Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 3.djvu/122

150 the invention of several new instruments for sea and land service, in peace and war. The names of the machines in English, Greek, and Latin, and their descriptions and uses, may he found detailed in a patent granted to our author by king Charles I., in the year 1626, for the sole making, vending, and exporting of the same. This document has been published in the collection of Drummond's works, and is worthy of notice, as illustrating that useful science, though then a neglected object of pursuit, was not overlooked by our author in the midst of more intellectual studies. Perhaps we might even be warranted in saying farther, that the attention which he thus bestowed on the existing wants and deficiencies of his country, indicated more clearly than any other fact, that his mind had progressed beyond the genius of the age in which his existence had been cast.

Drummond lived till his forty-fifth year a bachelor, a circumstance which may in great part be ascribed to the unfortunate issue of his first love. He had, however, accidently become acquainted with Elizabeth Logan, granddaughter to Sir Robert Logan of Restalrig, in whom he either found, or fancied he had found, a resemblance to his first mistress; and this impression, so interesting to his feelings, revived once more in his bosom those tender affections which had so long lain dormant. He became united to this lady in the year 1630. By his marriage he had several children. William, the eldest son, lived till an advanced age, was knighted by Charles II., and came to be the only representative of the knights-baronets formerly of Carnock, of whom in the beginning of this article we have made mention. We learn little more of the private life of our author after this period ; but that he lived retiredly at his house of Hawthornden, which he repaired; an inscription to this effect, bearing date 1638, is still extant upon the building.

Drummond has left behind him many political papers, written between the years 1632 and 1646, in which, if he has not approved himself a judicious supporter of king Charles, and his contested rights and authority, he has only failed in a cause which could not then be supported, and which has never since been approved. That all his former feelings and habits should have inclined him to the side of monarchy, in the great struggle which had then commenced for popular rights, was natural, and to be expected ; still it is evident enough, that his strong inclination for peace, and philanthropic desire of averting the impending miseries of civil war, actuated him in his interference, as powerfully as did any spirit of partisanship even in the cause of royalty itself. At a time when the grand principles of constitutional freedom were unknown or undefined, and when no wisdom could foresee the event to which new and uncertain lights regarding civil and religious government might lead, the temporizing with old established forms and customs, though it might seem to retard the spirit of improvement so busily at work, might be called humane, if it was not indeed expedient. It was not till very near the end of that century that the universal sense of the nation was prepared for a decisive and bloodless revolution.

"Irena, or a remonstrance for concord among his majesty's subjects," is the first of these political tracts ; and the picture which it draws of civil strifes and disorders, and of men given to change, is set forth with much eloquence and persuasive force. Though the doctrine of obedience is enforced throughout, it is neither dogmatically nor offensively insisted upon. This, and other papers of a similar tendency, Drummond wrote in the years 1638-9; "but finding," as he informs us in one of his letters, "his majesty's authority so fearly eclipsed, and the stream of rebellion swelled to that height, that honest men, without danger dared hardly speak, less publish their conceptions in write, the papers were suppressed."