William Drummond, 1585–1649. Born, at Hawthornden, 13 Dec. 1585. Educated at Edinburgh High School till 1601; at Edinburgh University, 1601–05; M.A., 27 July 1605. To London, 1606. In France, studying law at Bourges and Paris, 1607–08. In Scotland, 1609. In London, 1610. Returned to Hawthornden as laird, same year, at father’s death. Betrothed to Miss Cunningham of Barns, 1614 (?); she died, 1615. Severe illness, 1620. Took out a patent for mechanical appliances, mostly military, Dec. 1627. Presented library to Edinburgh University, 1627. Married Elizabeth Logan, 1632. Political activity 1638–49. Died, 4 Dec. 1649, at Hawthornden. Buried in Lasswade Church. Works: “Tears on the Death of Meliades,” 1613; “Mausoleum” (a collection of elegies by various writers), 1613; “Poems” (anon.) 1616; “Forth Feasting” (anon.), 1617; “Flowers of Zion,” 1623; “The Cypresse Grove,” 1625; Sonnet on the Death of King James, 1625; “A Pastorall Elegie,” 1638; “A Speech to the Noblemen, etc.” 1639; “Considerations to the Parliament,” 1639; “Speech for Edinburgh to the King,” 1641; “Σκιαμαχία,” 1642; “Remoras for the National League,” 1643; “Objections against the Scots answered,” 1646; “Vindication of the Hamiltons,” 1648. Posthumous: “The History of Scotland,” 1655; “Poems,” 1656; “Polemo-Middenia” (anon.; attrib. to Drummond), 1683; Extracts from MSS. (ed. by Laing in “Archæologica Scotica”), 1827. “Conversations with Jonson,” 1842. Collected Works: “Poems,” 1711; “Poems,” ed. by W. S. Ward (4 vols.), 1894. Life: by Prof. Masson, 1873.

Personal

  Mr. Drummond, though a scholar and a man of genius, did not think it beneath him to improve himself in those gay accomplishments which are so peculiar to the French, and which never fail to set off wit and parts to the best advantage. He studied music, and is reported to have possessed the genteel accomplishment of dancing, to no inconsiderable degree.

  I have no doubt that Drummond, a valetudinarian and “minor poet,” was thoroughly borne down by the superior powers, physical and mental, of Jonson, and heartily glad when he saw the last of his somewhat boisterous and somewhat arrogant guest. The picture drawn by one who thus felt himself “sat upon” at every turn was not likely to be a flattering one, and yet there is nothing in the “Conversations” to lead us to expect that the portrait given at the end of them would be composed almost entirely of shadows.

  He loved a beautiful girl of the noble family of Cunningham, who is the Lesbia of his poetry. After a fervent courtship, he succeeded in securing her affections; but she died, “in the fresh April of her years,” and when their marriage-day had been fixed. Drummond has left us a most charming picture of his mistress; of her modesty, her retiring sweetness, her accomplishments, and her tenderness for him…. He travelled for eight years, seeking, in change of place and scene, some solace for his wounded peace. There was a kind of constancy even in Drummond’s inconstancy; for meeting many years afterwards with an amiable girl, who bore the most striking resemblance to his lost mistress, he loved her for that very resemblance, and married her. Her name was Margaret Logan.

  Whose chief value to posterity is as the Boswell of Ben Jonson.

  Drummond was evidently a man of superior talents and accomplishments. We are informed that he was familiarly acquainted with the best Greek and Latin authors: his long residence on the Continent afforded him an excellent opportunity of acquiring a knowledge of the living languages: and he is said to have spoken French, Italian, and Spanish as fluently as his native tongue. To his graver qualifications he added no mean proficiency in music; and he occasionally sought a relaxation of his studies by playing on the lute, “which he did to admiration.” He seems to have devoted a considerable portion of his time to the invention or improvement of various instruments and machines, applicable to various purposes of peace or war. They are curiously enumerated, to the extent of sixteen, in a patent which he obtained in the year 1627, and which secured to him the sole right and property within the kingdom of Scotland for the space of twenty-one years.

  The church and churchyard of Lasswade are on a height overlooking 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.

  The natural beauties of Hawthornden make it a fit scene where fancy may sport at will with the poets’ memories; and the associations of a later minstrel have added fresh charms to the romantic dell, fragrant in olden times with the scent of the hawthorn bloom, through which the North Esk still wends its way past Roslin Castle, Drummond’s tower, and Melville Grove, mid scenes of ancient song and story, to the meeting of the waters under Dalkeith palace.

  He was a man of varied culture, and his writings in poetry and prose were widely read. He was the foremost of that band of men which broke the tradition that Scottish literature ought to be written in the Scottish national tongue, and which strove to express their thoughts in the language which had served the purposes of Shakspeare and Jonson, and was one day to serve the purposes of Scott and Campbell. He was withal an upright and honest man, craving for philosophic and literary culture rather than for Calvinistic orthodoxy, and fearing the inquisitive meddling of the Presbyterian clergy who would be sure to bear hard upon one of his tastes and opinions. He was one who, like Patrick Forbes, had formed part of that wave of liberal reaction, which, through the blunders of James and Charles, had already spent its force.

  If Drummond, as he sat under his sycamore-tree that memorable afternoon, watching Jonson’s approach, did not cry, “Welcome, welcome, royal Ben,” and if Jonson did not reply on the instant, “Thank’e, thank’e, Hawthornden,” as tradition has ever since asserted, there can be no question that the welcome was a right royal one. Jonson might not have been so free with his thanks and his speech, however, if he had known that his “Hawthornden” was to become, at his expense, the inventor of interviewing.

  Drummond of Hawthornden lives in literature rather by the picturesque beauty of his name than by the intrinsic merit of his poetry, real as that is. Drummond of Hawthornden! There is a pleasant murmur in the very syllables, as of the humming of bees on Mount Hybla.

Cypress Grove, 1625

  “A Cypress Grove” is a remarkable, and in some respects unique, example of sonorous poetic prose. Detached passages of similar eloquence are to be found in the prose of Drummond’s contemporaries and immediate successors; none of them has maintained the same height of imaginative contemplation throughout a piece of equal length. “A Cypress Grove” is the first original work in which an English writer has deliberately set himself to make prose do service for poetry. It is a dignified “Meditation upon Death,” tinged with melancholy; and the whole has unity of tone and conception…. The most characteristic qualities of Drummond’s style are wealth of imagery, variety of sentence-structure, and rhythmic flow. His metaphors are apt and pregnant; he uses similes less frequently than the writers of his age, and seldom draws them out beyond a line. The antithesis of some of the apophthegms which break the continuity of his periods is not overstrained. Two cases of word-play occur, but they are venial. The composition, though carefully elaborated, is seldom laboured or overcharged with ornament; and his ear is rarely, if ever, betrayed into a preference of sound to sense. The even pitch of subdued eloquence at which the style is maintained would prove monotonous but for the ever-changing and contrasting formation of the sentences. This skilful variation of construction, by diversifying the length and cadence of the clauses, gives to the pages of “A Cypress Grove” the peculiar charm of richly modulated music.

Sonnets

  Without ostentatious praise (which is always to be suspected) it is but truth to observe that many of his sonnets, those more especially which are divested of Italian conceits, resemble the best Greek epigrams in their best taste, in that exquisite delicacy of sentiment, and simplicity of expression, for which our language has no single term, but which is known to all classical readers by the word αφετεια. It is in vain we lament the fate of many of our poets, who have undeservedly fallen victims to a premature oblivion, when the finished productions of this man are little known, and still less read.

  His sonnets are in the highest degree elegant, harmonious, and striking. It appears to me that they are more in the manner of Petrarch than any others that we have, with a certain intenseness in the sentiment, an occasional glitter of thought and uniform terseness of expression.

  Drummond’s sonnets, for the most part, are not only of the legitimate order, but they are the earliest in the language that breathe what may be called the habit of mind observable in the best Italian writers of sonnets; that is to say, a mixture of tenderness, elegance, love of country, seclusion, and conscious sweetness of verse. We scent his “muskèd eglantines,” listen to his birds, and catch glimpses of the “sweet hermitress” whose loss be deplored. Drummond was not without the faults of prototypes inferior to those writers. His Italian scholarship in some measure seduced, as well as inspired him; but upon the whole his taste was excellent; and he leaves upon his readers the impression of an elegant-minded and affectionate man.

  As a poet in the broadest sense of the word, Drummond of Hawthornden ranks far below Spenser; but in the “sonnet’s scanty plot” he rules as of right divine, and even the lord of the world of faery must stand uncovered before him. There is not the same weight of matter in his sonnets that there is in the irregular sonnets of Shakspeare, nor is there the same penetrative vigour of language; but there are qualities equally precious if not equally impressive—exquisite keenness of sensibility, attested by peculiar delicacy of touch; imaginative vision and notable power of rendering it; native spontaneousness happily allied with fine mastery of the secrets of metre and melody; and the rare art—carried to perfection in the sonnets of Mr. Rossetti—of making his verse the expression, not of crude passion, which, as Edgar Poe pointed out, is not genuine poetic material, but rather the reflection of passion in the still deeps of imaginative reverie.

  Some of Drummond’s sonnets are—one must use the word—simply adorable; and if this sounds extravagant there are “Be as thou wast, my Lute,” and “Dear Quirister who from these shadows sends,” and twenty more, to speak for themselves in such wise as no man may gainsay.

  Their most distinguishing quality is elegance of expression,—a tender pensiveness of sentiment, and a vein of meditation that bespeaks a serious thinker.

  What poems of Drummond do we remember as we remember those which record how he loved and lamented Mary Cunningham?

  Drummond said that Drayton seemed rather to love his muse than his mistress, judging by his many artificial similes, which showed the quality of his mind, but not the depth of his passion. Perhaps Drummond alone of the poets of his period, excepting Shakspeare only, had just license to write so, for what he says with truth of Drayton might with equal appropriateness have been urged against all his other contemporaries save one…. Drummond also was free from excess of the kind that marred contemporaries possessed of more vital impulse; for much that reality of absorbing passion did for Shakspeare in preserving him from the artificial expression of affected suffering, time itself, acting healingly on a great sorrow, did for him. After the early book in which he told the story of his life’s one loss, Drummond seemed to sit above the need of that languishing craving for love-experience which was the will-o’-the-wisp which led his contemporaries into one knows not what quagmires of poetic mockery. Drummond’s sonnets are wholly devoid of those excellences of conception and phrase which, where they exist in the best of his brother poets, seem to be delved out of the full depth of a deep nature, but they are distinguished by a healthful seriousness and enlarged view of life and its operative relationships, such as must have come to him equally from his patient submission to untoward circumstance, and from the distance at which he stood removed from the irritating atmosphere of small rivalries, which in London narrowed the sympathies of men so much above him in original gift as Ben Jonson.

  A graceful poet, but assuredly not the master he has again and again been represented to be. His essential weakness may be seen in his inability to adopt any pure mould: his sonnets may either be regarded as English bastards of Italian parentage, or as Italian refugees disguised in a semi-insular costume.

  A more important event in Drummond’s life, the most important perhaps of all for literature, was his meeting with a daughter of Cunningham of Barns, which seems to have taken place about this time. He fell in love with the lady, wooed and won her; the marriage day was fixed, but before it came she died of a fever. Drummond’s genuine and deep affection for her and the tragic close of their love had a profound effect upon his poetry. It strengthened and confirmed the melancholy which, implanted by nature, had been nourished by the quietude of Hawthornden. It fed his mystic idealism; it gave him, both during the lady’s life and after she was dead, a real subject for his muse; and thus it did much to save him from that tendency to conceits which was creeping like a canker into English poetry…. These poems are Drummond’s most valuable contribution to literature. The series of pieces commemorating his love is divided into two parts, one prior, the other subsequent to her death. Together they contain most of what is truly excellent in the author’s poetry; only occasionally in later years did he rise as high…. The best of Drummond’s pieces entitle him to a place in the first rank of English sonneteers; and it is to be wondered that he has not, in virtue of these exquisite poems, taken a higher place in the rolls of literature.

The History of Scotland, 1655

  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.

  He was universally esteemed one of the best poets of his age, and stands in the first rank of modern historians. He, for his excellence in telling a story, and interesting his reader in what he relates, is thought to be comparable to Livy.

  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.

General

  His censure of my verses was: That they were all good, especiallie my Epitaphe of the Prince, save that they smelled too much of the Schooles, and were not after the fancie of the tyme: for a child (sayes he) may writte after the fashion of the Greeks and Latine verses in running; yett that he wished, to please the King, that piece of Forth Feasting had been his owne.

  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.

  During the reign of King James and Charles I. we have met with no poet who seems to have had a better ear, or felt more intimately the passion he describes.

  The earliest piece of Waller is that to the King on his Navy, in 1625. The piece in which Sir John Denham’s greatest force lies, “Cooper’s Hill,” was not written till 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 yet begun to write, is an honour to him that should never be forgotten. Nor is his excellence half enough praised or acknowledged.

  It is not easy to determine, whether a dead language, in which men had been initiated, and of which the purest models had been studied, from their earliest years, or a foreign dialect which, the tongue was unable to pronounce, and to the purity and precision of which the mind was unaccustomed, imposed the severest constraint upon original genius. Yet at a time when the rugged numbers of Donne and Johnson prevailed in poetry, Drummond of Hawthornden gave the first specimen of a rich and melodious versification, and discovered a vein of tender, unaffected sentiment which succeeding poets have not disdained to imitate. His taste was formed in the Italian school; and he preceded Denham and Waller in the refinement of our numbers; though his poetry, like theirs, is neither always equal, nor always correct.

  The Scottish Court of James the Sixth, in the midst of pedantry, scholastic jargon, and polemic theology, produced several poets by no means devoid of genius. Some possessed quaintness of wit, some easy versification, and some the power of affecting the emotions of the heart; but the various talents of the poets were seldom concentrated in the same person. The rays of poetical light were refracted and divided among several poets. In Drummond alone were they united, and displayed the solar radiance of fancy.

  I have long sought a copy of Drummond’s works, and I have sought it in vain; but from specimens which I have casually met with, in quotations, I am forcibly inclined to favour the idea, that, as they possess natural and pathetic sentiments, clothed in tolerably harmonious language, they are entitled to the praise which has been so liberally bestowed on them.

  The elegance of Drummond’s sonnets, and the humour of his Scotch and Latin macaronics, have been at least sufficiently praised: but when Milton has been described as essentially obliged to him, the compliment to his genius is stretched too far.

  Drummond, the over-praised and under-praised,—a passive poet, if we may use the phraseology,—who was not careful to achieve greatness, but whose natural pulses beat music, and with whom the consciousness of life was the sentiment of beauty.

  And Mr. Drummond was a genius? I expect his singing will differ a little from that of the old Iliad Homerides,—merging direct with fiery veracity towards the fact, melting into music by the very truth and fire of it. Alas, yes, from the Greek Homerides, from the Norse Skalds, from the English or Scotch ballad-singer, from all men that ever at any time sang truly. The true singer hurries direct—towards the fact, intent on that alone, melts into music by the very fire of his veracity. Drummond’s genius one would say is that of an accomplished Upholsterer rather. Different from Homer’s—as a pair of the costliest slashed puff-breeches, stuffed broader than a bushel with nothing in them, may differ from a pair of Grecian Hippolytus’ limbs with nothing superflous on them, but good Mr. Drummond is a type of his age. His monstrous unveracious puff-breeches ovation is the emblem of so much other unveracity.

  Through the greater part of his verse we hear a certain muffled tone of the sweetest, like the music that ever threatens to break out clear from the brook, from the pines, from the rain-shower,—never does break out clear, but remains a suggested, etherially vanishing tone. His is a voix voilée, or veiled voice of song.

  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 Drummondism. 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 Drummondism is the best name 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 unpublished 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.

  His poetry lacks fire and force, and emotional power; but on the other hand, he had a cultured taste, fancy, and a command of descriptive imagery. Some of his sacred poems exhibit poetical imagery and an easy flow of versification.

  Good as are some of the love-sonnets and madrigals, Drummond is best where he is most serious. His deepest interests are metaphysical and religious; he is for ever taking refuge from the ills of the present in meditations on Death, Eternity, the Christian Doctrine. The Universe, “this All” as he calls it,—that conception of the earth with its concentric spheres which belonged to the older astronomy,—is an idea on which he dwells in almost monotonous fashion. The finest of all his writings, the prose tract called “The Cypresse Grove,” is a discourse upon Death, reminding us, as Mr. Masson well says, of the best work of Sir Thomas Browne; the most striking of his poems are certainly those where, as in the sonnet “For the Baptist,” he presents in his own rich language the severer portions of the Christian history, or the inexhaustible theme of the shortness and the mystery of life. What saves him from becoming wearisome is partly the nobility of his verse at its best, its stateliness and sonorous music; partly his evident sincerity, and his emancipation, speaking generally, from the evil influences that were creeping in to corrupt English poetry at that time.

  Drummond is a learned poet, and is at his best in his sonnets. Italian influence is always perceptible, and his indebtedness to Guarini is very pronounced. Yet sonnets like those on “Sleep” and the “Nightingale” possess enough natural grace and feeling to give them immortality, and borrowed conceits are often so cleverly handled by Drummond that he deserves more praise than their inventor. His madrigals show a rare command of difficult metres, but are less sprightly than could be wished. The elegy on Prince Henry, which has been compared with “Lycidas,” is solemnly pathetic. Drummond anticipated Milton in using the metre of the “Hymn of the Nativity.” The prose of “The Cypresse-Grove” is majestic and suggests Sir Thomas Browne, but the historical and political tracts are not noticeable for their style. Drummond’s political epigrams and satires are dull and often pointless.

  His sonnets, a form in which he is peculiarly successful, approach more nearly to perfection of rhyme-structure than any of those of his contemporaries, except perhaps Donne’s; but he is barely able to resist the tempting error of the final couplet. One or two long and glowing odes of great merit he styles “songs.” This first collection of his poems contains many lyrics that are admirable, and few that are without dignity and skill. He uses flowers and pure colours like a Tuscan painter, and strikes us as most fantastic when he essays to write in dispraise of beauty, since no poet of his time is so resolute a worshipper of physical loveliness as he is. In Drummond’s voluptuous and gorgeous verse there is no trace of the Elizabethan naïveté or dramatic passion. It is the deliberate poetry of an accomplished scholar-artist.

  With one exception the Scottish poets of mark of the Jacobean period were something more than simply men of letters. Courtiers, statesmen, or, as in the case of the later Montrose, soldiers, the main interests of their lives lay in the world of action, and poetry was with them either the solace of hours of retirement or the outcome of experience gained in active life. William Drummond, alone of them all, can be said to have lived a life devoted to the art of poetry. To this circumstance may possibly, to some extent, be attributed the fact that of all the Scottish poets of that time he, without question, holds the highest place…. Drummond’s poetry, though it is limited in range, was certainly the finest English poetry of its time…. The chief characteristics of Drummond’s verse are its lustrous beauty and its melodious sweetness. For these qualities it has been termed Spenserian, but Spenser was not its model…. If he appears to lack vigour and originality, as has sometimes been said, that lack is more than atoned for by the wonderful sensuous richness and perfection of his work. His genius, it is true, seems to have been unfitted for the production of any long-sustained composition, but so also, later, was the genius of Robert Burns, and it may well be doubted whether the yard-measure serves as any very valuable criterion of poetic merits.

  His landscape is generalised: Hawthornden and its lovely scenery have no distinct place in it. But the passion which burned in his heart was true and tender as Petrarch’s; and this has given a vivifying power, a peculiar colour to his descriptions.

  The imagination of Drummond aspires to Spenser’s rich standard of association and contrast; he has a refined poetic sensuousness and delight in objective imagery; his sentiment is romantic, melancholy, and musical; but the new subjective and meditative emotion which pervades his verse, and a slight involuntary tendency to the new conceits and metaphysical quiddities mark him also as one of the new age.

  Drummond of Hawthornden’s “Forth Feasting,” 1617, bought by Ouvry at Sotheby’s in 1858 for £8, 15s. (bound in morocco), fetched £60 at Ouvry’s sale in 1882.