48 on Drummond of Hawthornden. May 16. 
his navy in 1625. The piece in which Denham’s 
‘greatest powers are exerted, his Coopers Hill, was not 
written till the year 1640. -The harmony of Drum- 
‘mond, therefore, at a time when those who are usu- 
ally called the first mtroducers ‘of a smooth, and 
‘polithed ‘versification, had not begun to write, is an 
‘ honour to Hawthornden that fhould never be forgot- 
ten. His excellence hardly known, cannot be enough 
acknowledged or praised. 
Drummond and Petrarcha had this in their fate 
alike, that each lamented first ‘the cruelty and then 
the lofs of their mistrefses ; so that their sonnets are 
alike naturally divided into two clafses, those after, 
and those before the deaths of their-respective swect- 
hearts. Drummond, in several of these composi-~ 
tions, has fhown much of the genius and spirit of 
the Italian poet. The seventh sonnet, of the first 
part, 1s much resembled by Sir Henry Wotton’s ele- 
gant little poem on the queen of Bohemia: 
*¢ Ye meaner beauties, @c. 
And among Drummond's -Flowers of Zion, the poem 
which begins, . 
~ ©. Amidst the azure clear of Jordan’s sacred streams,” 
eminently distinguifhes him, whether he be*consider= 
‘ed as a philosopher or as a poet. 
- His Polemo Meddinia, a burlesque poem, founded 
on a ridiculous fray in Fife, is written with more 
than the humour of a Swift, or Peter Pindar; and 
may afford an excellent modern clafsical amusement 
to our nobility and gentry, who cannot bear the mon- 
strous bore of turning over an Ainsworth’s dictionary, 
and may still have retained enough of the charming 
one 
