The encomium included, or ought to have included, more than Drummond’s performances in verse. His fine and verdant genius is no less discernible in his prose writings. His little essay entitled “A Cypress Grove” is a piece of prose so superlatively excellent that one wonders how it should be so little known,—why, in fact, it should not have had a prominent place in all professed collections of the flowers of English seventeenth-century prose. For high-toned philosophic thoughtfulness, ingenuity of artistic phantasy, musical beauty of style, and perfection of literary taste and finish, there is nothing superior, of the same length, if anything quite equal, in all Sir Thomas Browne, or in all Jeremy Taylor. That essay was published in 1623, as an adjunct to one of his volumes of poems; and, though there is a good deal of other and later prose from Drummond, it is mainly of a character less readable now, and less acceptable in some quarters where it may still receive attention. For the _quæstiones vexatæ_ did at last coil themselves round Drummond, and in his later years, in his own despite, he had to become a polemical politician. King James had been succeeded by King Charles; on the 23d of July 1637 Jenny Geddes hurled her stool in St. Giles’s; and Scotland then passed into that trebly troubled period of her always troubled history which, commencing with her own defiance to Charles and Laud in her National Scottish Covenant, and proceeding thence to her alliance with the English Parliamentarians in the Solemn League and Covenant, includes Montrose’s brief year of Royalist outblaze and anti-Covenanting triumph, and all the rest of the chequered sequel till the English Republicans brought Charles to the block. No Scot through that long agony was permitted to be neutral; if any one had tried, he would have been torn from his retirement, and obliged to declare himself. Drummond did declare himself, and it was on what was then, and still is, among his countrymen, the unpopular side. In a series of prose tracts, circulated surreptitiously, some of them of the nature of satirical squibs, he advocated views of Scottish politics which were very much those of Montrose and the Hamiltons. Even where this may be remembered, in a general way, to his discredit now, there is much, however, in the tracts themselves to arrest the unfavourable judgment and turn it into respect. Their literary ability and clever wit may count for little with those who resent their purport; but there are passages of high-minded and eloquent earnestness that must startle any reader in such a context. While inculcating upon his countrymen an effete and impracticable political philosophy of passive obedience, and while indicating a preference on Drummond’s own part for something of that florid Anglican ecclesiasticism against which his countrymen were fighting, he flings out to the right and to the left remonstrances much