AND THE VALE OF THE ESK. 13s
principal talker ; and, when Ben and Drummond walked briskly together in
the winter-weather by the paths in the glen itself, close to the house, or on the
high-way or cross-roads near, Ben would still be talking, and Drummond
chiefly listening. You must remember also that Drummond’s was a bachelois
household, and that, when he and Ben were alone together in the evenings,
and the candles were lit in the chief room, and the supper was removed, there
would still be wine on the board. Then, if you know anything of the two
men, you can see the scene as distinctly as if you had been peeping through
the window. You can see the two sitting on snugly by the ruddy fire far into
the night, hardly hearing the murmur of the Esk and the moaning of the wind
outside, but talking of all things in heaven or earth, Ben telling anecdotes of
his London acquaintances back to Shakespeare, and reciting scraps of poetry,
and pronouncing criticisms on poets, and Drummond now and then taking
out a manuscript from a desk and modestly reading as much as Ben would
stand, and Ben helping himself and going off again, and the noise and the
laughter always increasing on his part, till Drummond at length would grow
dizzy with too much of it, and light their bedroom tapers by way of signal.
And next morning you may be sure it would be a late breakfast, and Ben
would be surIy and taciturn for a while ; but gradually he would come round,
and the day’s talk would begin again. As surely, I repeat, as if you had been
a spy sent to watch, this is what went on in Hawthornden House during that
fortnight or so when the great Ben from London was the guest of the cultured
Drummond.
‘ The visit was one to be marked with a red mark in Drummond‘s calendar,
Here he had been for many years in his Scottish retirement, far from the
London world of politics and letters, and with only such information from
that world as might be blown to him among his boors by rumour, or brought
occasionally by Sir William Alexander and other friends. But now he had
under his own roof the very laureate of the London world, the man who had
known everybody of note in it since Elizabeth was queen, and whose habits of
talk made him the very paragon of gossips. It was, doubtless, a great treat.
But there is nothing perfect under the sun. There is evidence that Ilrummond,
when he had Ben all to himself, began to feel that he had caught a Tartar.
Ben’s own poetry, it is to- be remembered, the poetry of general and
miscellaneous strength rather than of the pure and soft musical vein, was not that
which would have predisposed Drummond to forgive him his personal faults
from a sense of literary allegiance. Hence, though he was scrupulously polite
to Ben all the while he was his guest, and must have thought him one of the
136 ROSLIN, HAWTHORNDEN,
most massive and impressive fellows he had ever met, his private feeling, as
he sat opposite, watching the vast bulk in the chair, and the lighting up of his
surly visage as he swilled off .glass after glass, must have been ‘‘ Can this
really be the accepted living chief of British Literature 1”’
Drummond lived at Hawthornden from the time he was four-and-twenty
till his death at the age of sixty-three. He composed here his Teares ow fhe
Death of Mdiades, his Ebrfh Peasfing, his FZozwes af Sion, and his Cypress Grove.
He also made a valuable collection of English and foreign books, some portion
of which he afterwards presented to the library of Edinburgh University, where
he had been educated He married in the year 1632, and two or three
years later enlarged and rebuilt Hawthornden.
, ‘The new house was completed in 1638, when Drummond, to commemorate
the event, caused this inscription to he carved over the new
doorway : Dizino mut2t-n GuZieZmus Drummondus ab Huw+wrden, Joannis,
Eguifis Aurafi, Filius, ut honesto ofw quiesccref, sibi et mccessoribus itutauravit,
1638 ” (‘‘ By the divine favour, William Drummond of Hawthornden, son of
Sir John Drummond, Knight, that he might rest in honourable ease, founded
this house for himself and his successors.’) Accordingly, the mansion of
Hawthornden which tourists now ‘admire, peaked so picturesquely on its high
rock in the romantic glen of the Esk, is not the identical house which Ben
Jonson saw, and in which he and Drummond had their immortal colloquies,
but Drummonds enlarged edifice of 1638, preserving in it one hardly knows
what fragments of the older building.’
A biographer of Drummond, writing in the year 1711, thus records the
poet’s death:-‘In the year 1649, when rebellion was prosperous and
triumphant in ’the utmost degree, the best of kings and men, under a sham
pretence of justice, was barbarously murdered at his own palace gate by the
.worst of subjects and the worst of men. Our author, who was much weakened
with close studying and diseases, was so pverwhelmed with extreme grief and
anguish that he died the 4th of December, wanting only nine days of sixtyfour
years of age, to the great grief and loss of all learned and good men ; and
was honourably buried in his own aisle in the church of Lasswade, near to his
house of Hawthornden.’
This statement of the cause of Drummond’s death is not quite correct.
‘ Of Drummond’s deep feeling,’ says Professor Masson, ‘ about the death of
