DRUMMOND, WILLIAM, OF HAWTIIORNDEN, a poet of considerable celebrity, was descended from a very ancient and noble Scottish family, and was b. 13th Dec., 1585. He was educated at the high school of Edinburgh, and afterwards at the university of that city, where he took his degree of M.A., July 27, 1605. On leaving college, lie was sent to the continent in order to study law, for which he exhibited great aptitude. He returned in 1609, and his father dying in the following year, he retired to the paternal estate at Hawthornden, which, according to the learned Ruddiman, "was a sweet and solitary seat, and very fit and proper for the muses;" and there, with an interval of 8 years of foreign travel, spent his life in his favorite literary pursuits. He died 4th Dec., 1649; his death, it is said, being hastened by his excessive grief for the fate of Charles I. His principal works are the following: Tears on the Death, of Moeliades—prince Henry, son of James I.(Edin. 1613); Poems : Amorous, Funeral], Divine, Pastorali, in Sonnets, Songs, Sextants, Madrigals (1616); Forth Feasting (1617); Polemo Middinia (Oxford, 1691).
After relinquishing poetry, he wrote a sectional history of Scotland, known as the His-' tory of the Five Jameses. A standard edition of his poems was edited for thp Maitland club by Dr. Irving and lord Dundrennan in 1832. Smaller editions appeared in 1833 and 1856, and an exhaustive life, with an account of his writings, by prof. Masson, in 1873. D. enjoyed the friendship of many of his literary contemporaries, including Dray ton and "rare" Ben Jonson, the latter of whom visited him at Hawthornden in 1619. D.'s _Notes of Ben ,Tonson's Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden„ is a char acteristic record of the literary Spirit of the time.
D.'s verse abounds in the conceits, antitheses, and hyperboles of the period, and gives indication of a mind indulging itself in melancholy. His sonnets are the best speci mens of his muse, although even in them one looks in vain for sustained harmony or great originality of thought.