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his navy in 1625. The piece in which Denham's greatest powers are exerted, his Coopers Hill, was not written till the year 1640. The harmony of Drummond, therefore, at a time when those who are usually called the first introducers of a smooth, and polished versification, had not begun to write, is an konour to Hawthornden that fhould never be forgotten. His excellence hardly known, cannot be enough acknowledged or praised.

Drummond and Petrarcha had this in their fate alike, that each lamented first the cruelty and then the lofs of their mistresses; so that their sonnets are alike naturally divided into two classes, those after, and those before the deaths of their respective sweethearts. Drummond, in several of these compositions, has shown much of the genius and spirit of the Italian poet. The seventh sonnet, of the first part, is much resembled by Sir Henry Wotton's elegant little poem on the queen of Bohemia :

"Ye meaner beauties, &c.

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And among Drummond's Flowers of Zion, the poem which begins,

Amidst the azure clear of Jordan's sacred streams,” eminently distinguishes him, whether he be considered as a philosopher or as a poet.

His Polemo Meddinia, a burlesque poem, founded on a ridiculous fray in Fife, is written with more than the humour of a Swift, or Peter Pindar; and may afford an excellent modern classical amusement to our nobility and gentry, who cannot bear the onstrous bore of turning over an Ainsworth's dictionary, and may still have retained enough of the charming

language of the Scipios, to be able to taste the beauties of the dunghill fight. These slight notices and extracts, I have scattered on the pages of your elegant journal, in the fond hope that they may draw forth the quill of an abler eulogist.

Ille ego qui quondam patriæ perculsus amore,
Civibus opprefsis, libertați succurrere ausim,
Hunc arva paterna colo fugiosque limina regum.

ALBANICUS.

POSTSCRIPT.

WHAT has been written concerning the person, family, and residence of Drummond, in the account of his writings, may be thought sufficient for Scotland, where such particulars are well known by the public; but considering the deserved celebrity of the poet, and the extensive circulation of this Miscellany, I have thought proper to set down as briefly as pofsible some circumstances that may deserve the attention of people of taste who visit Scotland, to contemplate its picturesque beauties, and to meditate on the classic footsteps of her illustrious citizens.

Drummond was descended from William Drummond, third son of Sir John Drummond of Drummond, by Mary de Montefex eldest daughter and coheiress of Sir William de Montefex, high justiciary of Scotland. The patriarch of the poet's family married a daughter and co-heirefs of Sir William Airth of Airth, in Stirlingshire, with whom he got the barony. of Carnoe.

Sir John Drummond, the poet's father, who was second son of Sir Robert Drummond of Carnoe, bought Hawthornden, in the year 1598, from the heirs of VOL. ix.

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Douglas of Strathbrock, a family which, with many other fair and opulent pofsefsions, had held Hawthornden for more than two centuries.

The caves of Hawthornden, cut by human art from the rock, are certainly of the most remote antiquity, resembling those in the vicinity of Thebes, and had probably served for the dwellings or fastenesses of the aboriginal natives of the country. This conjecture is supported by tradition, and, with the other singularities of the place, gives a sublimity to the scene. Captain Grose, in his antiquities of Scotland, has given a very well chosen view of the sequestered dale or den, and of the house overhanging the romantic rivulet of Efk.

The reverend Dr Abernethy Drummond, who married the heirefs, as above mentioned, caused to be engraved, on a stone tablet placed over Ben Johnson's seat, an inscription to the memory of his own ancestor, Sir Laurence Abernethy of Hawthornden, and to his wife's relation, the poet; where, if the public or the future proprietors of the place fhould erect the busts of Drummond and Ben Johnson, they ought to be placed close to each other on the same therm.

Dr Abernethy's inscription concludes with the following lines:

O sacred solitude, divine retreat,

Choice of the prudent, envy of the great,

By these pure streams, or in thy waving fhads,
I court fair Wisdom, that celestial maio;

There, trom the ways of men laid safe afhore,
1 smile to hear the distant tempest roar;

'There, blest with health, with business ung erplex'd,
This life I relifh, and secure the next.

The inscription over the door of the house, engra

ved by order of the poet, is as follows:

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THIS HIS loch is how swarming with herrings, which, for want of salt, the people are prevented from catching to the extent they might do; or indeed beyond their own limited consumption. They dry them without salt in their barns, which are of wicker, and eat them in winter by the name of sour herrings: A harsher name would be bestowed upon them any where else. At Scalpa is constructing, under the direction also of captain Macleod, one of the new lighthouses, which all allow to be judiciously placed, promising great advantage to the navigation of the Minche, through which all vefsels from the southward pafs from Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow, in their direct course to Norway and the Baltic.

A very obvious remark occurs to every visitor of the Hebrides, viz. that fish might be furnished cheaper to Great Britain and the rest of the world, from hence, than almost from any other place; for here, fish come to the very doors of the fishers. At Fort William, sixty or seventy boats are sometimes seen in an evening,

shooting their nets within a pistol fhot of the spot where they were launched into the water. By day-light the fishing is over, and the fifhers breakfast on the spoil, rest themselves in the forenoon, and pursue their ordinary occupations through the rest of the day. At Cannay, Eriskay, and Loch Bay, the cod and ling are landed, and put to salt on the very day they are caught. The herrings occasionally visit every salt water loch along the Hebrides, and north-western coast; whereas the Dutch have bufses to fit out at a great expence, and a long voyage to make over to the British coast before they wet their nets. The voyage from Great Britain to Newfoundland is surely not lefs expensive. It is, indeed, said the Swedes, since about the year 1756, have caught herrings near Gottenburgh, with still more facility; and that the annual visit of those fish has been more steady to the neighbourhood of that town, than to any one part of the western coasts of Great Britain; but it is added, they arrive every year later and later at that place, and if this retardment continue much longer, they will arrive when those seas are frozen up, and when it would be impofsible to catch them. Till then the Swedes are likely to be the great herring venders to Europe and the West Indies: For the Swedes are industrious; that part of Sweden is very populous; and the fiscal obstructions on the subject of salt, are next to nothing. Two hundred thousand barrels are said to be cured there annually, besides fifty thousand barrels of herring oil. If this be true, the Swedes enjoy the same, or, perhaps, superior advantages to our fishers for the present; but

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