Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/170

150 in leisure at Hawthornden, that he acquired the wide knowledge of literature—classical, French, Italian, and Spanish—which colours all his work. His elegy on Prince Henry, Tears on the Death of Mœliades, the most poetical elegy in imagery and verse written between the death of Spenser and Lycidas, was published in 1613, and his Poems followed three years later. They were divided, after the model of Petrarch and his imitators, into those written before and those after the death of his Laura, Miss Cunningham of Barns, and arranged, in still closer accordance with Marino's Lira (1602-14), into Amorous, Funeral, Divine, Pastoral, in Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals. Forth Feasting—the title of which is taken from Marino's Tebro Festante, but which in its elevated strain recalls the Pollio of Virgil—was composed for King James's visit to Edinburgh in 1617. The religious sonnets of his earlier volume were embellished and added to in Flowers of Sion (1625), to a second edition of which in 1630 he affixed his eloquent prose meditation, A Cypress Grove. Drummond's literary activity was, in his last years, absorbed by political controversy, in which he espoused the royalist cause.

Drummond's poetry is the product of a scholar of refined nature, opulent fancy, and musical ear. His indebtedness to Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare for imaginative phrases is palpable, and many of his most charming sonnets and madrigals are no more than translations from Petrarch, Sannazaro, Ronsard, and Marino. To the last he is