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 the Drummond family. On 4 Dec. following he died at Hawthornden, and was buried in the church of Lasswade. Colonel George Lauder wrote a very pathetic poem on his death, entitled ‘Damon.’ All his brothers and sisters except James died before him. By his second marriage Drummond had nine children—five sons and four daughters—but only two sons and a daughter survived him. The daughter Elizabeth married Dr. Henderson, an Edinburgh physician. The younger son Robert died in 1607. The heir, William, was knighted by Charles II; inherited land at Carnock from another branch of the family, and died in 1713. Sir William's granddaughter, Mary Barbara, whose second husband, Bishop William Abernethy, took the surname of Drummond [see ], succeeded to the Hawthornden property, and was the last lineal descendant of the poet. She died in 1789.

In 1655 there was printed in London a volume of Drummond's prose works. The editor was a ‘Mr. Hall of Gray's Inn,’ and some copies contain a dedication to Scot of Scotstarvet, signed by Drummond's eldest son, William. The title ran: ‘The History of Scotland from the year 1423 until the year 1524: containing the Lives and Reigns of James the I, the II, the III, the IV, the V. With several Memorials of State during the Reigns of James VI and Charles I.’ Only ‘The Cypresse-Grove’—the prose meditation on death—first issued in 1623, had been published before, but the ‘Memorials of State’ did not include Drummond's emphatically royalist tracts, like the ‘Irene’ and the ‘Skiamachia,’ some of which were destroyed by Drummond's relatives. A second posthumous volume, ‘Poems by that most famous Wit, William Drummond,’ was issued by the same London publisher in 1656. All that had been already published was here reprinted, together with some sixty new sonnets, madrigals, and elegies. Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew, edited this collection, and spoke extravagantly of Drummond's genius. An epigram by Arthur Johnston and an English poem by Archbishop Spottiswoode are among the commendatory verses. A few copies contain a dedication to Scot of Scotstarvet. This edition of Drummond's poems was reissued in 1659. In 1683 there was issued anonymously at Edinburgh a macaronic or dog-Latin poem in hexameters, entitled ‘Polemo-Middinia inter Vitarvam et Nebernam’—a farcical account of a quarrel between the tenants of Scot of Scotstarvet and those of his neighbour, Cunningham of Barns. This was reprinted at Oxford in 1691 and edited by Edmund Gibson, afterwards bishop of London, together with James V's ‘Christ's Kirk on the Green,’ and in this volume Drummond was positively declared to be the author. The facts that no mention of such a work is found in the Hawthornden MSS. and that Drummond never claimed it in his lifetime make its authorship doubtful. But when in 1711 Bishop Sage and Ruddiman prepared the chief collected edition of Drummond's works in both verse and prose, this piece was included and its authenticity distinctly asserted in the prefatory memoir. The folio of 1711 includes all Drummond's extant prose tracts and many of his letters, together with all the previously printed poems and some additional verse hitherto unprinted. Among the latter are some vesper hymns, translated from Latin, which had already appeared without an author's name in the Roman catholic primer first printed at St. Omer by John Heigham in 1619, and republished in the primer of 1632. That a sturdy protestant like Drummond should have contributed to a Roman catholic service-book looks at a first glance so improbable that the authenticity of these hymns has been questioned. Internal evidence, however, favours their attribution to Drummond. The editor of the 1632 primer distinctly states, too, that they ‘are a new translation done by one of the most skilfull in English Poetrie,’ and it is quite possible that Drummond made the translation on one of his early visits to the continent (, Annus Sanctus, pref., 1884; Athenæum, 1885, i. 376). Reissues of Drummond's poems appeared in 1832 (by the Maitland Club), in 1833 (by Peter Cunningham), and in 1857 (by W. D. Turnbull). These editions include many poems from the Drummond MSS. These three editions include many poems, recovered from the Drummond MSS.

In 1782 Dr. Abernethy Drummond, the husband of the poet's last lineal descendant, presented a mass of his manuscripts to the Scottish Society of Antiquaries. In 1827 David Laing carefully arranged these papers in fifteen volumes and published extracts from them in the ‘Archæologia Scotica,’ iv. 57–110, 224–70. Besides transcripts of his poems and tracts, the manuscripts contain Drummond's notes of his conversations with Ben Jonson, lists of the books he read from 1606 to 1614, and many more letters than those published in the folio of 1711. A reprint of the ‘Conversations with Jonson’ was issued by the Shakespeare Society in 1842.

A portrait by Gaywood, prefixed to the 1655 volume, was re-engraved for the 1711 edition and for Masson's ‘Life’ (1873).

Drummond is a learned poet, and is at his best in his sonnets. Italian influence is always perceptible, and his indebtedness to Guarini