As among the last things written by Drummond the two 
 following may be printed together. The venerable lady cele- 
 brated in the first was one of the Prestons of Craigmillar, near 
 Edinburgh, possibly the mother of George Preston, Laird of 
 Craigmillar, whom we know to have been one of Drummond's 
 most intimate friends ; the boy or youth for whose tomb the 
 second was written is sufficiently described in the document 
 itself. 
 
 "to the memory of the worthy lady, the lady of 
 
 Craigmillar. 
 
 " This marble needs no tears : let them be poured 
 For such whom Earth's dull bowels have embowred 
 In childhood, or in youth who left to live 
 By some sad chance fierce planets did contrive. 
 Eight lustres twice full reckoned did make thee 
 All this life's happiness to know ; and we 
 Who saw thee in thy winter (as men flowers 
 Shrunk in their stems, or Ilium's fair towers 
 Hid in their rubbidge) could not but admire, 
 The casket spoiled, the jewel so entire ; 
 For neither judgment, memory, nor sense 
 In thee was blasted, till all fled from hence 
 To thy great Maker. Earth unto earth must ; 
 Man in his best estate is but best dust. 
 Now, even though buried, yet thou canst not die, 
 But happy liv'st in thy fair progeny, 
 To out-date time, and never pass away. 
 Till Angels raise thee from thy bed of clay, 
 And blest again with these here loved thou meet, 
 Rest in Fame's temple and this winding-sheet. 
 Content thou liv'd here, happy, though not great, 
 And died with the Kingdom ancl the State." 
 
 "D. O. M. S." 
 
 " What was mortal of W. Ramsay lieth here. He was the 
 son of John Ramsay, Laird of Edington, brother to the Right 
 Honourable William, the first Earl of Dalhousie, a lineage of 
 all virtues in peace and valour in war, renowned by all times 
 
 have been more pushed on the attention of the world than that of the 
 Drummonds ; for an abstract of it will be found in Bayle's Dictionary (Art. 
 Drummond), communicated to that work, in the year 1695, by some 
 interested person.
 
 &tat. 64. /V-;./ 7 '//. V (/•' 1649. 4 g! 
 
 and second to none : a youth ingenuous, of fair hopes, a mild 
 sweet disposition, pleasant countenance; his kindred's delight 
 td joy; and now their greatest displeasure and sorrow ; having 
 left this transitory stage of cares, when he but scarce appeared 
 upon it, in his tender nonage. 
 
 So falls by northern blast a virgin rose, 
 
 At half that doth her bashful bosom close ; 
 
 So a sweet flourish languishing decays 
 
 That late did blush when kissed by Phoebus' rays. 
 
 Though untimely cropped, leave to bemoan his fate : 
 
 He died with our Monarchy and State. 
 
 His Mother, out of that care and love she carried to him, to 
 continue here his memory some space, raised this monument, 
 Anno 1649, mense. . . . 
 
 Immortale decus Superis." 
 
 " Died with our Monarchy and State " is, it will be noticed, 
 Drummond's form of obituary dating in both cases. The ven- 
 erable lady of Craigmillar, who had been more than eighty 
 years in the world, and the hopeful boy, William Ramsay, whose 
 life had hardly begun, died, Drummond expressly marks, in the 
 same fatal year 1649. The deaths in that year, it may be as- 
 sumed, were neither more nor less numerous than usual ; but 
 the following, as they are noted in Balfour's Annals, may be 
 supposed to have been those of most public interest in Scot- 
 land : — February 28, 1649, died suddenly John Elphinstom:, 
 2nd Lord Balmerino, so famous for that prosecution of him by 
 Charles 1. in 1635 which had drawn forth Drummond's bold 
 IcLter of remonstrance (ante pp. 233-241), and afterwards for his 
 activity in the Covenant. March 1649, died Sir George Hali- 
 burton of Todrews, one of the Senators of the College of 
 Justice. In the same month died, at Kirkwall in Orkney, 
 William Douglas, 7th Earl of Morton, some time Lord 
 Treasurer of Scotland ; and on the 30th of May following his 
 Countess, Anna, daughter of the Earl of Marischal, died at the 
 same place. "August 12, 1649," writes Balfour, " died Patrick 
 Leslie, Lord of Lindores : he was never married, but had above
 
 452 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 67 base children, sons and daughters : he was aged. . . ; and was 
 interred privately at the east end of Newburgh church on 
 Tuesday, in the night, the 14th of the same month." On the 
 10th of November died Anna, Lady Elcho, daughter of Lord 
 Balfour of Burleigh; on the 12th of the same month died, at 
 Kirkwall, Robert, 8th Earl of Morton, having survived his father 
 and enjoyed the Earldom only eight months; on the 22nd 
 of the same month died John, first Earl of Wemyss, at his 
 house in Wester Wemyss; and on the 26th of the same month 
 died, at Priestfield, near Edinburgh, Sir Alexander Hamilton, 
 brother to Thomas, first Earl of Haddington, certified by Bal- 
 four as " a man of rare spirit and a very valiant soldier," and 
 known to us long ago as the "Sandy Hamilton" who was 
 Drummond's rival in practical mechanics, and became afterwards 
 the Scottish General of Artillery in the Bishops' Wars. 
 
 To these deaths of 1649 we liav e to add that of Drummond 
 himself. It occurred in the very end of the year, eight days 
 after that of Sandy Hamilton. Of his occupations through the 
 preceding eleven months there are only such indications as 
 have been already given. Mercifully, it is to be hoped, the 
 Argyle Government and the Kirk authorities had let him alone, 
 or had not troubled him for his approbation of the Engage- 
 ment, and his Defence of the Hamiltons in that connexion, in a 
 way to cause him any great inconvenience. And so he had lived 
 on at Hawthornden, in weak and failing health, and seeing one 
 more round of the seasons in that beloved spot of his life-long 
 habitation. To the terrible opening of the year, with its shock- 
 ing news of the King's execution, had succeeded the gentler 
 months of spring, when the glen and all the soft country round 
 resumed their budding and again grew lightly green. The green 
 had deepened and enriched itself into summer, and once more 
 the invalid, walking slowly in his accustomed grounds, had seen 
 the Esk flowing in its rocky bed, in the full recovered beauty of 
 clear sky and sunshine, its banks terraced and precipiced by
 
 Mtat.ba,. DEATH OF DRUMMOND. 453 
 
 all their wealth of shrub and foliage. Then the changing 
 colours had broken out in the woods, the russet and the yellow 
 coming in patches amid the doubly sombred green, till there was 
 the glory of later Autumn's variety, and in October the languid 
 footsteps on the pathways began to be over fallen leaves. No 
 longer out on roads or pathways we are then to fancy him, but 
 shuffling about in the little courtyard of the house, or from 
 fireside to fireside within doors, now in the dining-room below, 
 which may be still seen, with his own favourite little study 
 opening out from it, now in the larger drawing-room upstairs, 
 which is also still to be seen, with the small chamber near it in 
 which he usually slept. This small chamber looks out to the 
 front of the house, with the famous sycamore just opposite the 
 little window ; but from the other main apartments the view is 
 still always of the glen behind, either in those upper windings 
 and cliffs which bring the Esk from Roslin, or again in other 
 windings and cliffs to the right hand, where the rock on which 
 the house stands bends the course of the stream into a new 
 gorge. Pictures and pieces of furniture remain now in the 
 rooms which were there when Drummond inhabited them. 
 There is at least one picture of himself, very indifferently done ; 
 there is one of his father, Sir John Drummond, really well 
 done, and presenting him as he must have been in the first 
 days of his gentleman-ushership to James VI., the face light- 
 complexioned, and very manly and handsome, with the light 
 hair tinged to red round the mouth, and a most winning ex- 
 pression of sweet temper ; there are several old portraits of 
 Kings and Queens ; and among other antiquities is a table of 
 fine black oak, with the date 1396 carved on it, which the poet 
 may have prized from some association with Robert III. and 
 Queen Annabella Drummond. With such objects about him, 
 and the other familiar nick-nacks gathered in a studious life, 
 and telling of cultured tastes, we are to imagine the invalid in 
 his last days, conscious that the end is approaching, sometimes 
 turning perhaps to his books and papers by habit, but rather
 
 454 DR UMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 for the most part listlessly pensive, or with looks of sup- 
 pressed meaning at the wife and young children from whom he 
 is to part. Not unhappy looks either, but only kindly sad ! All 
 his life lie has been familiar with the contemplation of death ; 
 nothing can be now thought or imaged about it which he has 
 not thought and imaged again and again for more than thirty 
 years ; more than once in his earlier life he had expected death 
 and been ready for it ; and, save that there now mingles with 
 his musings an interest in the earthly future of those he has since 
 attached to him, and on whom his eyes now rest, they are the 
 same as they had always been. T here is the same abiding im- 
 age of the Cosmical All as one thing, the same notion of this Cos- 
 mical All as but the visible manifestation and sensuous allegory of 
 something else, outlying and transcending its wheeling spheres 
 and the utmost reason and phantasy of its denizens, but which 
 yet a natural faith, accepting the essence of the sacred tradition 
 which all the wrangling Churches conserved, might figure, with 
 the humblest Christian of any Church, as a Heavenly World 
 above all the starry appearances, the home of the Eternal Maker 
 and of what He might call to Himself. And so, not needing 
 the more precise suggestions of Mr. Fairly, or of any other 
 minister that might visit him, but not declining these either, 
 Drummond, as the close drew near, might revert with perfect 
 sincerity to some of his own spiritual songs, or his translations 
 of hymns of the Church. Even this he might repeat, or hear 
 repeated : — 
 
 " That dreaded day of wrath and shame 
 In flames shall turn this world's huge frame, 
 As sacred prophets do proclaim. 
 
 O with what grief shall earthlings groan 
 When that great Judge, set on his throne, 
 Examines strictly every one ? 
 
 On that great day at thy right hand 
 Grant I amongst thy sheep may stand, 
 Sequestered from the goatish band !"
 
 < Etat. 64. Z>A\ / 77/ 07" Z?AV 'MMOND. 45 5 
 
 In a vaguer vein, but perhaps more his own, might be this 
 from his Flowers of Sum ; — 
 
 " Beneath a sable veil, and shadows deep 
 Of unaccessible and dimming light, 
 In silence, ebon clouds more black than night, 
 The World's great King his secrets hid doth keep : 
 Through those thick mists when any mortal wight 
 Aspires, with halting pace and eyes that ,weep, 
 To pore, and in His mysteries to creep, 
 With thunders He and lightnings blasts their sight. 
 O Sun invisible, that dost abide 
 Within thy bright abysms, most fair, most dark, 
 Where with thy proper rays Thou dost Thee hide ! 
 O ever-shining, never full-seen mark ! 
 
 To guide me in life's night Thy light me show : 
 The more I search, the less of Thee I know." 
 
 Or perhaps it might be this, the mystically abrupt closing ol 
 the largest poem he ever wrote, and which he left un- 
 finished : — 
 
 " Near to that sweet and odoriferous clime 
 Where the all-cheering Emperor of Time 
 Makes spring the cassia, nard, and fragrant balms, 
 And every hill and colline crowns with palms, 
 Where incense sweats, where weeps the precious myrrh, 
 And cedars overtop the pine and fir, 
 Near where the aged phoenix, tired of breath, 
 Doth build her nest, and takes new life in death, 
 A valley into wide and open fields 
 Far it extendeth . . . ." 
 
 The death of Drummond is recorded by his biographer of 
 171 1 very briefly. " In the year 1649," he says, "when Rebellion 
 "was prosperous and triumphant in the utmost degree, the best 
 " of Kings and of men, under a sham pretence of justice, 
 "was barbarously murdered at his own palace-gate by 
 "the worst of subjects and the worst of men. Our 
 "author, who was much weakened with close studying 
 "and diseases, was so overwhelmed with extreme grief 
 " and anguish that he died the 4th of December, wanting 
 " only 9 days of 64 years of age, to the great grief and loss of
 
 456 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORN DEN. 
 
 " all learned and good men : and was honourably buried in his 
 " own aisle in the Church of Lasswade, near to his house of 
 " Hawthornden." In one particular this statement obviously 
 requires correction. Of Drummond's deep feeling about the 
 death of Charles I., and his despondency over the state of the 
 times, the evidence is sufficient ; but that Charles's death in 
 any way occasioned Drummond's no one is bound to believe. 
 There was an interval of ten months between the two events ; 
 and Drummond had at any rate reached the limit of life that 
 might have been anticipated. He had passed by seven years 
 the age attained by his father; and he had outlived all his 
 brothers and sisters, except his brother James, the next to 
 him in age, who is heard of as surviving him for a year 
 or two. 
 
 The church and churchyard of Lasswade are on a height over- 
 looking the village, and about two miles and a half from 
 Hawthornden. The present church was built about a hundred 
 years ago ; but, in a portion of the well-kept churchyard, railed 
 in separately from the rest, as more select and important, there 
 is the fragmentary outline of the smaller old church, with some 
 of the sepulchral monuments that belonged to it. Drummond's 
 own aisle, abutting from one part of the ruined wall, is still 
 perfect, a small arched space of stone-work, with a roofing of 
 strong stone slabs, and a grating of iron for door- way. Within 
 that small arched space Drummond's ashes certainly lie, though 
 there is no inscription to mark the precise spot as distinct from 
 the graves of some of his latest descendants who are also 
 buried there, and to one of whom there is a commemorative 
 tablet. The small arched aisle itself is his monument, and it is 
 a sufficient one. There could hardly be a more peaceful rustic 
 burying-ground than that in which it stands, the church and 
 the manse close to it on the height, with only steep descending 
 lanes from them to Lasswade village and to the road leading 
 from Lasswade to Edinburgh. In the same separately enclosed 
 part of the churchyard which contains Drummond's aisle, and
 
 sEtat.64. LASSWADE CHURCHYARD. 457 
 
 attached to the same mined fragment of the old church, are 
 some ' other tombs of families of ancient connexion with 
 Lasswade parish or its neighbourhood. Two or three of them 
 exhibit well-known Scottish names ; and in one of them, more 
 spacious than the rest, but still simple, lies Henry Dundas, 
 1 st Viscount Melville, the colleague and friend of Pitt, and from 
 1775 to 1805 the virtual King of Scotland.
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 POSTHUMOUS PARTICULARS. 
 
 "njRUMMOND had nine children : five sons, John, William, 
 Robert, Richard, and James ; and four daughters, Eliza- 
 beth, Margaret, Annabella, and Jane. Of these, however, the 
 eldest and two youngest sons and the three youngest daughters- 
 died at an early age, so that, at the time of his death, the family 
 seems to have consisted of only the widow and three children, 
 William, Robert, and Elizabeth. By a will which he had made 
 in September 1643 (i.e., before all his children had been born, 
 and also before some of those born had died), he had assigned 
 500 marks and his "moveables" as a portion for his daughter 
 Elizabeth, ^1000 to his son Robert, and ^1000 to his son 
 James, the rest to go to his eldest surviving son, William, but 
 the administration of the property during the nonage of the 
 children, and the care of their education, to rest with their 
 mother. Conjoined with her in this trust were to be his " well- 
 beloved kinsman and friend, John Stirling of Birnay, Commis- 
 sioner of Wigtown, and Mr. Richard Maitland ;" but, in case 
 of her death or her second marriage, then Lord Drummond, 
 William Drummond of Riccarton, and George Preston, Laird 
 of Craigmillar, were to take her place as co-trustees with those 
 two persons. As his property at the time of his death, apart 
 from the lands, was estimated at ^3936, the provision by this. 
 will, if we allow for the Scottish value of money then, seems 
 to have been moderately ample.* 
 
 * Abstract of Drummond's Will, with Extracts, given by Mr. David 
 Laing, Arch. Scot., IV. 229.
 
 DRl 'J/JWND'S DESCENDANTS. 
 
 459 
 
 The eldest son, William, being but in his fourteenth year, the 
 administration of the widow and her co-trustees must have been 
 required for some time. When or where she died is not known.* 
 Of Elizabeth, the only surviving daughter, all that is known 
 is that she married a Dr. Henderson, a physician in Edinburgh, 
 and was dead long before 171 1. Robert, the second surviving 
 son, either was never married or left no issue, and died about 
 16S7, when he was little more than forty years of age. The 
 family-name was transmitted, therefore, only in the line of the 
 eldest son, William. 
 
 Knighted in the time of Charles II., this Sir William Drum- 
 mond lived to as late as 17 13, known latterly not only as the 
 third. Laird of Hawthornden, but also as the representative of the 
 Drummonds of Carnock, the descent of that house from Patrick 
 Drummond, his great-uncle, having lapsed. He is said, in the- 
 family legend, to have " inherited his father's principles and 
 virtues, and even a portion of his genius, though he published 
 nothing to the world." Surer evidence presents him in his 
 last years as only a very respectable old Scottish gentleman, 
 looking now and then over his father's papers, or those of other 
 people which his father had collected, and jotting down in them 
 such remarks as this, still to be read on the particular parcel 
 containing the papers of Drummond's uncle Fowler : "Papers of 
 Secretarie Fowler's, all his owen hand-writt, preserved as they 
 are by my father ; so ther may be better things in them than I 
 know, for the writt is fashious to read." He was twice married, 
 had three daughters by the first marriage and three sons and six 
 daughters by the second, and was succeeded by his son William, 
 
 * Among the Fairfax MSS. in the Bodleian, bequeathed to that library 
 by the Parliamentary General, Lord Fairfax, there is a valuable old MS. 
 copy of John of Fordun's Scotichronicon that had belonged to Drummond. 
 On the first page there is this inscription : " Mr. James Drummond, 1650, 
 gifted this book to Coronall Fairfax, the 17 of December, arino 1650," fol- 
 lowed by this, in Fairfax's hand : "It was sent to me by the Lady Haw- 
 thornden, widow to the famous poet, William Drummond, by the hands of 
 her husband's brother, vizt., Mr. James Drummond here superscribinge. — 
 Fairfax.''
 
 460 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEX. 
 
 born in 1664. Of this fourth Laird of Hawthornden, the 
 poet's grandson, we are told that, " having improved himself by 
 travelling abroad," he " became a well-bred, polite, and accom- 
 plished gentleman," but that " he unhappily received a stroke 
 upon the head by a fall from his horse, soon after his return to 
 his own country, which, though it did not destroy his under- 
 standing, yet affected him so much that he contracted a dislike 
 to business, and in a great measure retired from the world during 
 the remainder of his life." Nevertheless he lived to 1735, and 
 left, besides five daughters, an only son, William, who succeeded 
 him in the Hawthornden lairdship, having previously married 
 a cousin of his own, Jean Mylne, daughter of Sir Charles Mylne 
 of Barnton by his wife, Mary Drummond, fifth daughter of Sir 
 William Drummond, the poet's son. Thus, at this stage of the 
 descent, both the Laird and the Lady of Hawthornden were of 
 the Drummond lineage, the laird being the poet's great- 
 grandson, and the lady (unless I misconstrue the documents) 
 his great-grand-daughter. They had two children. One of 
 these, a son, who had been bred to the medical profes- 
 sion, and had gone to Jamaica, having died there, the 
 estate, on the death of their father, the fifth laird, in 
 1760, went to the only other child, Barbara Mary Drum- 
 mond. She had been married, before she came to the 
 property, to a Highland gentleman of Jacobite distinction; but, 
 this husband having died in 1758 and left her childless, she 
 married, for her second husband, Dr. William Abernethy, a phy- 
 sician, and also a Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, who 
 assumed, in consequence, the name of Dr. Abernethy-Drummond, 
 or Bishop Abernethy-Drummond, and was virtually laird of Haw- 
 thornden so long as his wife lived. They had but one child, a 
 daughter, who died in 1777 at the age of thirteen, and to whose 
 memory there is the tablet in Drummond's aisle already men- 
 tioned. Thus, on the death, in 1789, of Barbara Mary Drum- 
 mond, the direct inheritance from the poet ended. By a 
 settlement she had effected, the Hawthornden estate, burdened
 
 LA UDER'S ELEGY ON DRl T MMOND. 46 1 
 
 with a life-rent for her husband, Bishop Abernethy-Drummond, 
 then went to a cousin of hers, who had married Bishop Aber- 
 nethy-Drummond's nephew. The name Drummond, however, 
 followed the property ; and both have passed on, by farther 
 descents, to the present possessors of Hawthornden. The 
 baronetcy now in the family dates from 1828." 
 
 After Drummond's death there was a roused interest 
 in him among his countrymen. It was, of course, strongest 
 and most affectionate among the Royalists. Perhaps the very 
 best poetical tribute to his memory, and certainly more interest- 
 ing now than any of the compliments he had received in his 
 lifetime (one of these being a rough set of English verses by 
 Archbishop Spotswood), is a piece written immediately after 
 his death by a Scottish Royalist abroad, and entitled Damon : 
 A Pastoral Elegy on the Death of His Honoured Friend, 
 William Drummond of Hawthornden. The author was a 
 certain Colonel George Lauder, son of Alexander Lauder of 
 Hatton by a daughter of Sir Richard Maitland, the ancestor of 
 the Lauderdale family. He is supposed to have been born 
 about 1600, and to have been educated at the University of 
 Edinburgh ; and he had been abroad on military service since 
 about 1630. Before he had gone abroad he had known 
 Drummond well, as a younger man might know a senior he 
 admired. The Elegy itself tells us this and much more. 
 The author, presenting himself as the shepherd Lysis, wander- 
 ing on foreign ground, begins thus : — 
 
 " The lonely Lysis, whom a froward fate 
 Full twenty summers in a sober state 
 Had seen a stranger to his native soil 
 In foreign fields, worn with the weary toil 
 
 * The authority for this account of the descent of the Drummond name, 
 and of the Hawthornden property, since the poet's time, is Douglas's 
 Baronage of Scotland ; for which the article " Drummond of Hawthornden," 
 carrying down the descent to 1798, was furnished by Bishop Abernethy- 
 Drummond.
 
 462 DRUMMOND OF BAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Of wandering, waiting on a wayward flock, 
 
 Which neither hoised his hopes nor swelled his stock, 
 
 One day went pensive o'er a pleasant plain, 
 
 Near where old Maes doth fall into the main. 
 
 His heart was heavy and he knew not why ; 
 
 The lambs did bleating go ; the surly sky 
 
 Seemed to presage a storm ; which to prevent 
 
 Unto his old retreat he swiftly went. 
 
 An aged elm there was," &c. 
 
 While he is here under the elm on the plain near the mouth of 
 the Maes (somewhere near Rotterdam), he sees coming rapidly 
 towards him a figure in which he at length recognises his 
 former comrade, " the young Alcydon," who has just come 
 back from a visit to his " native Albany." After greetings, 
 Alcydon gives him the news he has brought thence, horrifying 
 him with the account of the execution of King Charles, and 
 the dreadful state' of Britain, and of Scotland in particular. 
 There, he says, the loyal can hardly live ; 
 
 " And, were it not the hope they have at home 
 To see their Prince to save his people come, 
 The swains would all for sorrow faint and fly, 
 As many do for grief and anguish die ; 
 Of which, alas ! old Damon was the first, 
 Whose royal, loyal, noble heart did burst." 
 
 "" Damon dead ! " cries Lysis, this last piece of news utterly 
 paralysing him. For a while he is motionless with the shock, 
 till at length a passion of tears comes to his relief, and he 
 begins to speak of Damon and all that he knew of him : — 
 
 " Burst forth, my soul, in sorrow's saddest strain ; 
 Sigh, heart, and break, and wish no more again 
 Those home-bred haunts and flowery fields to see 
 Whose love and longing late possessed thee ! 
 Farewell those fancies, since the herdsmen's head, 
 Apollo's priest, whose learned lays did lead 
 The lovely nymphs, enchanted with his song, 
 O'er Ochil's snowy tops in pompous throng, 
 And brought those beauteous girls in gaudy train 
 Home dancing to his Hawthornden again, 
 Is now no more the wonder of our woods, 
 The valley's wish, the favourite of our floods."
 
 LAUDER'S ELEGY ON DRUMMOND. 
 
 There is then a recollection of the happy time when the 
 speaker, then "a stripling 'mongst the shepherds," first saw- 
 Damon, their acknowledged peer, and experienced his kind- 
 ness ; after which there is a kind of review of all Drummond's 
 published writings, the chief of them mentioned exactly by their 
 names, and each with a few words of appreciation, showing 
 familiarity with it, as if from repeated reading. The fact that 
 Drummond in his later age had left his youthful metrical 
 fancies, which " were rich conceits, although he termed them 
 toys," and betaken himself to grave Clio, the Muse of History, 
 is duly noted ; and there is a description of his History of the 
 Five famescs, in language which implies that, though unpub- 
 lished, it had been much talked of, and its style and character 
 were pretty generally known. Then, after a re-assertion that 
 Scotland can never again be w r hat it was to the speaker, now 
 that he can never again see Damon's honoured face or grasp 
 his hand, he wishes that he had " old Aytoun's vein or great 
 Alexis' stately tragic strain," that he might fittingly celebrate the 
 excellencies of the dead. As this cannot be, he says, his 
 excuse for writing at all must be his desire to connect his name 
 with Damon's ; and, so, with really a graceful tact, identifying 
 the poet with various Scottish scenes painted in his poetry, but 
 localizing him last of all in the picturesque spot of his dwelling 
 (where also, by mistake, he supposes him buried), he drops the 
 curtain on a view of Hawlhornden : — 
 
 " Yet with what vigour my poor verse can fly 
 It shall record to after times that I 
 So dearly loved thy worth, thy name adored, 
 Thy friendship honoured, and thy death deplored, 
 That, wheresoe'er the world my rhymes shall read, 
 There Damon's love shall live when we're both dead. 
 Nor shall I fear Antiquity to wrong 
 With our own home-bred haunts to stuff my song, 
 And say our Forth, which doth so wind and wander, 
 As famous is by thee as old ?ileander. 
 Thy murmuring Esk and Ora's rushy hair 
 With Mincius and old Tiber do compare ;
 
 464 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 And why shall I not freely venture then 
 
 To match with Helicon thy Hawthornden? 
 
 Thy grot, in which grim Saturn still remains 
 
 Bound to the rock with mighty metalled chains, 
 
 The same prophetic spirit doth inspire 
 
 That in Trophonius' cave set souls on fire ; 
 
 And, if the earth from hence a passage yields, 
 
 It is the entry to the Elysian fields. 
 
 A fitter place the Fates could never find 
 
 To lay thy sacred relics up enshrined ; 
 
 There all the Nymphs and Shepherd-swains can come 
 
 And yearly sing sad hymns before thy tomb ; 
 
 Which on the marble cold these lines shall keep, 
 
 For pilgrims all to read, and, parting, weep, 
 
 That once thy care commanded to be cut 
 
 Upon thy grave, if I have not forgot : — 
 
 ' Here Damon lies, whose songs did sometime grace 
 
 ' The murmuring Esk : may Roses shade the place.' " 
 
 This Elegy by a Scot abroad was written, it is to be supposed, 
 in 1650 ; and there was no leisure in Scotland for the next few 
 years to think much about Drummond. In 1655-6, however, 
 or six years after his death, something of the necessary leisure 
 had returned, though in a strange way, and after much agony. 
 Charles II. had come into Scotland (June 1650), but Cromwell 
 had come into Scotland too (July 1650) ; there had been the 
 great battle of Dunbar (Sept. 3, 1650), followed by the partial 
 subjugation of Scotland to the English Commonwealth, and 
 the great battle of Worcester (Sept. 3, 1651), followed by its 
 complete subjugation ; Charles II. was back in his foreign 
 exile ; and Cromwell had become Protector of the United 
 Commonwealth of Great Britain and Ireland. It was during this 
 Protectorate of Cromwell, when Scotland had been substantially 
 annexed to England, and Monk, with his head-quarters at Dalkeith, 
 was Cromwell's deputy among the Scots, that it occurred to 
 Drummond's surviving friends to recall attention to his writings. 
 Circumstances were favourable. In England there was a new 
 activity in authorship. Theology and polemics were a little in 
 abeyance ; and old poets and prose-writers were again in 
 demand. Why not bring out Drummond's poetry afresh, and
 
 SCO TS 7 AR I '/■'. T S LA'l ER ) 'EA RS. 
 
 4^5 
 
 publish some specimens of his prose, so that he might have his 
 chance with English writers in the new Protectorate ? Nay, to 
 give him the fairer a chance, why not bring him out in London? 
 So several may have reasoned ; but the person who seems to 
 have acted as Drummond's literary executor, and carried the 
 project into effect, was his brother-in-law, Sir John Scot of 
 Scotstarvet. 
 
 Of much tougher constitution than Drummond, Scotstarvet, 
 though he had been born about the same time, did not die till 
 1670, when he was in his eighty-fourth year. When Cromwell's 
 Protectorate began he was in his sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth. 
 His first wife, Drummond's sister, by whom he had two sons 
 and seven daughters, had long been dead ; a second wife, who 
 had borne him one son, was also dead ; and he had married a 
 third time, and had another son. He had not been without 
 troubles. His eldest son and heir, Sir James Scot, who had 
 been conjoined with him in the office of Director of the Chan- 
 cery, had died in 1650, a year after his uncle Drummond ; and, 
 in the changes recently made in the Scottish Bench and Law- 
 Courts under Cromwell's Protectorate, Sir John himself had 
 been ejected from this and his other offices, and, moreover, fined 
 ,£500. He was living consequently on his Fifeshire estates, 
 grumbling a good deal, but pushing on, in conjunction with Gor- 
 don of Straloch, the Scottish maps for Blaeu's great Atlas, and 
 beginning, perhaps, those curious and crabbed notes about his 
 official contemporaries and their predecessors, which he finished 
 at a later time, and which, after lying in MS. for nearly a century, 
 were published in 1754 as Scot of Scotstarvefs Staggering State 
 of Scots Statesmen. Most " staggering," indeed, he makes it 
 out to have been. About eighty Scotsmen of political mark 
 between 1550 and 1650 figure in his lists ; and of each he tells 
 what lands he "conquessed," and what came of the " con- 
 quests," with any tit-bit of scandal about him or his wife that 
 will give a relish to the tale, the general result being that most 
 of them were either scoundrels or very dubious characters, but 
 
 2 G
 
 4 66 DRUMMOND OF HAIVTHORNDEN. 
 
 that happily there is a Divinity that brings such persons to ac- 
 count, whatever lands they may " conquess." Sometimes, how- 
 ever, this Divinity makes mistakes. The very last person men- 
 tioned in the Staggering State, for example, is the writer him- 
 self, Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet, ex-Director of the Chancery. 
 What had happened to him ? " Sir John was a Councillor to 
 " King James and King Charles I., and Lord of Exchequer, 
 " and a Lord of Session. Albeit he was possessor of the said 
 " place of Chancery above forty years, and doer of great ser- 
 " vices to the King and country, yet, by the power and malice 
 " of his enemies, he has been at last thrust out of the said 
 " places in his old age, and likewise fined in ^"500 sterling, 
 " and one altogether unskilled placed to be Director. But, as 
 " one of the ancients says well, ' Ubi ' beneficia modum excesserunt, 
 "pro beneficio damnum rependitur : where benefits exceed 
 " measure, instead of benefits they get skaith.' He had been 
 " a Councillor since the year of God 1620, and for his Ma- 
 jesty's and predecessor's service been twenty-four times at 
 " London, being 14,400 miles, and twice in the Low Countries 
 " for printing the Scots Poets \Delitice Poetarum Scotorum] and 
 " the Atlas [the Scottish part of Blaeu's great general Atlas], 
 " and paid to John Blaeu a hundred double pieces for printing 
 " the Poets." * 
 
 * The Geographic Blaeviancc Volumen Sextum, containing the maps of 
 Scotland which Gordon of Straloch had edited, and on which Scot of 
 Scotstarvet had spent so much pains, was published at Amsterdam in 1654, 
 and is a truly magnificent folio, well worth looking at. Scot of Scotstarvet's 
 labours and' generosity in connexion with the enterprise receive frequent 
 and ample acknowledgment in the volume. Thus, in the prefixed Latin 
 "Epistle to the Reader" by the printer John Blaeu, it is said, "If you 
 impute this work to that most noble and munificent man, John Scot of 
 Scotstarvet, you will but attribute the progeny to its rightful father ; " and 
 again, with a change of metaphor, "Scotland could not have been born 
 and come into the light unless Scot had been the accoucheur." Again, 
 with reference to Scot's visit to Holland on the business of the Atlas : 
 " He passed whole days in my house, writing and dictating what might 
 illustrate the maps of his country, with such happiness of memory that, 
 though without papers or books, he gave all due information respecting the 
 shapes of districts, sites, boundaries, old and more recent owners of 
 estates, the produce of the soil, cities, rivers, and the like, so that the man
 
 HISTORY OF THE FIVE JAMESES. 467 
 
 With all his grumbling, Scotstarvet retained his interest in 
 whatever concerned the literary glory of Scotland. Add his 
 particular interest in the memory of Drummond, and it will not 
 seem extraordinary if it was in consequence of one of his 
 twenty-four visits to London that there appeared there, almost 
 simultaneously, a Volume of Drummond's selected Prose- 
 writings and a Collected Edition of his Poems. If Scotstarvet did 
 not go to London himself on the business, he must have arranged 
 it by correspondence. 
 
 The prose volume appeared first. It is a rather handsome 
 small folio of 292 pages, with a portrait of Drummond, and 
 with this title : — 
 
 appeared to me to be a Scotland to himself." Besides this eulogy by 
 Blaeu, and Latin verses to Scot, and other recognitions of him in various 
 parts of the volume, there is a Latin dedication of the whole to him by 
 Gordon of Straloch, dated " Abredonice, 9 Cat. Feb. 1648." The volume, 
 therefore, must have been substantially completed some year's before its 
 actual publication, and while Drummond was yet alive. An interesting 
 testimony to the same effect is afforded by a slip of paper pasted into the 
 copy of the volume belonging to the University of Edinburgh. It is the 
 draft, in Gordon of Straloch's own hand, of his intended dedication of the 
 Atlas to the Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles II. From the wording of 
 the draft it is clear that it must have been written before the misfortunes of 
 Charles I. had come to their height. Afterwards, the dedication and 
 
 other arrangements had to be altered to suit. After all, Scot of 
 
 Scotstarvet died a wealthy man, leaving estates which were improved 
 and increased by his descendants. The fourth generation of these de- 
 scendants was represented in chief by two brothers, his great-great- 
 grandsons, the elder being David Scott, Esq., of Scotstarvet, and the 
 younger Majoi -General John Scott, of Balcomie in Fifeshire, sometime 
 M.P. for that county, and reputed the wealthiest commoner in Scotland. 
 The three daughters of this last, being great heiresses, made high matches, 
 and carried the blood of the old Staggering Statesman, with that of his first 
 wife, Drummond's sister, into remarkable new directions. The eldest, 
 Henrietta Scott, after succeeding to the Scotstarvet estates by the death of 
 her uncle, as well as to much of her father's wealth, married, in 1795, 
 William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, Marquis of Titchfield, who added the 
 name of Scott to his family-name in consequence, and succeeded his father 
 in 1809 as Duke of Portland. She died in 1844, after having been Duchess 
 of Portland for many years ; and one of her sons is the present Duke, an- 
 other having been Lord George Bentinck, Mr. Disraeli's favourite politi- 
 cian, who died in 1848. Of her sisters, one married the ninth Earl of Moray ; 
 and the other married, in 1800, the statesman, George Canning, was made 
 Viscountess Canning after his death in 1827, and had for one of her sons 
 Viscount Canning, Governor-General of India during the Mutiny.
 
 4 68 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 " The History of Scotland from the year 1423 until the year 
 1542 : containing the lives and Reigns of James the L, the II., 
 the III., the IV., the V. With several Memorials of State daring 
 the Reigns of James VI. , and Charles I. By William Drum- 
 mond of Hawthornden. With a Prefatory Introduction by Mr. 
 Hall of Gray's Inn. London, printed by Henry Hills for 
 Rich. Tomlins and himself, and are to be sold at their houses 
 near Py- Corner, mdclv." 
 
 The contents of the volume are these : — (1) The History of the 
 Five Jameses, filling 230 pages out of the total 292 ; (2) Under 
 the heading Mem orials of State, the Paper of 1632 on the Men- 
 teith Earldom case, entitled " Considerations to the Kins?-, " 
 and the Paper of 1635 on the Balmerino case, entitled "An 
 Apologetical Letter," with " An Intended Speech at the West- 
 gate of Edinburgh to King James" (a mistake for King Charles) ; 
 (3) Under the heading Familiar Epistles, a selection of twenty- 
 two of Drummond's Private Letters, including one of those to 
 Ben Jonson ; (4) The Cypress Grove. As, with the exception 
 of the last Essay, none of the contents of the volume had been 
 in print before, there must have been some care in selecting and 
 transmitting the manuscripts. Of the History there had been 
 several copies made, ready for the press, while Drummond was 
 alive ; but the selection of the Memorials and the Letters must 
 have required some searching of his papers. Evidently the 
 intention was to make the volume a pretty complete represen- 
 tation of Drummond's powers in prose. The Irene, the Skia- 
 machia, and other Political Tracts of too flagrant Royalism, were, 
 for obvious reasons, omitted. The " Mr. Hall of Gray's Inn," 
 who writes the Prefatory Introduction to the whole volume, 
 seems to have been some lawyer employed by the publishers to 
 see the volume through the press. His Introduction consists 
 mainly of a short Sketch of Scottish History from the time of 
 Robert Bruce to the point at which Drummond's narrative 
 begins ; but at the end there is a page of biographical particulars 
 about Drummond, with an announcement of his " Poe?ns "
 
 HIS 1 'OR 1 ' OF I 'HE FIVE J. I MESES. 469 
 
 as forthcoming. Mr. Hall, who dates " From my Chamber, 
 Jan. 24, 1654-5," concludes with a hint that he had been ill- 
 paid for his trouble. 
 
 It had been thought right, it appears, that Drummond's son, 
 the young laird of Hawthornden (not yet married, nor indeed 
 quite of age), should co-operate with Scotstarvet in the produc- 
 tion ; and, accordingly, in some copies there is this dedication 
 of the book by young Drummond to his uncle, Scotstarvet, 
 representing the nephew as the editor, and the uncle as only the 
 patron : — 
 
 " To the Right Honourable Sir John Scot of Scots-Tarvet, 
 Knight, late Director of his Majestie's Chancellarie, and one of 
 the Lords of his Majestie's most Honourable Privy Council, 
 Session, and Exchequer.— —My Lord, These few collections 
 of the innocent results of my late Father his idle hours I thought 
 good to gather and preserve, at the desire and for the satisfac- 
 tion of his friends, being induced thereto not out of any vain- 
 glory of ourselves, but to preserve him in some sort alive to us 
 by that same birth of his soul which cannot die but by our un- 
 kindness. I would present [them] to your Lordship's patrocinie, 
 as well for the affection you carry toward the Muses, as for the 
 near relation you have to the Author, — as being yours, Will. 
 Drummond." 
 
 This is, at length, the place for the notice of Drummond's 
 History of Scotland under the Five Jameses which we promised 
 when the book became due. It had been begun, as we saw, 
 in 1633. Continued in a leisurely manner, and with interrup- 
 tions, it had been finished, there is reason to think, by 1644 ; 
 several transcripts of it had been made, by means of which 
 some notion of it had got about in Drummond's lifetime ; but 
 not till now, in 1655, when Drummond had been dead six 
 years, was it submitted to public judgment. Although, how- 
 ever, it is bv far the most ambitious of Drummond's writ- 
 ings, and equal in bulk of print to all the rest put together, it 
 need detain us but a moment. For, unfortunately, it is a per- 
 formance of very little value. Had Drummond, living as he
 
 47 o DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 did so near to the time of the Jameses, explored the materials 
 which then doubtless existed — had he searched and studied till 
 he himself had distinctly pictured old Scottish society as it had 
 been, seen the physiognomies of the chief men and women that 
 moved in it, understood the sequence of events, and felt sure he 
 could tell the true story — we should have known a great deal 
 more of the Scotland of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 
 than we ever shall know now, and Sir Walter would have had 
 less to do in his wonderful craft on that subject, or would have 
 done it differently. But Drummond had no such conception of 
 the business of a historian. To take what came to hand in any 
 easily accessible form — the mere first tea-leaves, let us say, that 
 had already yielded three or four infusions calling themselves 
 Histories ; to get from these, by his art as a stylist, yet another 
 weak dilution, which he could tinge with his doctrine of kingly 
 prerogative ; thus, in the guise of a new History, to inculcate 
 the same Drummondism in politics which he had expounded 
 more openly in his pamphlets : such was Drummond's method, 
 and such his purpose. Even the literary ability shown in the 
 execution of the task is not great. There is nothing graphic 
 in the book; you are in a haze as you read ; you cannot, except 
 at a point or two, discern a group of faces, or see things 
 happening. By way of specimens, I had thought of giving one 
 or two of the portraits and characters of the Jameses which 
 come at the ends of their Lives. But it is not worth while. 
 They are not portraits at all ; they are only pretences at such by 
 the use of a few faint phrases and epithets. If on any of them 
 Drummond might have been expected to bestow pains, surely 
 it was on that of the Poet-King, James I. of Scotland, the son 
 of Annabella Drummond. Though the reign of this King lies 
 farthest back of the five, his personal portrait might even yet, 
 with the materials we have, be sketched as vividly and as truly 
 as that of any sovereign of the Scottish list. That Drummond 
 had a fascination for this Poet-King we have already seen ; and 
 that he looked with some special complacency, when his His-
 
 HISTORY OF THE FIVE JAMESES. 471 
 
 tory was finished, on that part of it which consisted of this 
 King's Life, appears from a passage in his Dedication of the 
 work to the Earl of Perth. " It may seem strange," he there says, 
 " that I, who the most part of my life have been writing about 
 " small things in verse, should adventure to write about so many 
 " great and weighty affairs in prose ; but what could not the love 
 " I carry to your Lordship's family make me attempt to do, and 
 " the virtues of so high and great a Prince as King James I., 
 " descended of your Lordship's house ? If we believe some 
 " schoolmen, that the souls of the departed have some dark 
 "knowledge of the actions done upon Earth which concern 
 " their good or evil, what solace then will this bring to James L, 
 " that after two hundred years he hath had one of his mother's 
 " name and race that renewed his fame and actions in the world !" 
 After this, Drummond's account of the Poet-King's reign is 
 peculiarly disappointing. Indeed, all in all, no one need look 
 into this book of Drummond's with any hope of historical in- 
 struction. The single pleasing thing about it is the flowing and 
 somewhat ornate style, especially in those imaginary speeches 
 which Drummond, after Livy's fashion, introduces occasionally 
 as a means of explaining the state of the situation. These 
 are, I think, the best parts of the book ; one of the most inte- 
 resting of them is a fine plea for Toleration of Religious 
 Difference, inserted in the Life of James V. ;»but they are 
 generally more remarkable for their rhetoric than for their 
 insight. They furnish perhaps one lesson. Drummond, standing 
 so much nearer to those reputedly savage old times than we do, 
 could suppose in them, we see, the same sentiments of just and 
 honourable which he and his contemporaries acknowledged, 
 and never dreamt of anything in their procedure so utterly 
 rugged and archaic, so utterly savage after all, but that his own 
 normal way of thinking could interpret it, and his usual sweet 
 style manage the narration. Was he not here a little, though 
 not altogether, in the right ? 
 
 The volume of Drummond's Poetry, announced in the
 
 47 2 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 introduction to the Prose Volume, made its appearance some 
 months later, at the shop of one of the publishers of that 
 volume. It is an octavo of 224 pages, with this title : — 
 
 " Poems by that most famous Wit, William Drummond of 
 
 Hawthornden. 
 
 Ai 'as prima canit Veneres, postrema Triwnphos. 
 
 London : Printed for Richard Tomlins, at the Sun and Bible, 
 neare Pye-Corner. 1656." 
 
 The volume, which is not very correctly printed, has another por- 
 trait of Drummond prefixed, and consists of a collection of all or 
 most of the poems that had been previously printed, with the 
 addition of about sixty Sonnets, Madrigals, Epitaphs, or other 
 brief scraps, some of them evidently juvenile, that had been 
 furnished from among Drummond's papers. One of the added 
 pieces is a translation of some Latin verses of Scotstarvet's. For 
 the production of this volume too a London editor had been 
 employed ; and we know more of him than of Mr. Hall, the 
 editor of the prose volume. 
 
 He was no other than Edward Phillips, Milton's elder nephew. 
 After having been educated wholly by his uncle during 
 eight or nine years of his boyhood, he had gone to Oxford 
 in 1649 ; but he had left that University in 165 1 without taking 
 a degree, and he was now, at the age of six-and-twenty, earning 
 a livelihood by teaching and literary hack-work, occasionally 
 looking in upon his uncle at his house in Petty France, West- 
 minster. Milton being now in the fourth year of his total 
 blindness, the duties of his Latin Secretaryship to Cromwell, 
 though he still attended to some of them, were necessarily per- 
 formed in large part by deputy ; Paradise Lost, though con- 
 templated, had not been begun ; but various prose-compilations 
 were on hand, in which Milton, who now depended wholly 
 on amanuenses, found the occasional visits of his nephew and 
 old pupil useful. His other nephew and pupil, John Phillips, 
 Edward's younger brother, had until recently been more about
 
 POEMS EDITED BY PHILLIPS. 473 
 
 him, if not still a member of his household ; but he too had 
 started on life for himself, also as a literary hack. 
 
 How Scotstarvet's bundles of Drummond's copy, or the 
 proof-sheets from that copy, came into the hands of one of the 
 nephews of the Protector's blind Latin Secretary, nobody can 
 tell. Probably Scotstarvet had nothing to do with the choice of 
 an editor, and it was a mere arrangement of the publisher 
 Tomlins. The accident, however, is interesting. Milton, it 
 can be proved, knew Drummond's poetry well, had always 
 liked it, and had been disposed to regard Drummond as, on the 
 whole, a man of as true a poetic vein as there had been in 
 Britain through that age of merely minor Poetry, mingled with 
 much metrical effort miscalled Poetry, which was spanned by 
 the Laureateship of Ben Jonson. Edward Phillips, therefore, 
 in editing Drummond, brought to the task an opinion of 
 Drummond pre-acquired from his uncle. There may even be 
 some trace of Milton's way of speaking about Drummond, 
 though with obvious exaggerations, in the prose preface and set 
 of commendatory verses prefixed to the volume by Phillips, and 
 the furnishing of which, with the revision of the proof-sheets 
 (rather ill done), constituted his editorship. The prose preface 
 runs as follows : — 
 
 "To say that these Poems are the effects of a genius the 
 most polite and verdant that ever the Scottish nation produced, 
 although it be a commendation not to be rejected (for it is well 
 known that that country hath afforded many rare and admirable 
 wits), yet it is not the highest that may be given him ; for, 
 should I affirm that neither Tasso, nor Guarini, nor any of the . 
 most neat and refined spirits of Italy, nor even the choicest of 
 our English Poets, can challenge to themselves any advantage 
 above him, it could not be judged any attribute superior to 
 what he deserves, nor shall I think it any arrogance to maintain 
 that among all the several fancies that in these times have 
 exercised the most nice and curious judgments there hath not 
 come forth anything that deserves to be welcomed into the 
 world with greater estimation and applause. And, though he 
 hath not had the fortune to be so generally famed abroad as
 
 4 j 4 DRL \MMOXD OF HA IVTH0RXDE.\ '. 
 
 many others, perhaps of less esteem, yet this is a consideration 
 that cannot at all diminish, but rather advance, his credit ; for, 
 by breaking forth of obscurity, he will attract the higher ad- 
 miration, and, like the sun emerging from a cloud, appear at 
 length with so much the more forcible rays. Had there been 
 nothing extant of him but his History of Scotland, consider but 
 the language, how florid and ornate it is, consider the order 
 and the prudent conduct of the story, and you will rank him 
 in the number of the best writers, and compare him even with 
 Thuanus himself. Neither is he less happy in his Verse than 
 Prose ; for here are all those graces met together that conduce 
 anything towards the making up of a complete and perfect 
 poet — a decent and becoming majesty, a brave and admirable 
 height, and a wit so flowing that Jove himself never drank 
 nectar that sparkled with a more sprightly lustre."' 
 
 Notwithstanding the hyperbole in these passages, there is a 
 certain fitness in the expressions and epithets ; and some of 
 them, especially that in the opening sentence, — " a genius the 
 most polite and verdant that ever the Scottish nation produced," 
 — are what Milton himself might have dictated, if indeed the 
 words are not his. Phillip's commendatory verses, which are 
 very far from being Miltonic, repeat this form of compliment, 
 but again spoil it by hyperbole : — 
 
 " Never brake forth 
 From climes so near the Bear so bright a worth ; 
 And I believe the Caledonian bowers 
 Are full as pleasant and as rich in flowers 
 As Tempe e'er was famed, since they have nourished 
 A wit the most sublime that ever flourished " 
 
 Besides Phillips's verses, the volume is introduced by Arthur 
 Johnston's Epigram in praise of Drummond, by Archbishop 
 Spotswood's English poem of eulogy, and also by a very pretty 
 set of verses signed " Man- Oxlie of Morpet." These must 
 have been supplied by Scotstarvet, whose connexion with the 
 volume is farther commemorated by a set of Latin Sapphics 
 included among the Commendatory Poems, signed "D.F.," and 
 entitled "Jocund Scoto Scototarvatio, equiti pr<z!ustri, de Liter-
 
 POEMS EDITED BY PHILLIES. 475 
 
 at urn of time merito" In these, after high praise of Scotstarvet 
 as a veteran jurisconsult, mention is made of his sen-ices to 
 Scotland in the matter of Blaeu's Atlas, and in the publication 
 of the Poems of the Scottish Latinists; and, in conclusion, he is 
 thanked for his care of Drummond's relics. But, indeed, some 
 copies of the volume contain an express Dedication to Scots- 
 tarvet, in these words : — 
 
 " To the Right Honourable, Sir John Scot of Scots-Tarvet, 
 Knight [&c] — Sir, Having received these ingenious Poems 
 from your Honour, I could not more fitly have presented 
 them to any than to yourself; it being most just that the 
 noblest Wit of Scotland should fly to the patronage of the 
 greatest Maecenas of wit and learning that the nation affords. 
 Be pleased therefore to accept the humble endeavours to 
 serve you of T. R." 
 
 In 1659, or just before the Restoration, there was a new- 
 London Edition of Drummond's Collected Poems, or possibly 
 only a sale of the remaining copies of Phillips's Edition, with 
 the dedication to Scotstarvet repeated, and with this new title- 
 page : " The Most Elegant and Elaborate Poems of that great 
 "Court Wit, Mr. William Drummond, whose labours, both in 
 " Verse and Prose, being heretofore so precious to Prince Henry 
 " and to King Charles, shall live and flourish in all ages, whiles 
 " there are men to read them or wit and judgment to approve 
 " them : London, Printed for William Rands, Bookseller, at his 
 "house over against the Bear Tavern in Fleet Street, 1659." 
 After this (perhaps a booksellers device to force off a remainder) 
 we do not find much trace, for a good many years, of the 
 tradition of Drummond in England. 
 
 In Scotland, of course, his reputation continued to be most 
 cherished among those who looked back with affection on the 
 political part he had taken. After the Restoration, when 
 Episcopacy was re-established, these were no longer the sup- 
 pressed minority, but the triumphant Tory party, in possession 
 of the Government for Charles II., oppressing and per-
 
 476 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 securing in their turn the relics of the ultra-Presbyterian 
 Covenanters or Whigs, and rehabilitating as well as they could 
 both the properties and the memories of Scots who had suffered 
 for their Royalism. Hawthornden, one finds, had begun by 
 this time to be visited on Drummond's account. There is a 
 copy of verses written on the occasion of such a visit by no less 
 a person than Sir George Mackenzie, the King's Advocate, 
 " the Eluidy Mackenyie " of popular Presbyterian record, by 
 whose relentless rigour in his office so many poor Covenanters 
 were brought to the scaffold between 1677 and 1688. Here 
 is what the " Bluidy Mackenyie " wrote in Hawthornden 
 House at the very time when some of his Presbyterian victims 
 may have been hanging in the Grassmarket : — 
 
 " Here lived that Poet whose immortal name 
 Was crowned by laurels and adorned by fame, 
 Whom every man next to himself did love, 
 Who durst be loyal, and, what's more, reprove 
 The vices of that base rebellious age : 
 His was a Poet's, theirs a Tyrant's, rage. 
 Each man him then his neighbour wished to be, 
 And we now grieve that we did not him see. 
 They did his wit, we do his works, admire, 
 And each young spark does kindle at his fire ; 
 Or, which is more, he poems can beget 
 On my old Muse, though now much past the date." 
 
 We come now to a very curious posthumous incident in 
 Drummond's biography. About the time when " Bluidy 
 Mackenyie" wrote the foregoing, or several years before the 
 Revolution of 1688, there was in circulation in Edinburgh a 
 Macaronic or Dog-Latin Poem, of about 170 Hexameter lines, 
 which does not seem to have ever been heard of in Drummond's 
 life-time, but which was now attributed to him and universally 
 accepted as his. As soon as it was printed it seems to have 
 become excessively popular, especially among the lawyers of 
 the Parliament House, who have always kept up a traditional 
 literature of facet 'ice, much of it the production of wits of their 
 own body. The earliest known copy of the thing, purporting
 
 THE POLEMO-MIDDINIA. 477 
 
 to be " Reprintat " at Edinburgh in 1684, bears this title 
 " Breviuscula et Competidiuscula Tellatio dc Storia memorabili 
 FecJitcc mervelabilis qua fuit inter Muckreillios et Horsboyos atque 
 Ladceos, &-r., in hoc Libellulo, cujus inscriptio famosa hcec est, 
 Polemo-Medinia inter Vitarvam et Nebernam, p/acidc ef 
 jocose tractatur? One knows not how many copies, or hun- 
 dreds of copies, of the thing, in this or other forms, may have 
 been laughed over in Scotland during the next seven years ; 
 but in 1 69 1 it had the honour of a new appearance, in more 
 scholarly fashion, from the Oxford University Press. A manu- 
 script copy of it, as well as a printed Edinburgh copy, had 
 come into the hands of Edmund Gibson, of Queen's College, 
 then a rising scholar of two-and-twenty years of age, immersed 
 in Anglo-Saxon studies, and preparing his edition of the Saxon 
 Chronicle with a Latin translation, but afterwards more widely 
 known as a learned ecclesiastical antiquary, and as Bishop 
 successively of Lincoln (17 15) and London (1723). He 
 seems to have been attracted to the thing by a philological 
 interest, on account of the mixture in it of dog-Latin with 
 homely Scottish words of genuine old English origin ; and he 
 published a new edition of it, together with a new edition of 
 the* old Scottish Poem, Christ's Kirk on the Green, supposed to 
 be by the Scottish James Y., prefixing a Latin Essay on 
 Macaronic Poetry generally, and illustrating both the poems 
 with elaborate Latin notes. The book so edited — a very thin 
 quarto — bears the title " Polemo-Middinia : Carmen Macaroni- 
 cum, Auiore Gidiclmo Drummundo, Seoto-Britanno. Accedit 
 Jacobi id nominis Quinti, Regis Scotorum, Cantilena Rustica 
 vidgo insa-ipta ' Christ's Kirk on the Green.' Recensuit, 
 noiisque illustravit E. G. Oxonii, e Theatro She/doniano, anna 
 Dom. 1 69 1." Here, it will be observed, the piece is openly 
 ascribed to Drummond. Whether it is Drummond's or not 
 may be more properly discussed after we have given some 
 account of it. 
 
 " The Midden-Fecht," or, more extendedly, " The Midden-
 
 478 
 
 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 Fecht between Vitarva and Neberna" may pass at a first glance 
 as the translation of the dog-Latin title of the piece ; but, after 
 it is read and studied, one finds that " Vitarva " stands, by 
 personification, for the " Tarvet " or " Scotstarvet" property in 
 Fifeshire, and " Neberna " for the " Newbarns " or " Barns " 
 property in the same county, and that the title, consequently, 
 might run thus : " The Midden-Fecht between Scotstarvet and 
 Newbarns" But we may be more precise still. The Scots- 
 tarvet estate or barony, as we have seen, reached from Tarvet 
 proper, which is near Cupar, in the centre of Fifeshire, to the 
 sea-coast of the county on its East Nook, where the parishes of 
 Crail and Kilrenny meet ; and, while one of the residences of 
 the Scotstarvet family had continued to be the original inland 
 mansion or tower of Tarvet, another of their residences, it 
 not their favourite Fifeshire residence, was that of Thirdpart, 
 in Kilrenny parish, on the East Nook coast. Here, accord- 
 ingly, they had for their near neighbours those Cunninghams of 
 Barns of whom we have heard so much in Drummond's life, 
 and whose house and estate of Barns, called also Newbarns, 
 were in the parish of Crail. I find, indeed, that the Barns or 
 Newbarns property was ultimately (when the Cunninghams had 
 died out, or had otherwise vacated it) acquired by the Scots of 
 Scotstarvet, and included in their general Fifeshire barony, so 
 that their "chief seats" came to be set down in books as 
 " Scotstarvet (i.e. Tarvet proper), Thirdpart, and Barns, all in 
 the county of Fife." To all appearance, however, it was before 
 this annexation of Barns to Scotstarvet, and while the Cunning- 
 hams of Barns were still extant as a distinct family, with the 
 Scots of Scotstarvet for their near neighbours at Thirdpart, 
 that the incident of the Midden-Fecht occurred. In short, as I 
 interpret, it was nothing else than a scrimmage between Scots- 
 tarvet's people at Thirdpart or its neighbourhood (personified in 
 the vixen Vitarva, for the Lady of Scotstarvet) and Cunningham's 
 people of Barns or Newbarns (personified in the vixen Neberna, 
 for the Lady of Newbarns). Hence The Midden-Fecht between
 
 7 II F. P0LEM0-MIDDIX1A . 
 
 479 
 
 the Scotstarvet folk of Thirdpart and tlie Cunningham folk of 
 Newborns may be the most exact explanatory title, both for those 
 who cannot read the poem itself, and for those who can. The 
 former, however, are at a disadvantage, in which we can give 
 them but small further assistance. 
 
 It was a great theme, and the poet first calls upon all the 
 Fifeshire muses to aid him, and all the Fifeshire populations to 
 listen :— 
 
 " Nymphaa quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea, 
 Seu vos Pittenwema tenent, seu Crailia crofta, 
 Sive Anstraea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis, 
 Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et sketta pererrant 
 Per costam, et scopulos lobster manifootus in udis 
 Creepat, et in mediis ludit whitenius undis ; 
 Et vos, Skipperii, soliti qui per mare breddum 
 Valde procul lanchare foras iterumque redire, 
 Linquite skellatas botas, shippasque picatas, 
 Whistlantesque simul fechtam memorate blodaeam, 
 Fechtam terribilem, quam marvellaverat omnis 
 Banda Deum, quoque Nympharum Cockelshelearum, 
 Maia ubi sheepifeda et solgosifera Bassa 
 Swellant in pelago, cum Sol bootatus Edenum 
 Postabat radiis madidis et shouribus atris."* 
 
 The cause of the battle was a dispute as to right of way. 
 Vitarva, determined to assert her right of transit through the 
 territories of Neberna, summons all the Scotstarvet people 
 together, and instructs them, under the leadership of her fore- 
 man, or grieve, Geordie Aikenhead, to drive their loaded 
 muck-carts, in the most ostentatious fashion, through the crofts 
 of the Newbarns folk, and past their very windows. The heroes 
 are thus enumerated and described : — 
 
 " Hie aderant Geordie Akenhedius et little Johnus, 
 Et Jamie Richaeus, et stout Michel Hendersonus, 
 Qui gillatis pulchris ante alios dansare solebat, 
 Et bobbare bene, et lassas kissare bonasas, 
 Duncan Oliphantus, valde stalwartus, et ejus 
 Filius eldestus, jolyboyus atque oldmoudus, 
 
 * Pittenweem, Crail, and Anstruther are coast towns in the east of Fife ; 
 May (where sheep feed) and Bass (the haunt of Solan geese) are islands in 
 the Firth of Forth ; Edenum is Edinburgh.
 
 4 8o DRUMMOND OF II A WTHORNDEN. 
 
 Qui pleugham longo gaddo drivare solebat, 
 
 Et Rob Gib, wantonus homo, atque Oliver Hutchin, 
 
 Et plooky-faced Watty Strang, atque in-kneed Elshender 
 
 Atkin, ' 
 Et Willy Dick, heavy-factus homo, pigerrimus omnium, 
 Qui tulit in pileo magnum rubrumque favorem, 
 Valde lethus pugnare, sed hunc Corngrevius heros 
 Noutheadum vocavit, atque ilium forsit ad arma. 
 Insuper hie aderant Tom Taylor et Tom Nicolsonus, 
 Et Tomie Gilchristus et fool Jockie Robisonus 
 Andrew Alshinderus, et Jamie Thomsonus, et unus 
 Norland -bornus homo, valde valde Anti-Covenanter, 
 Nomine Gordonus, valde blackmoudus, et alter 
 (Heu pudet, ignoro nomen) slavery-beardius homo. 
 Qui pottas dichtavit et assas jecerat extra." 
 
 When these men of Tarvet, marshalled by Vitarva herself, had 
 invaded the territories of Newbarns, with their muck-carts in 
 the most provoking array, and a piper going before them play- 
 ing the Battle of Harlaw by way of challenge,* this was the 
 consequence : — 
 
 " Tunc Neberna furens, yettam ipsa egressa, vidensque 
 Muck-cartas transire viam, valde angria facta, 
 Haud tulit affrontam tantam, verum, agmine facto, 
 Convocat extemplo boroughmannos, atque ladasos, 
 Jackmannumque, hiremannos, pleughdrivsters atque pleugh- 
 
 mannos, 
 Tumblantesque simul reekoso ex kitchine boyos, 
 Hunc qui gruelias scivit bene lickere plettas, 
 Hunc qui dirtiferas tersit cum dishcloute dishas ; 
 Et saltpannifumos, et widebricatos fisheros, 
 Hellaeosque etiam salteros duxit ab antris, 
 Coalheughos nigri girnantes more Divelli ; 
 
 " " Incipit Hariri cunctis sonare Batellum " is the proper printing of the 
 line describing the conduct of the Tarvet people as the muck-carts invade 
 Newbarns; but the Oxford philologist, printing " harlcsi" with a small 
 initial letter, was led into a comical instance of misplaced ingenuity in ac- 
 counting for the word. "Vestigium hujus vocis [harlcei) " he says " est in 
 Islandico hardlya, et per contractionem harla, perquam, valde, fortiter." He 
 had never heard of Harlaw in Aberdeenshire, where the forces of the 
 Eastern Scottish Lowlands met Donald of the Isles in 141 1, defeated him, 
 and saved Scotland from being reconverted into a Celtic kingdom. The 
 Battle of Harlaw continued to be, for three centuries, the theme of Scottish 
 ballads ; and Scottish schoolboys had a game of mimic war called the 
 Battle of Harlaw, in which they divided themselves into Teutons and Celts
 
 77/ A' POLEMO-MIDDINIA. 
 
 481 
 
 Lifeguardamqe sibi saevas vocat improba lassas, 
 Maggseam, magis doctam milkare cowasas, 
 Et doctam sweepare flooras ct sternere bcddas, 
 Quseque novit spinnare ct longas ducere threddas, 
 Nansseam, drives bene quae keepaverat omnes, 
 Yellantemque Elpen, langoberdamque*Anapellam, 
 Terribilemque simul Gillam, gleydamque Kataeam." 
 
 At the head of this collected troop of Newbarns warriors and 
 heroines, Neberna, armed with a rusty gully, faces the invaders, 
 and addresses them : — 
 
 " Ite, ait, ilglaei feloes ; si quis mode- posthac 
 Muckifer has nostras tentet crossare fenestras, 
 Juro ego quod ejus longum extrahabo thropellum, 
 Et totam rivabo faciem, luggasque gulaso hoc 
 Ex capite cuttabo ferox, totumque videbo 
 Heartbloodum fluere in terrain. " 
 
 The Vitarvians, though much frightened by this speech, sum- 
 mon up courage, and the battle takes place on a convenient 
 midden. It is described briefly as dreadful on both sides, no 
 one yielding a foot-breadth for some time ; but at last the 
 attention is concentrated on the encounter of one brave Vitar- 
 vian muck-drivester with Neberna herself: — 
 
 " Turn vero e medio muckdrivster prosilit unus, 
 Gallantaeus homo, et graipam minatur in ipsam 
 Nebernam, quoniam misere scaldaverat omnes, 
 Dirtavitque totam petticotam gutture thicko, 
 Perlineasque ejus skirtas, silkamque gowneeam, 
 Vasquineamque rubram mucksherda begariavit." 
 
 In this crisis, one of the Newbarns lasses, Gilly, advances to the 
 rescue of her mistress, and, filling her fist with a clod of muck, 
 dashes it twice with all her force against the eyes and nose of 
 the man of Tarvet. 
 
 " Obstupuit bumbaizdus homo, backumque repente 
 Turnavit veluti nasus bloodasset, et O God 
 Ter quater exclamat, et O quam ssepe sneezavit !" 
 
 This is the turning-point of the victory for the Nebernians ; for. 
 
 though the Corngrieve tries to rally the Vitarvians, a needle 
 
 2 H
 
 482 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 judiciously administered to him by a Nebernian seamstress 
 while he is in the act of speaking, changes the speech into a 
 call for truce and a howl of private pain (" Barlafumle ! clamat, 
 et dixit ' Dais, God /"') The Vitarvians then retreat, 
 whether with or without their muck-carts is not said. 
 
 " Quid multis ? Sic fraya fuit, sic guisa peracta est ; 
 Una nee interea spillata est droppa cruoris." 
 
 -Such is the Polemo-Middinia, first printed with Drummond's 
 name in 1691, always from that date included among his poems, 
 and perhaps more popular with a considerable class of his 
 readers than any of the rest. Only of late has the question 
 been raised whether the piece is Drummond's after all. But it 
 is a very proper question. 
 
 The reasons for doubt are (1) the absence of all reference in 
 Drummond's life-time, or immediately afterwards, to such a 
 piece as having been written by him, and of any draft or trace of 
 it among the extant Hawthornden MSS., and (2) the total 
 unlikeness of the piece to anything else known to have come 
 from Drummond. In expansion of the second reason, it may 
 be said, and very truly, that Drummond's known writings are 
 prevailingly serious, pensive, melancholy even, and fastidiously 
 nice in style and form, and that, on any evidence which they 
 afford, the very last quality that would be predicated of him is 
 that of humour proper. Occasionally there is wit, or even a 
 liking for the facetious, as when he books a clever jest he has 
 heard, or employs the ludicrous moderately for some satirical 
 or epigrammatic purpose. But the Polemo-Middinia is a piece of 
 humour and nothing else — sheer farcical humour, coarse Fife- 
 shire fun for its own sake (the coarseness greater than appears 
 in our summary), and without a tinge of purpose of any kind, 
 moral or political. Can Drummond have been the author of such 
 a piece ? 
 
 The arguments on the other side seem to be the following : — 
 (1) It would not be a safe rule to conclude that a particular
 
 THE POLEMO-MIDDINIA. 483 
 
 piece cannot have been written by an author because of its unlike- 
 ness to all or most of his acknowledged writings. Some writers 
 who are conspicuously grave, lofty, and fastidious, in all they 
 give to the world, abound privately in humour, and prefer fun 
 and the interchange of ludicrous anecdote to any other form of 
 conversation ; and it is only necessary to suppose that, in some 
 moment of frankness or whim, such a writer should puzzle those 
 who do not know him privately by an outbreak of this unsus- 
 pected part of the real Adam. (2) Not ohly may a good deal 
 of wit, and a sense of the humorous, be detected in Drnmmond's 
 writings, if it is sought for in the smaller scraps and jottings 
 taken from his common-place books ; but the distinct tradi- 
 tion about him personally is that he could be very jocose in 
 company. " He never thought Religion consisted in peevish- 
 "ness or sourness of mind," says Bishop Sage : "on the contrary, 
 " his humour was very jovial and cheerful, especially among his 
 " friends and comrades, with whom he sometimes took a 
 " bottle only ad hilaritatem . . . He was very smart and 
 " witty in his sayings and repartees, and had a most excellent 
 " talent in extemporary versifying, above the most part of his 
 " contemporaries." Two instances are given, neither of them 
 worth repeating. The fact need not be doubted. (3.) 
 There is nothing in the Polemo-Middinia itself absolutely 
 inconsistent Avith the idea that Drummond was the author, but, 
 on the contrary, something that would point to him. From the 
 fact that one of the combatants is described as "norland-bornus 
 homo, valde valde Anticovenanter, nomine Gordonus," it is 
 clear that the piece must have been written after 163S, or 
 perhaps after 1643 ; and there are other allusions in it suggest- 
 ing that it was written within the last ten years of Drummond's 
 life. Then who more likely to have written of the Fight 
 between the Scotstarvet folk and the Newbarns folk than Drum- 
 mond ? If he was not the author, one would be bound to find 
 the author in some one else of the Scotstarvet connexion, if not 
 in Scotstarvet himself. (4.) The universal ascription of the
 
 484 DRUMMOND OF IIAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 piece to Drummond about 1690 must go a great way. His 
 eldest son and many of his friends were then alive ; and no 
 question on the subject appeared among them, The Oxford 
 editor, Gibson, who had a manuscript before him of unknown 
 date, had no doubt ; for, though he leaves the authorship of 
 Christ's Kirk on the Green uncertain, speaking of it as 
 " supposed" to be by James V., he inserts no such caution 
 respecting the Polemo-Middinia. Further, though it is not till 
 about 1690 that we are sure Drummond's name was associated 
 with the piece, we cannot be sure that it was not in private, or 
 very local, circulation in MS. as Drummond's long before 
 that time. Finally, may not the difficulty which arises 
 from the absence of all trace of the Polemo-Middinia among 
 the Hawthornden MSS. be met by supposing that it was a 
 jocular waif of Drummond's, written on some visit to Scotstarvet 
 and perhaps in Scotstarvet's company, when the incident it cele- 
 brates was fresh, and which, left in Fifeshire, was either forgotten, 
 or not thought fit for the purposes of the London Edition of 
 Drummond's Poems in 1656, but was afterwards gradually 
 divulged by private copying till there arose a demand for it in 
 print ? 
 
 I am not satisfied ; but, as I see no way to a positive decision, 
 so I must let the matter rest. Certain it is that for the next 
 twenty or five-and-twenty years after the appearance of the 
 first known Edinburgh print or reprint of the Polemo-Middinia, 
 and of Gibson's more learned Oxford Edition, nothing else 
 bearing Drummond's name was in such perpetual demand in 
 Scotland. Thus, in 17 n, Bishop Sage, who had never heard 
 any doubt of its being Drummond's, and speaks of it as 
 " a sheet he wrote for diverting himself and his friends," adds : 
 " It is reprinted here [in Edinburgh] almost every year, and is 
 " very witty and diverting, and suits mightily with the humour 
 " and genius of the nation." In that very year, however, Bishop 
 Sage himself was engaged in the production of a work intended 
 to recall Drummond to the minds of his countrymen as much
 
 EDITION OF HIS WHOLE WORKS. 485 
 
 more than the author of a popular piece of Macaronic Poetry. 
 "7he Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden: consisting 
 of those which were formerly printed, and those which were 
 designed for the press, now published from the authors original 
 copies. Edinburgh: Printed by James Watson, in Craig's Closs, 
 17 1 1 :" such is the title of a folio volume of 350 pages, with a 
 clumsily engraved portrait prefixed, which is still the only 
 collective edition of Drummond' s whole Works. 
 
 In the circumstances of this publication we still note the 
 fact that Drummond's reputation had come down most kindly 
 among the Episcopalian and High Tory section of his country- 
 men. The Restoration period, with its forced reimposition 
 of Episcopacy on the Kirk and the dread of Claverhouse 
 and the " Bluidy Mackenyie," had passed away ; and, since the 
 accession of William and Mary in 1689, Scotland had again 
 rejoiced in the recovery of that Presbyterian system for which 
 she had so long straggled and suffered. Again, in its turn, 
 Episcopacy was under a ban ; for, though' William would fain 
 have arranged for some distinct toleration of Episcopalian dis- 
 sent among the re-Presbyterianized Scots, the mood of the 
 people and the traditions of their Presbyterian system were too 
 strong. Episcopacy was hunted out of the Universities and 
 Schools ; those of the laity, in the Southern and Western shires 
 at least, who persisted in Episcopalian worship were exposed to 
 popular obloquy ; the Episcopal Clergy were now a persecuted 
 residue, driven from place to place, and often put to the 
 severest shifts in the exercise of their office. So it had con- 
 tinued through the reign of William, and after the accession of 
 Anne in 1702, and even after the completed Union of Scotland 
 and England in 1707, though gradually with more of a tendency 
 to toleration. Altogether the Scottish Episcopalians in Queen 
 Anne's reign were a very interesting and well-marked portion of 
 the Scottish population, scattered in the South and West, but 
 numerous in the North and Northern Highlands, with many 
 men of talent among them, and keeping up traditions, both
 
 486 DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 political and literary, from the past of Scotland, very different 
 from those which stirred the souls of Scotsmen of the type of 
 " douce David Deans." The martyred monarch Charles I. and 
 his faithful Cavaliers ; the heroic memory of Montrose ; the 
 horrible Interregnum of Noll Cromwell and his crew of mis- 
 creants ; the Blessed Restoration of the jolly King Charles II.; 
 the gallant Claverhouse and his splendid rough-ridings among 
 the canting Whigs ; confusion to the memory of the Dutchman ; 
 long life and better days yet for the King over the water; 
 down with all sour Religion, and up with the right Church : 
 such were the phrases and sentiments distinguishing the Scottish 
 Episcopalians from the rest of the nation. 
 
 Naturally it was among these that it became a pious duty, 
 seventy years after Drummond's death, to put forth a complete 
 edition of his works, and assert his claims to be remembered 
 even in the midst of the new Literature of Queen Anne's 
 reign. At all events, it was Bishop John Sage, the chief of 
 the Scottish Episcopalian clergy of his time, that undertook this 
 duty. He had been consecrated as Bishop in 1705, having 
 been a parish-minister in Clasgow before the Revolution, and 
 since then distinguished by his resolute adherence to the dis- 
 established Episcopacy, and the amount of persecution and 
 hardship he had undergone on that account. He had published 
 various works against Presbytery, and also a Life of Gawin 
 Douglas, before he undertook the editorship of Drummond's 
 Works. This, indeed, was the very last of his last occupations, 
 for he died June 7, 17 n, aged fifty-nine, when they had hardly 
 left the press. Llis assistant in the labour was the well-known 
 Scottish scholar, Thomas Ruddiman, then thirty-seven years 
 of age, and assistant-keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edin- 
 burgh ; and Ruddiman's opinions were also decidedly of the 
 Tory colour. Drummond's son, Sir William, then an old gentle- 
 man of seventy-five, took much interest in the publication, 
 and allowed Sage and Ruddiman the freest access to his 
 father's MSS.
 
 EDITION OF HIS WHOLE WORKS. 487 
 
 They did not perform their editorial duties very well. To 
 the Poetical Works, which they placed last in the folio, paged 
 separately, they added, indeed, about forty small pieces never 
 before printed, chiefly scraps of political satire and religious 
 hymns ; and, as they reprinted all that had been previously 
 published in any shape, including the Polemo-Middinia, they 
 did furnish a more perfect edition of Drummond's Poems than 
 had before been accessible, though in a very unhandy form. 
 They took no trouble, however, with arranging, dating, or other- 
 wise elucidating. In the matter of the Prose Works, also, almost 
 the sole merit of the edition is that of enlarged quantity, though 
 the merit in this respect is very great. They gave a better, 
 though less pleasantly printed, text of the History of the Five 
 Jameses than that of the London volume of 1655 ; they reprinted 
 the three papers called Memorials of State, with the twenty- 
 two Familiar Epistles, and the Cypress Grove, included in that 
 edition ; but all the rest, to the extent of a hundred folio pages, 
 was new. For the first time, in this folio of 1711, were pub- 
 lished the Irene, the Skiamachia, and the other political tracts 
 that have been mentioned in this Biography ; and there was 
 also a valuable new selection of letters from or to Drummond, 
 with other miscellaneous scraps, including an abstract of the 
 heads of conversation with Ben Jonson. With few exceptions, 
 however, the editors gave no annotations, but left the pieces to 
 explain themselves — which they never do. Bishop Sage's 
 brief prefixed Life of Drummond is far from unacceptable, but, 
 with the materials he had at hand, might have been much 
 better had any tolerable pains been taken. Neither in that 
 Life nor in the General Preface which opens the volume 
 is there any concealment of the peculiar satisfaction the 
 editors had in remembering Drummond's political opinions. 
 " Our author was a true Tory " is one of the phrases in 
 the Preface. 
 
 A time at length came when Drummond's Toryism could be 
 remembered with milder or more philosophical interest, and
 
 488 DRU ALMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN. 
 
 both Whigs and Tories could agree in recollecting him, all in 
 all, as indubitably the man of most " polite and verdant " 
 literary genius produced by Scotland in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, if not the only Scotsman of that century of any really fine 
 mark in the History of English Literature. 
 
 In 1782 Dr. Abernethy Drummond, already mentioned as 
 not only a successor of Bishop Sage in the Scottish Episcopate, 
 but also the husband of the last direct heiress of Hawthornden, 
 presented all Drummond's manuscripts to the Society of Anti- 
 quaries of Scotland. They remained in the possession of that 
 Society, occasionally referred to, but in the main neglected, and 
 the bulk of them in loose unarranged sheets, till 1827, when 
 they were more properly cared for and assumed the form of 
 fifteen bound Volumes. This Vas owing to the diligence of 
 Mr. David Laing, who had devoted much time to the exami- 
 nation of the MSS., and whose account of them, read to the 
 Society in January 1628, and supplemented in January 1832 
 by his happy discovery of a MS. copy of Drummond's missing 
 Notes of Ben Jonsoiis Conversations at Hawthornden, threw more 
 light on Drummond's Life than all that had been before written 
 about him. Mr. Laing's description of the contents of the 
 fifteen volumes may be given in abridgement. Volumes I — V. 
 consist of several scroll copies of the History of the Five 
 Jameses, and a revised transcript of the same, partly in Drum- 
 mond's hand ; Volume VI. contains copies of the more impor- 
 tant Political Tracts printed in the 17 11 edition of Drummond's 
 Works ; Volumes VII. and VIII. are a Commonplace Book of 
 miscellaneous extracts from books in different languages, with 
 collected anecdotes, epigrams, jests, &c. ; Volume IX. is a 
 register of Drummond's Letters to his various correspondents ; 
 Volume X. consists of scrolls of many of Drummond's Poems, 
 including a good deal that had never been published by him- 
 self or his editors ; Volumes XL and XII. contain scrolls 
 and fragments of papers by Drummond's uncle, William 
 Fowler; Volume XIII. is a collection of Poems and Fragments
 
 THE HAWTHORNDEN MSS. 489 
 
 from various authors ; Volume XIV. consists of miscellaneous 
 law-papers that had belonged to Drummond's father ; and 
 Volume XV. of transcripts of Poems of Dr. Donne in Drum- 
 mond's hand, with other odds and ends. Not content with 
 this description, Mr. Laing supplied a series of extracts of 
 all that he had found most interesting in the previously 
 unpublished portions of the manuscript mass, particularly 
 from Volumes VII., VIIL, IX., and X. Thus, besides recover- 
 ing many miscellaneous particulars about Drummond and his 
 friends, he added thirty-one Letters of Drummond's to those 
 previously published as his Familiar Epistles, and more than 
 fifty short pieces of verse (Sonnets, Madrigals, Epitaphs, and 
 scraps of political epigram) to his previously published Poems. 
 The papers in which Mr. Laing made these valuable additions 
 to the transmitted information about Drummond will be found 
 in Vol. IV. of the Archceologia Scotica or Transactions of the 
 Scottish Society of Antiquaries. 
 
 Advantage was taken of Mr. Laing's investigations in a new 
 Edition of Drummond's Poems, in very handsome quarto form, 
 edited for the Maitland Club in 1832 by Lord Dundrennan 
 and Mr. David Irving. This Edition, carefully arranged, and 
 containing the pieces extracted by Mr. Laing from the Haw- 
 thornden MSS., as well as all that had been published in any 
 previous Edition, must now be accounted the Standard Edition 
 of Drummond's Poetical Works ; but, as only 68 copies of it 
 were printed, and as Drummond's Poetry had for many years 
 been accessible to most people only in the general collections 
 of the British Poets by Anderson and Chalmers, or in an 
 incorrect London reprint of 1790, there have been two more 
 recent Editions of smaller size, one by Mr. Peter Cunningham 
 in 1833, and another by Mr. W. B. Turnbull in 1857. 
 
 Of Drummond's Prose-writings, on the other hand, there has 
 been no collected edition since 17 11. Nor, perhaps, is there 
 any real necessity for another. His Cypress Grove, originally 
 published by himself as a companion to his Poems, is still to
 
 49 o DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. 
 
 be found in their company in most of the subsequent editions 
 of them; his History of 'the Five Jameses is quite as accessible 
 in the two old editions of 1655 and 171 1 as its worth deserves ; 
 and, though his political tracts, his letters, and the few brief 
 essays that make up the rest of his prose writings, do contain 
 matter of interest, it is of the kind that may be presented most 
 fitly in a Biography. It has, accordingly, been one of the 
 objects of this book to reproduce everything of any possible 
 modern interest contained in those long-neglected prose writ- 
 ings of Drummond, and, indeed, to edit them for the first time, 
 after a certain fashion, by exhibiting them severally in their 
 biographical and historical connexions. 
 
 The End. 
 
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