Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 3.djvu/126

154 The "Forth Feasting" is a poem of some ingenuity in its contrivance, designed to compliment king James VI., on the visit with which that monarch favoured his native land in 1617. Of the many effusions which that joyous event called forth, this, we believe, has alone kept its ground in public estimation; and, indeed, as a performance professedly panegyrical, and possessing little adventitious claim from the merit of its object, it is no ordinary praise to say that it has done so. It attracted, lord Woodhouselee has remarked "the envy as well as the praise of Ben Jonson, is superior in harmony of numbers to any of the compositions of the contemporary poets of England, and in its subject one of the most elegant panegyrics ever addressed by a poet to a prince."

DRUMMOND,, a distinguished scholar and philosopher. The date of his birth seems not to be ascertained, nor does any memoir of which we are aware, describe his early education. He became first slightly known to the world in 1794, from publishing "A Review of the Government of Sparta and Athens." It was probably a juvenile performance, which would not have been recollected but for the later fame of its author, and it is not now to be met with in libraries. In 1795, he was elected representative of the borough of St Mawes; and in 1796 and 1801, he was chosen for the town of Lostwithiel. In the meantime he was appointed envoy extraordinary to the court of Naples, an office previously filled by a countryman celebrated for pursuits not dissimilar to some of his own Sir William Hamilton; and he was soon afterwards ambassador to the Ottoman Porte. Of his achievements as an ambassador little is known or remembered, excepting perhaps an alleged attempt, in 1808, to secure the regency of Spain to prince Leopold of Sicily. Nor as a senator does he appear to have acquired much higher distinction; from being a regular and zealously labouring political partizan, his studious habits and retired unbending disposition prevented him, but such political labours as he undertook were on the side of the government. In 1798, he published a translation of the Satires of Perseus, a work, which, especially In fidelity, has been held to rival the contemporaneous attempts of Gifford, and it established him in the unquestioned reputation of a classical scholar. In 1805, appeared his Academical Questions, the first work in which he put forward claims to be esteemed a metaphysician. Although in this work he talks of the dignity of