But in truth Montrose understood his countrymen as little as he understood the King. He had framed for himself an ideal constitution as unlike anything possible in such a country and at such a time as the ideal sovereign of his imagination was unlike the reality. His political views were in truth a dream like Dante's, but, like the great Italian's, a dream based on what had been in the past, and an anticipation in part at least of what was to be again in the future,--the dream of a real State, a government based on justice and law and supported by obedience. A parallel has been drawn between Montrose and that singularly interesting and attractive man, William Drummond of Hawthornden. Fanciful as the resemblance may at first seem between the fiery ambitious man of action and the shy meditative man of letters, the parallel is on one side good. Drummond, it is said, was a passive or theoretical Montrose, Montrose a rampant or practical Drummond. The latter's _Irene_ indeed embodies, in more elaborate detail and more fanciful language, the peculiar form of Scottish Conservatism which Montrose was afterwards to express in a remarkable paper rescued by the industry of his biographer from two centuries of neglect. The plan of each discourse is very similar. Both draw a picture of the hopeless state of anarchy and confusion into which Scotland must fall if certain evil counsels prevail. Montrose, writing later in time and influenced by personal dislike as well as disappointment, aims clearly at Hamilton and Argyll; while Drummond includes in his censure all the noblemen who had joined the Covenant, and Montrose among them, openly accusing the majority of acting solely under the influence of private revenge and ambition. Both then proceed to appeal to each Estate particularly, to the nobles, the clergy, and the people. In both is the same recognition of the necessity for a paramount authority in the State, and the conviction that from the temper of the times that authority must be vested in the hands of a king. In both is the same dislike of all clerical interference, whether Episcopalian or Presbyterian, in matters of State. Both show the same mistrust of any alliance between the aristocracy and the people. Both warn the latter in almost the same strain that they are not fit for power, and that the nobles who would persuade them otherwise can do so only for their own selfish ends. Both, in short, may be said to preach the doctrine of passive obedience; but both imagine a king under whose wise and beneficent rule passive obedience should mean no more than happy and prosperous quiescence in the secure enjoyment of their religion and liberties. Of the two Drummond was readiest to push his doctrine to its last conclusion, as the man of theory always will be. Resolved on no consideration and in no extremity to suffer himself to be dragged into the vortex of politics, in the solitude of his beautiful home on the wooded banks