I have done, and what I must continue to do. To return to Drummond.—I cannot but think that his Sonnets come as near as almost any others to the perfection of this kind of writing, which should embody a sentiment and every shade of a sentiment, as it varies with time and place and humour, with the extravagance or lightness of a momentary impression, and should, when lengthened out into a series, form a history of the wayward moods of the poet’s mind, the turns of his fate; and imprint the smile or frown of his mistress in indelible characters on the scattered leaves. I will give the two following, and have done with this author. ‘In vain I haunt the cold and silver springs, To quench the fever burning in my veins: In vain (love’s pilgrim) mountains, dales, and plains I over-run; vain help long absence brings. In vain, my friends, your counsel me constrains To fly, and place my thoughts on other things. Ah, like the bird that fired hath her wings, The more I move the greater are my pains. Desire, alas! desire a Zeuxis new, From the orient borrowing gold, from western skies Heavenly cinnabar, sets before my eyes In every place her hair, sweet look and hue; That fly, run, rest I, all doth prove but vain; My life lies in those eyes which have me slain.’ The other is a direct imitation of Petrarch’s description of the bower where he first saw Laura. ‘Alexis, here she stay’d, among these pines, Sweet hermitress, she did alone repair: Here did she spread the treasure of her hair, More rich than that brought from the Colchian mines; Here sat she by these musked eglantines; The happy flowers seem yet the print to bear: Her voice did sweeten here thy sugar’d lines, To which winds, trees, beasts, birds, did lend an ear. She here me first perceiv’d, and here a morn Of bright carnations did o’erspread her face: Here did she sigh, here first my hopes were born, Here first I got a pledge of promised grace; But ah! what serves to have been made happy so, Sith passed pleasures double but new woe!’ I should, on the whole, prefer Drummond’s Sonnets to Spenser’s; and they leave Sidney’s, picking their way through verbal intricacies and ‘thorny queaches,’[34] at an immeasurable distance behind. Drummond’s other poems have great, though not equal merit; and he may be fairly set down as one of our old English classics.