ation, on 13th December 1585. His father was Sir John Drummond,
and he was educated in Edinburgh and in France, betaking himself, like
almost all young Scotchmen of family, to the study of the law. He came back
to Scotland from France in 1610, and resided there for the greater part of
his life, though he left it on at least two occasions for long periods,
once travelling on the continent for eight years to recover from the grief
of losing a lady to whom he was betrothed, and once retiring to avoid the
inconveniences of the Civil War. Though a Royalist, Drummond submitted to
be requisitioned against the Crown, but as an atonement he is said to have
died of grief at Charles I.'s execution in 1649. The most famous incidents
of his life are the visit that Ben Jonson paid to him, and the much
discussed notes of that visit which Drummond left in manuscript. It would
appear, on the whole, that Drummond was an example of a well-known type of
cultivated dilettante, rather effeminate, equally unable to appreciate
Jonson's boisterous ways and to show open offence at them, and in the same
way equally disinclined to take the popular side and to endure risk and
loss in defending his principles. He shows better in his verse. His sonnets
are of the true Elizabethan mould, exhibiting the Petrarchian grace and
romance, informed with a fire and aspiring towards a romantic ideal beyond
the Italian. Like the older writers of the sonnet collections generally,
Drummond intersperses his quatorzains with madrigals, lyrical pieces of
various lengths, and even with what he calls "songs,"--that is to say, long
poems in the heroic couplet. He was also a skilled writer of elegies, and
two of his on Gustavus Adolphus and on Prince Henry have much merit.
Besides the madrigals included in his sonnets he has left another
collection entitled "Madrigals and Epigrams," including pieces both
sentimental and satirical. As might be expected the former are much better
than the latter, which have the coarseness and the lack of point noticeable
in most of the similar work of this time from Jonson to Herrick. We have
also of his a sacred collection (again very much in accordance with the
practice of his models of the preceding generation), entitled _Flowers of
Sion_, and consisting, like the sonnets, of poems of various metres. One of
these is noticeable as suggesting the metre of Milton's "Nativity," but
with an alteration of line number and rhyme order which spoils