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
