Scottish pre-Reformation poets had been comparable, or more than comparable, with the very best of their English coevals, Chaucer alone deducted; but, when the literary historian, leaving the crowded series of lustrous names, from those of Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare at one end, to those of Dryden and Pope at the other, which represent the literature of South Britain between 1580 and 1725, seeks in North Britain for equivalents, what does he find? No equivalents in the highest degree; but, at the utmost, if he mixes any strictness of conscience with his kindliness, only such an exception here and there to the general sterility that, if it is of the racy vernacular sort, it can be noted apart with pleasure on that account, or, if it is cognate with anything in the English series, it can be moved along that series till the proper interstice is found into which it can be fitted. One indubitable exception, the exception in chief, was Drummond of Hawthornden. Born amid a people almost wholly absorbed in their Kirk controversy, it had somehow happened that here was one Scot whose ideal of life differed from the common. Of a meditative and philosophical temperament from his boyhood, a lover of books, art, and music, and with his tastes in such matters educated by foreign travel and by a familiarity with the recent English Elizabethan literature which must have been then excessively rare in North Britain, he had no sooner become Laird of Hawthornden by his father’s death in 1610 than, abjuring all other occupations, he schemed out for himself that life of studious leisure which suited him best, and for which there could not, in all Scotland, have been a more beautiful home than the leafy dell of his lairdship and habitation:— “Dear wood, and you, sweet solitary place, Where from the vulgar I estranged live.”