the superior merit of Ben Jonson. Hear what the great Lord Clarendon says of him: "Ben Jonson's name can never be forgotten, having, by his very good learning, and the severity of his nature and manners, reformed the Stage, and indeed the English poetry itself. His natural advantages were, judgment to order and govern fancy, rather than excess of fancy,---his productions being slow, and upon deliberation, yet then abounding with great wit and fancy; and they will live accordingly. And surely, as he did exceedingly exalt the English language in eloquence, propriety, and masculine expressions; so he was the best judge of, and fittest to prescribe rules to poetry and poets, of any man who had lived with, or before him, or since, if Mr Cowley had not made a flight beyond all men, with that modesty, however, as to ascribe much of this to the example and learning of Ben Johnson." His conversation was very good, and with men of most note; and he had for many years an extraordinary kindness for Mr Hyde*, till he found he betook himself to business, which he thought ought never to be preferred before his company. Drummond loved Drayton, and a great and continued friendship subsisted between them, fanned by frequent letters, as appears by his papers, which were presented to the earl of *Earl of Clarendon Buchan by the reverend Dr Abernethy Drummond. I Drayton, sweet ancient bard! his Albion sung, I have a copy of Latin verses addressed, as suppose, to Drayton by Hawthornden, as it is in the hand-writing of the latter, and was found in a bundle of Drayton's letters to Drummond: Dum tua melliflui specto pigmenta libelli At sensum ex pendens tumque altæ pondera mentis Sed mage dædaleo miror te pectore qui sic Drummond's family having been grafted as it were on the royal family of Scotland, by the marriage of king Robert III. and upheld by them, he was a steady royalist during the troubles of Charles I., but does not appear ever to have armed for him. Yet it seems he had been much employed by the king, in his uttermost distress, or by those immediately about his person, as among his papers I found *Sea pieces, canto ii. by Dr Kirkpatrick. a prima cura of king Charles Ist's last appeal to the people of England, with corrections and marginal notes, in the king's own handwriting*. As Drummond had always been a laborious student, and had applied himself equally to history and politics, as to classical learning, his services were frequently rendered by occasional publications, in which, it must be confessed, he was not so happy as in the flights of his muse, which, as Pinkerton justly observes, amply establish his fame. Phillip's (adds he) who compiled his Theatrum Poetarum under Milton's own eye, and may be supposed to express that great writer's opinion, upon many occasions, observes with regret, "the strange neglect into which Drummond's poems had even then fallen. But this was no wonder, when Milton's smaller poems met with the same fate. Now it may be safely said, that if any poems possess a very high degree of that exquisite Doric delicacy, which we so much admire in Comus, and Lycidas, those of Drummond's do. Milton seems to have imitated him, and certainly he had read and admired his works! Drummond was the first who introduced into English that fine Italian vein; and if we had had no Drum * This affecting paper was deposited in the library of the society of Antiquarians at Edinburgh. Lord Buchan has the picture Old Stone painted, of the king at Carisbrook castle. mond, perhaps we should never have seen the delicacies of Comus, Lycidas, Il Penseroso, L'Allegro. Milton has happened to have justice done him by posterity, while Drummond has been neglected." From the familiar letters of Drummond, printed in his works, and from those unpublished, it appears, that his most intimate and frequent correspondents, and friends, besides those already mentioned, were Arabella, or Annabella, countess of Lothian, daughter of Archibald Earl of Argyll, the Earl and Countess of Perth, Robert Carre, Earl of Ancram, Dr Arthur Johnstone, physician to the king, author of that admirable piece of humour, Parerga, a sketch of whose life and writings I hope may sometime or other make its appearance in this Miscellany, Mr Cunningham of Barnes, and a few other relations. In a survey of Drummond's, poems two considerations must be had---the nation in which he lived, and the times in which he wrote. Yet these will be found, not offered to extenuate faults, but, to increase admiration. His thoughts are generally bold and highly poetical; he follows nature, and his verses are delicately harmonious. On the death of Henry prince of Wales in 1612, he wrote an elegy entitled "Tears on the death of Moeliades," a name which that prince had used in all his challenges of martial sport, as the anagram of "Miles a Deo." In this piece, according to Denham's epithets to the Thames, are thoughts as strong, as deep, as gentle, and as full, as any of his or Waller's *. When king James, after his accession to the English throne, returned to Scotland in the year 1617, his arrival was celebrated by every effort of poetical congratulation. Upon this occasion, Drummond composed a panegyrick entitled the "Wandering Muses," in which are found four lines apparently imitated by Pope, "To virgins flowery, &c. t." Of these two poems, it is observable, that they date earlier than any of Waller's, whose first was that to the king on his navy in 1625. The piece in which Denham's greatest powers are exerted, his Cooper's Hill, was not written till the year 1640. The harmony of Drummond, therefore, at a time when those who are usually called the first introducers of a smooth, and polished versification, had not begun to write, is an honour to Hawthornden that should never be forgotten. His excellence hardly known, cannot be enough acknowledged or praised. Drummond and Petrarch had this in their fate alike, that each lamented first the cruelty and then the loss of their mistresses; so that their sonnets are alike naturally divided into two classes, those after, and those before the deaths of their respective sweethearts. Drummond, in several of these compositions, has shown much of the genius and spirit of the * Cursory Remarks, c. Vide Pope's third pastoral. |