He had a pension from the city of London, from several of the nobility and gentry, and particularly from Mr. Sutton the founder of the Charterhouse.[5] In his last sickness he often repented of the profanation of scripture in his plays.  He died the 16th of August 1637, in the 63d year of his age, and was interred three days after in Westminster Abbey; he had several children who survived him.

Ben Johnson conceived so high an opinion of Mr. Drummond of Hawthornden by the letters which passed between them, that he undertook a journey into Scotland, and resided some time at Mr. Drummond’s seat there, who has printed the heads of their conversation, and as it is a curious circumstance to know the opinion of so great a man as Johnson of his cotemporary writers, these heads are here inserted.

“Ben, says Mr. Drummond, was eat up with fancies; he told me, that about the time the Plague raged in London, being in the country at Sir Robert Cotton’s house with old Camden, he saw in a vision his eldest son, then a young child, and at London, appear unto him, with the mark of a bloody cross on his forehead, as if it had been cut with a sword; at which amazed, he prayed unto God, and in the morning he came to Mr. Camden’s chamber to tell him; who persuaded him, it was but an apprehension, at which he should not be dejected.  In the mean time, there came 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 he thinks he shall be at the resurrection.  He said, he spent many a night in looking at his great toe, about which he had seen Tartars, and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians fight in his imagination.

“That he had a design to write an epic poem, and was to call it Chrologia; or the Worthies of his Country, all in couplets, for he detested all other rhime.  He said he had written a discourse on poetry, both against Campion and Daniel, especially the last, where he proves couplets to be the best sort of verses.”  His censure of the English poets was as follows: 

“That Sidney did not keep a decorum, in making every one speak as well as himself.  Spenser’s stanza pleased him not, nor his matter; the meaning of the allegory of the Fairy Queen he delivered in writing to Sir Walter Raleigh, which was, that by the bleating beast he understood the Puritans; and by the false Duessa, the Queen of Scots.  Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no children, and was no poet, and that he had wrote the civil wars without having one battle in all his book.  That Drayton’s Poly-olbion, if he had performed what he promised to write, the Deeds of all the Worthies, had been excellent.  That Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas was not well done, and that he wrote his verses before he understood to confer; and those of Fairfax were not good.  That the translations of Homer and Virgil in long Alexandrines were but prose.  That Sir John Harrington’s Ariosto