William Alexander, Earl of Sterling minor Scottish poet, born about 1567 at Menstrie House, Alva, studied at Glasgow and Leyden, travelled in France, Spain, and Italy, and published his “Tragedie of Darius” (1603), “Aurora” (sonnets, 1604), “Crœsus” (1604), “The Alexandræan” (1605), and “Julius Cæsar” (1607). He was knighted by 1609; in 1613 was attached to the household of Prince Charles; in 1614 was made Master of Requests for Scotland, and published part i. of his huge poem “Doomesday” (part ii. 1637). He received in 1621 the grant of “Nova Scotia” a vast tract in Canada and what now is United States; in 1631 he was made sole printer of King James’s version of the Psalms. From 1626 till his death he was the (unpopular) Secretary of State for Scotland; and in 1627–31 he was also made Keeper of the Signet, a Commissioner of Exchequer, and a Judge of the Court of Session. The French pushed their conquests in America, and Alexander’s grant of lands became valueless. In 1630 he was created Viscount and in 1633 Earl of Stirling, in 1639 also Earl of Dovan, but he died insolvent in London, 12th September 1640.

Personal

  As to my long stay in these parts, 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 he 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.

  The purity of this gentleman’s vein was quite spoiled by the corruptness of his courtiership; and so much the greater pity; for by all appearance, had he been contented with that mediocrity of fortune he was born unto, and not aspired to those grandeurs of the court, which could not without pride be prosecuted, nor maintained without covetousness, he might have made a far better account of himself. It did not satisfie his ambition to have a laurel from the Muses, and to be esteemed a king amongst poets, but he must be king of some new-found-land; and, like another Alexander indeed, searching after new worlds, have the soveraignty of Nova Scotia.

  So this 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 1614, 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 all per 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 Bishop’s 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 larger quantity of fluent and stately English verse which no one reads.

General

  The Occasion of his being mention’d in our Catalogue, is, from “four Monarchick Tragedies,” (as he stiles them,) which are in print under his Name, viz. “The Alexandræan Tragedy,” “Crœsus,” “Darius,” and “Julius Cæsar.” These Plays seem to be writ with great Judgment, and (if I mistake not) the Author has propos’d the Ancients, for his Pattern; by bringing in the Chorus between the Acts. They are grave, and sententious, throughout, like the Tragedies of Seneca; and yet where the softer, and more tender Passions are touch’t, they seem as moving, as the Plays so much in vogue with the Ladies of this Age. The greatest objection that I know against them, is the Choice the Author has made of his Verse, which is alternate, like the Quatrains of the French Poet Pibrach; or Sr. William Davenant’s Heroick Poem, call’d “Gondibert.”

  Enjoyed a higher reputation than Drummond in his time. His monarchical tragedies are full of ostentatious morality, diffused through smooth, rhetorical stanzas, without a single spark of celestial fire.

  Wrote some very heavy tragedies; but there is elegance of expression in a few of his shorter pieces.

  He is rather the poet of sentiment than of imagination: his works are less frequently distinguished by bold flights of fancy, than by a philosophical vein of reflection; but he often displays considerable vigour of conception, and expresses his thoughts with suitable force and dignity. The Earl of Orford has characterized him as a poet “greatly superior to the age;” and if we compare him with such writers as Donne and Cowley, he certainly appears to no small advantage. His style, though not entirely free from Scoticisms, and from harsh combinations, is frequently conspicuous for its nervous simplicity.

  The chief literary beauties of these plays consist in their lyrical passages, which however are unequal in excellence, and weary by the sameness of their themes. The cadence of the quatrains which build up the dialogue is frequently pleasing, and its turns are often felicitous; but the general effect remains that of a volume of speech extremely prolix, and marred by affectations of style as well as by defects of construction and by occasional lapses into baldness of expression. The aid of antithesis and of alliteration is frequently called in, without any signal advantage being gained in the way of variety of effect. Elevated in tone, and often vigorous as well as dignified in sentiment, and manifesting the operation of an observing mind together with the influence of a carefully trained taste, these tragedies retain no interest for anybody but the literary student, whom alone they can be supposed to have been originally intended to please.

  Broadly, his poems are weighty with thought after the type of Fulk Greville, Lord Brooke, though scarcely so obscure as his. His tragedies have “brave translunary things,” if laboured and dull as a whole. His “Avrora” and minor pieces are elegant and musical. There is less of conceit in the merely conceitful sense than was common with contemporaries, and if you only persevere, opalescent hues edge long passages otherwise comparable with mist and fog. As a man he grows in our regard the nearer one gets at the facts. Manlier speech never was addressed to kings than by him in his “Parænesis” and “Tragedies” and elsewhere. His “noble poverty” is the best vindication of his integrity. He stands above any contemporary Scot, alike in many-sidedness and strenuousness of character.

  Alexander had indeed more power of sustained versification than his friend Drummond, though he hardly touches the latter in point of the poetical merit of short isolated passages and poems.

  The sonnets never reach a high level. They betray in numerous ingenuities of fancy and expression the “conceitie brains,” and have all the artificiality and more than all the monotony to be looked for in so long a series devoted to the praises of a mistress and lamentations of her cruelty…. The “Monarchicke Tragedies” are of all dramas the least dramatic. They are slow in movement, full of repetitions, destitute of living human characters, unfit alike for the stage and the study. Little or nothing is given as enacted; there is not even vigorous and progressive narrative, but, instead, windy commonplace reflections…. They stand apart from the true Elizabethan play with its abounding life, its vigorous action, its fulness of present interest. As little, perhaps even less, have they any vital relation to the classical drama…. If Alexander suggests anybody in the annals of dramatic composition it is Lorde Brooke; and that because of common defects rather than common merits. The works of both are equally preposterous as plays; but Alexander’s have not the power and weight of thought which half redeems Lord Brooke’s tragedies…. “Parænesis to Prince Henry,” a poem of considerable length on the duties of a king. It has been extravagantly praised; but the grounds of the panegyric are hard to discover. There is evidence of considerable learning, of keen intelligence, and on the whole of more independence of mind than was to be expected from a courtier in the court of James…. “Doomesday,” which in length almost rivals the other works of its author collectively and in dreariness, surpasses all.

  An undue neglect has hitherto been Alexander’s fortune at the hands of literary appraisers. For this the great extent of his writings is largely to blame, hiding the grains of gold in an earthen bed. But the insight, wisdom, and independent spirit, apart from the frequent beauties of his work, must always make even his longest poems worth perusal, and among the monuments of his time and of Scotland a niche of high honour of his own must remain to the Earl of Stirling as distinctively the poet-counsellor of kings.