It is two centuries and a half since Drummond of Hawthornden died; but he is still one of the most interesting figures in Scottish history. “A genius the most polite and verdant that ever the Scottish nation produced” was the character given of him in 1656 by Milton’s nephew and pupil, Edward Phillips, in the preface to a collective edition of Drummond’s poems brought out in London that year under Phillips’s editorial care. Very possibly the words are Milton’s own; for Phillips derived his notions of poetry from Milton, and there is other evidence of Milton’s familiarity with the poetry of Drummond. At all events the words are singularly exact for their purpose. They imply, it is true, an imperfect recollection, if not a total ignorance, of the previous wealth of Scottish poetry, represented in such predecessors of Drummond as Barbour, James I., Henryson, Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay; but, even had Phillips’s recollection of these been clearer and stronger than it was, his selection of the words “polite” and “verdant” as descriptive of those characteristics of Drummond’s genius which were surest to strike Englishmen would not have been so much amiss, while for the range of Scottish time actually within Phillips’s retrospect at the moment the wording of the eulogy was perfect. The famous series of the older Scottish poets had come to an end on the death of Lindsay just before the Reformation; and from that time it seemed as if the Literary Muses had all but vanished from Scotland, dispossessed and superseded by quite another order of Muses, if that name can be stretched so as anyhow to include them,—the rougher and angrier Muses of vexed national questions, and especially of the Kirk Controversy. Call them Muses or what else you will, they were very momentous powers, and he is but a feeble Scot who will speak of them with contumely, or will ignore the great effects for Scotland and for all Britain that came out of their turmoil. Not the less it is depressing to Scottish patriotism nowadays to remember how long the turmoil lasted, how all-engrossing it was, and how much of native faculty and aspiration of the finer, deeper, and quieter sorts it must have stifled and extinguished. For the first twenty years after the Reformation there is the compensation, indeed, of the oratory and pre-eminent prose energy of Knox, and of the great literary fame and exquisite Latinity of Buchanan; but from the year 1580 onwards till 1725, or thereabouts, what a long tract of sterility in the literary annals of Scotland! Through that century and a half England prodigiously surpassed her former self, first astonishing the world by the outburst of her Elizabethan splendours, and then continuing the astonishment by the rich and varied literary activity of three succeeding ages, the latest of which was that of the Queen Anne wits. Scotland, on the other hand, had sunk incredibly below the promise of _her_ former self. The