This Author also translated into English, Hymnus, Tobaci, &c.  Lond. 1651, 8vo.

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William Drummond of Hawthornden Esq;

This gentleman was a native of Scotland, and a poet of no inconsiderable rank.  We had at first some doubt whether he fell within our design, as being no Englishman, but upon observing that Mr. Langbaine has given a place to the earl of Stirling, a man of much inferior note; and that our author, though a Scotchman, wrote extremely pure and elegant English, and his life, that is fruitful of a great many incidents, without further apology, it is here presented to the reader.

He was born the 13th of November, 1585; his father was Sir John Drummond of Hawthornden, who was Gentleman Usher to King James VI. but did not enjoy that place long, being in three months after he was raised to his new dignity, taken away by death[1].  The family of Drummond in the article of antiquity is inferior to none in Scotland, where that kind of distinction is very much regarded.

The first years of our author’s youth were spent at the high school at Edinburgh, where the early promises of that extraordinary genius, which afterwards appeared in him, became very conspicuous.  He was in due time sent to the university of Edinburgh, where after the ordinary stay, he was made Master of Arts.  When his course at the university was finished, he did not, like the greatest part of giddy students, give over reading, and vainly imagine they have a sufficient stock of learning:  he had too much sense thus to deceive himself; he knew that an education at the university is but the ground-work of knowledge, and that unless a man digests what he has there learned, and endeavours to produce it into life with advantage, so many years attendance were but entirely thrown away.  Being convinced of this truth, he continued to read the best authors of antiquity, whom he not only retained in his memory, but so digested, that he became quite master of them, and able to make such observations on their genius and writings, as fully shewed that his judgment had been sufficiently exercised in reading them.

In the year 1606 his father sent him into France, he being then only twenty-one years old.  He studied at Bourges the civil law, with great diligence and applause, and was master not only of the dictates of the professors, but made also his own observations on them, which occasioned the learned president Lockhart to observe, that if Mr. Drummond had followed the practice, he might have made the best figure of any lawyer in his time; but like all other men of wit, he saw more charms in Euripides, Sophocles, Seneca, and other the illustrious ancients, than in the dry wranglings of the law; as there have been often instances of poets, and men of genius being educated to the law, so here it may not be amiss to observe, that we remember not to have met with one amongst them who continued