SOURCE: MacDonald, Robert H. “Amendments to L. E. Kastner's Edition of Drummond's Poems.” Studies in Scottish Literature 7, nos. 1 & 2 (July-October 1969): 102-22.

[In the following essay, MacDonald takes issue with L. E. Kastner's 1913 edition of Drummond's poetry, identifying manuscript poems that were not included in the collection and verses that were wrongly attributed to Drummond.]

Introducing a selection of the unpublished poems of Drummond of Hawthornden, David Laing states the case for the responsible Victorian editor, a case for eclectic publication, selective, careful and moral.

The fair fame of many a Poet has suffered by the indiscriminate publication, in a posthumous form, either of unfinished productions, or of what was unsuited for public view. In this respect Drummond has shared the fate of other celebrated writers; and it would have been well for his reputation had his son, Sir William Drummond … been less careful in preserving every scrap of the Poet's handwriting. …¹

A modern editor would draw the line in a different place; he would consider it his duty to print whatever his author had written, even if it were juvenile or in bad taste. He would let his author's reputation take care of itself. This point, I think, needs no amplification—one has only to remember the recent controversy over the manuscript poems of A. E. Housman² (which, if his wishes had been followed, should have been destroyed). But whether an editor should draw any line at all, or print anything he can lay his hands on, in whatever state it is, unfinished, imperfect, or merely scribble, is still an open question.

L. E. Kastner's Scottish Text Society edition of Drummond's poems is regarded as the definitive edition,³ and while considering this question with respect to Drummond's poems in manuscript, we might ask at the same time what Kastner's editorial practice was, and how different his attitudes were from those of Laing. To put the question another way: have we an edition of Drummond's poems that claims to be definitive, but is in fact not so? Have we all the poems that Drummond wrote, or only as many as the editor felt we should have? Are our sensibilities spared the indelicate, is our patience protected from the tedious? These doubts were first expressed in 1952, when French Rowe Fogle printed a number of “new” poems in an appendix to his critical work on Drummond.⁴ My own examination of the manuscripts has uncovered not only more unprinted matter but also some verse which should have never been attributed to Drummond in the first place.

Drummond wrote sparingly, and what he published, he polished and perfected until he considered it fit for the world to see. He printed little more than half his verse, suppressing the rest as unworthy; his reputation rests upon his Poems (1616) and his Flowres of Sion (1623). But he did not destroy all that he rejected; instead he saved it carefully. Since his death a succession of editors have plundered his papers, and few have been over-considerate to his “fair fame.”

Whether Drummond would have approved of all this industry may be doubted, but his almost compulsive hoarding of his workbooks, and their survival today, has left modern editors with little choice. The Hawthornden MSS are the richest remains left to us of any poet of the period;⁵ indeed if they were not so abundant they would have been studied more carefully long before now. For students of Drummond, students of Jacobean poetry or students of the age they are equally valuable.

The first posthumous edition of Drummond's poems was that of Edward Phillips in 1656, the next in importance the 1711 edition of the complete Works.⁶ Both these added new matter not previously printed, and in both the additional verse was almost certainly drawn from Drummond's MSS. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seven other editions appeared, and the number of verses attributed to Drummond grew, but until the Scottish Text Society commissioned L. E. Kastner to produce a definitive edition—which was eventually printed in 1913—no systematic examination of the printed and unprinted material had been made. This is reflected in Kastner's two volumes, which are divided into poems printed during Drummond's lifetime, and poems posthumous, with the poems posthumous subdivided into poems first published in 1656, in 1711, in 1857, and poems not previously published in any former edition. To these Kastner added the poems he considered of doubtful authenticity.

The chief editorial problem was with the poems posthumous, and Kastner's edition has all the marks of having settled all difficulties. Kastner's scholarship is impressive, his presentation and organization of the verse could hardly be improved upon, his bibliography is as thorough as could be desired, and can only be corrected in a detail here and there.⁷ His work on Drummond's sources established beyond question not only Drummond's wide reading but his almost parasitic inspiration, and left later scholars little more to do than to dot the “i's” and cross the “t's” of the Scottish Petrarch's constant borrowings and translations. It is thus unfortunate to find Kastner guilty of error, and that the very one he so deplored in his fellow editors—the failure to examine the Hawthornden MSS closely enough, the consequent omission of a considerable number of poems, and the inclusion of others of questionable authenticity.

It should be made clear at once that it is probable that some of Kastner's omissions were intentional, and though a modern editor would not agree to them, by the standards of his day Kastner was not altogether at fault. Many of the poems Kastner passed by are either juvenile and incomplete or bawdy (or both). The latter would now be printed without question, for taste has changed; the former would undoubtedly be printed too, for though they may be poor and imperfect poems, they have their interest. As Kastner himself said of the verses he rescued from the Hawthornden MSS, “they are of considerable importance … in the light of Drummond's poetic development, presenting him as they do at an early stage of his career when Scotticisms still flowed readily from his pen, and when he had not yet attained that mastery over the standard English of his day for which he strove so hard.”⁸

Kastner's position here accords with modern practice, and his argument for printing the unpublished pieces—that, though they may not be worth much as poems, they may help the critic and the scholar, and so must not be suppressed—is nowadays taken for read. From his introduction he leaves us with the impression that his edition is complete. “We have also made it our business,” he says, “to examine afresh and very carefully the Hawthornden Manuscripts … by so doing we have been able to improve materially the text of the posthumous poems, and to add to the present edition a not inconsiderable number of unpublished pieces.”⁹ We are now apparently freed from the eclecticism of Laing, we are to have all of Drummond, every line. Yet as will be clear from the following pages, Kastner exercised a censorship only different in degree.

The source of Drummond's posthumous verse is the Hawthornden MSS. The MSS are in the main Drummond's private papers. Some of them have almost certainly been lost, and the parts which do seem to be missing are those which were used by the editors of the 1656 and the 1711 editions. Kastner showed that Edward Phillips based his edition upon the early 1614 “trial” edition of the Poems, but that he also received manuscript material sent to him by Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet, Drummond's brother-in-law.¹⁰ Thomas Ruddiman and Bishop John Sage, the putative editors of the 1711 Works, were given a free hand to take what they wished by Drummond's son Sir William, who went over the manuscripts at various times of his life, annotating items presumably with this edition in mind. Not all of what went to these editors came back.

What is left of the MSS was sorted and bound in volumes by David Laing early in the last century.¹¹ Altogether the volumes number fourteen, but of this number we are concerned with only three, for apart from the odd verse here and there¹² only three contain any verse which could be suspected of being original. The first two of these are Drummond's commonplace books: these have his notes on his reading, his lecture notes from university, accounts of his visit to the theatre in France, a catalogue of his library, a collection of jokes, and—this is the important point—a great many verses in English, Latin, French and Italian not of his own composition. The third volume is titled in his own hand An Addition to the poemes of W. D. 1620, and though the title may not in fact refer to the whole volume as it is bound, this book does contain almost all the posthumous verse included in Kastner's edition, and indeed almost all the verse written after 1620.

The Addition is quite evidently Drummond's workbook for the last half of his life, or as much of it as has survived. Most of the poems in it appear in more than one version, rough drafts and emendations are numerous, and one can follow quite precisely the various stages of the composition of several pieces. By 1620—the date in Drummond's title—the Poems (1616) were of course in print, and most of the Flowres of Sion were already written. There are a few verses from both of these in the “Addition,” early drafts, one would guess, which did not go to the printer.

Before going further there are some general propositions which should be stated. First, because a poem is written in Drummond's hand, is no proof that Drummond composed it. Almost everything in the voluminous Hawthornden MSS is in Drummond's hand—he was a persistent scribbler—and it was his habit to copy out other men's verse from the books he read: Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Sir Thomas Browne, William Warner, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney and many more all appear in his pages. His first editor made the mistake of entering Samuel Daniel's best known sonnet, “Care-charming sleep, son of the sable night …” among Drummond's works;¹³ it is there in Drummond's commonplace book, in his own hand, unascribed to Daniel, but there has never been any question of its proper authorship.

Secondly, and following on from the last, we must suspect any poem in the commonplace books as being by somebody else, unless it shows definite signs of an original composition, that is, unless it is in rough draft, with emendations and perhaps a rhyme scheme still not quite worked out. On the other hand, we may begin by trusting any poem in the volume called An Addition, since almost all the verse of that volume is quite clearly original. Another way of putting it would be to say that any poem in the Hawthornden MSS that is present only in one fair copy is suspect, while verses in a number of drafts can be at the worst only the poetical rendering of a translation. It should be emphasized that Drummond made the distinction between what he wrote and what others wrote by keeping his copies of each in separate sections of his papers,¹⁴ and that what confusion there is has come only from the over-enthusiasm of his editors, who, unless they could readily put someone else's name to a verse, were all too eager to give it to Drummond.

With these distinctions in mind we can amend Kastner's edition in these ways. Firstly, we can add a number of poems from the Addition that are omitted by Kastner. Secondly, we can question some poems that appear only in the commonplace books, but which Kastner ascribed to Drummond. Next, we can add some comments on the authenticity of the doubtful poems. We may also consider Kastner's reasons for doing what he did, and where we might wish to draw the line today.

The poems which Fogle transcribed from the Addition are printed in the second appendix to his A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden.¹⁵ As he says, they are in various stages of composition, written—which is plain from both the language and the state of Drummond's hand—at different times of his life, but mostly in his youth. Many are fragments of longer works, and some are clearly translations. The first pieces appear under the heading “De Materia Prima,” and from the clue of a similar title over an Italian verse of Valerio Belli's transcribed in one of the commonplace books,¹⁶ may be a translation from this poet. Two further verses

O leave (Ulisses) in their caue the Winds(17)

and

Ilas of the Nymphes

(f.53r)

are from a group headed “Madrigali di Mauritio Moro.”¹⁸

Kastner printed five companion pieces,¹⁹ but left these two alone. They are translations (like the printed verses in the group), but they are both unrhymed, and as Fogle points out, noticeably unfinished. Kastner obviously excluded them on these grounds, and if we look over the verses under the heading “De Materia Prima” mentioned above,²⁰ we notice that these too are unrhymed. Since they occupy a prominent place in the manuscripts Kastner must have seen them; his criterion for suppressing them was thus that they were unfinished, that is, unrhymed. Much of the verse printed by Fogle falls in this category.

The unprinted material which Fogle missed and Kastner ignored is in one way more interesting. Here again are the juvenile efforts, more rough drafts of sonnets, madrigals and pastorals, poor verse compared to Drummond's finished work. To paraphrase Kastner's words, these are of some interest to students of Drummond's early development; a small record of conceits attempted then left, rhymes abandoned, translations begun. What is new here are some longer verses, all from Drummond's later years, which show him in a mood quite removed from the sweet Petrarchan. From his printed pasquills and epigrams it was clear he had a taste and a facility for coarse satire; these verses show him indulging this taste in more extended style. No wonder Kastner left these alone!

The first of these pieces is the most finished, a libellous, obscene address to a lady named Kit, who had evidently taken her husband to court for the non-consummation of their marriage (f.193r). We know that Drummond had a vicious tongue, for two of his unprinted letters directed to women are beyond common abuse and if they were actually delivered cannot have done less than made him hated and feared. Here he puts his attack in verse with some skill; the whole needs polishing but it has been worked out with some care and attention. From the way in which the couplets are broken up by the sentence structure to provide a variation for the rhythm, thus

And (foole) though thou a Bonnet ware of Haire
Is not thy spotted skull as vglie bare
As thy painted cheeke? Thy Haires were stronglie stout
Each one did tyre a Man ere it came out

Drummond seems to have been modelling himself on someone like Bishop Corbett. He transcribed one of Corbett's poems in his commonplace book;²¹ he probably saw it and others in manuscript. The tone of these later satires is reminiscent of such pieces as Corbett's “Upon an unhandsome gentlewoman, who made love to him,” and the treatment not dissimilar:

Have I some forreigne pactice undertooke
By poyson, shott, sharp-knife, or sharper Booke
To kill my King? have I betrayed the State
To fire and fury, or some newer Fate,
Which learned Murderers, those Grand-Destinies,
The Jesuites, have nurc'd? If of all these
I guilty am, proceed; I am content
That Mallet take mee for my punishment(22)

Drummond's Kit is accused of promiscuity with one and all; counts, knights, the gentry, her kinsmen, yeomen, grooms. She is past her best, she has been used and misused—Drummond employs all the common coarse metaphors to describe her repulsive condition. Not content with her private person, he turns to her appearance: her breath stinks, she is bald, her breasts are “like sodden haggises,” her skin dry and yellow as saffron bags. As invective the piece has a clumsy strength, and though the target is a woman rather than a fellow poet, the lines are in the Scottish “flyting” tradition, and so their abusiveness is probably somewhat stylized.

In a less personal strain is a shorter piece labelled “Maister Peter Arbothnet on the mariage of my lord Bruce to Diana Sicile” (f. 218r). (The marriage in question is that of Diana Cecil, daughter of Sir William Burleigh, to Lord Bruce, first Earl of Elgin.)²³ This poem is perhaps a translation from the Latin, and indeed it bears the marks of the crude, anti-feminine humour of the previous century, the sort which George Buchanan at times descended to. With a pun on her surname, the sexual parts of the unfortunate Diana are compared to the fiery volcano of her supposed native land, in which, Lord Bruce is warned, the great Empedocles “theere burnt his pricke.”

Some other verses are topical in their satire. “Iames Stuart his replye to a pasquiller” is a recital of the high-handed behaviour of the fourth Duke of Lennox, (f. 217r) a man known to historians as a somewhat ineffectual, slow-minded creature of Charles I's, but here attacked as a Machiavellian schemer.

                                        … Put wee not down
Your Charles, and reallie stript him of his crown,
Though we swore his defence?

Lennox is led to say. Lennox was used by Charles as an intermediary in his attempts to force the Council of the Scottish Kirk to accept the prayer book, and it is odd that Drummond, who so disliked the Covenanting party—to the extent of composing rude anagrams on the names of its leaders²⁴—should in these lines be attacking a king's man. The verse must have been composed about the year 1640, and by this time Drummond was in increasing despair over the intransigent attitudes of both sides. He seems to have felt that the king was misled and betrayed by those nearest to him, yet saw no hope in the tyrannies of the Presbyterian extremists.

About the same time—1640—he mocks the fanaticism of a local Presbyterian, Mr. William Jameson, Minister of Jedburgh (or Jedart) (ff. 224-5). This man had made an example of his horse, having put it to death for the ungodly offense of working on the Sabbath day: in the fever of the time such were the lengths to which the extremists were prepared to push their convictions. Drummond attempts an epigram on the affair, but though his ending is neat enough—

Yee people of Iedwert hereafter beleeue then
Not men for the Saboth were made, but it for the men.

—his rhymes cripple the verse: “Cranstow / Branstown” might just pass, but “Iadwart / Iad arte” is very clumsy. The horse's reply is another disappointment. Here Drummond seems to have attempted irony:

Ye know how oft I rode for the good cause
And though with hunger pinched, yet did not pause
Till yee was at the assembly, where first placed
With wit and learning yee the table graced.

But slides off into direct castigation for the rest of the verse. Whatever topicality lay in “Old Roxinante and fierce Rabican / Strong independentes …” is lost to us now, but even with this taken into account the ending seems lame.

If of the dead saue good nought should be said …

(f. 91r)

is one of the most polished of all the unprinted pieces. It seems to be a product of Drummond's maturity, for it is technically skilful, with the same attention paid to the rhythm and pauses that we noticed in “Kit.”

Disdaind and scorned all memorialls
Of antique ages and for funeralles
Of worthye Men, hee suffered not a Tombe
To enclose their bones: nor any Temple hold
Their sad remembrances.

It would be tempting to suppose that the subject of this hymn of hate was a regicide, yet this would be crediting Drummond with second sight. It is likely that he was of one of the leaders of the Covenanting party.

One quite unfinished piece

Disdaine kendles loue in mee and wanton lookes alayes my flame

(f.189Ar)

is something of a curiosity, for it echoes in a remarkable fashion a poem by Benjamin Ruddier or Rudyerd

'Tis love breeds love in mee, and cold disdaine

Ruddier's poem is sometimes attributed to John Donne, and can be found in Grierson's edition among Donne's dubia.²⁵ It is written in answer to a verse by Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, third Earl of Pembroke, namely “A Dialogue,”

If her disdaine least change in you can move(26)

Drummond's reply owes most of its similarity to Ruddier's in that both repeat Herbert's phrases; Drummond's is certainly independent since it appears in another draft on another leaf of the MSS (f.69r).

The rest of the unprinted verse is similar to that published by Fogle. The piece “Tinareo in praise of his lady” (ff. 27r, 203r)—judging from the title, a translation from the Italian—is coarse but funny, the usual extravagant description of the lady being exploded in the last couplet by an imaginative indelicacy. Kastner must have suppressed this piece as being, in David Laing's words, “unsuited for public view.” When we think of the lip-service Drummond paid to the Petrarchan conventions, and how strange the tones of Shakespeare's CXXX sonnet would sound in the midst of his public poetry,²⁷ this is a reminder that Drummond and his fellow Petrarchans used the conventions of their genre in the full knowledge that they were merely conventions. Unlike Shakespeare, they saved their ridicule for private enjoyment.

There are a number of other short epigrams and epitaphs, similar to those selected for the posthumous poems by Kastner, but vulgar or obscene. Some are no worse than those in print. Kastner appears to have accepted the vulgarities chosen by his predecessors, notably Thomas Ruddiman and Bishop Sage in the 1711 edition—he could have hardly done otherwise—but added only the most harmless examples himself. Farts, pricks and arses he thought outside the pale.

In summary Kastner's editorial practice while in the main sound, was tainted with prudishness and carelessness. He selected from the MSS what he considered finished verse, that is, mostly verse that rhymed. He excluded poems however polished, if they were obscene, and he overlooked a number of others which, had he found them, would have come up to his standards of acceptance. His main fault was that he concealed his suppressions, and left his readers with the impression that his edition contained all the poems that his author has written.

One poem outside the MSS should be mentioned, a commendatory sonnet written on the first leaf of Drummond's copy of Sir William Alexander's Monarchicke Tragedies.²⁸ This is in Drummond's hand, with his signature below, and there can be no doubt about its authenticity. The sonnet is a competent piece in the customary extravagant style: the ancients are addressed, and told their martial glories need remain unsung no more, for

O Happie Ghosts! What all those firie Climes,
And pregnant Ages past you did refuse
Our Artike yeeldeth, and these golden times,
Euen equall to your greatest deeds a Muse.
That worlds shall doubt which greater praise doth bring
Heroicklie to acte or sweetlie sing.(29)

This sonnet escaped Kastner's attention. It may be kept in mind when the authenticity of another sonnet is questioned below, the poem beginning

First in the orient raign'd th' assyrian kings …(30)

This is on the subject of the four Monarchies, and Kastner supposed it to refer to Alexander's Monarchicke Tragedies.³¹ It would be unusual for two poems to be attached to the same book.

So much for the omission in Kastner; careful examination of the volume of poems in the Hawthornden MSS, the Addition, makes it plain that they are all bone fide omissions, and not poems by some other author Drummond met in his readings. They all bear the signs of Drummond's composition, with words scored out, emendations made, and rhyme schemes incomplete.

The poems which must be questioned in Kastner's edition are another matter. These are distinguished by their neatness in the MSS, by their lack of corrections, and most important, as was argued earlier, by their appearance in the wrong place; that is, in the commonplace books rather than the Addition. I propose to discuss the authenticity of each of these poems, one by one, if, from their form and location in the MSS—their sole source—they seem at all suspicious. I will not confine myself to verses first printed by Kastner, but review any posthumous verse if it is possible that it was not in fact composed by Drummond.

We may begin with two sonnets about which there can be no doubt: “Wer thes thine eies, or lightnings from aboue” and “Faire cruel Siluia since thow scornes my teares.”³² These are written in Drummond's hand on ff. 230r and 231r of MS. 2060, the second of Drummond's commonplace books. They are translations, the first from De Porcheres, the second from Guarini. Kastner has no hesitation in claiming both of these for Drummond, although in fact (as he himself points out) they were printed in Charles Roger's edition of the poems of Sir Robert Ayton.³³ They are both in fair copy, and occur nowhere else in the manuscripts, so even without an attribution to Ayton we would have reason to suspect them. As it is, Ayton's latest editor, Charles Gullans, has no hesitation in rescuing both sonnets for Ayton.³⁴ His reason for doing so is excellent, for both poems occur in the two chief Ayton MSS. Kastner was unaware of the existence of these manuscripts, or else he would not have assigned the two poems to Drummond with such assurance. As Gullans rightly says, the presence of the sonnets in Drummond's hand in the Hawthornden MSS is not evidence of Drummond's authorship, but of his interest in them.³⁵

In his commonplace books Drummond made a habit of copying out verse from his reading. Of this verse, Kastner takes only one sonnet and one fragment from the first volume—the Ephemeris—as Drummond's own: “Great paragon of poets brichtest pearle” and “The greatest gift that from ther thrones.”³⁶ One can see why he accepts these two pieces: the sonnet occurs only in this copy, but the verse on the same leaf (MS. 2059, f.23v), “The greatest gift,” appears in the Addition under the title “Silenus to King Midas” (MS. 2062, f.2r), and so if Drummond wrote the one he might be supposed to have written the other. But I think it more likely that Drummond “borrowed” this verse, and entered it under his own title in his collection of epigrams. In the commonplace book both pieces are, admittedly, partly spelled in Scots, set down in a young hand, and thus like much of Drummond's early verse. The lines themselves are clumsy, and the last couplet of the sonnet

Thy perfyt praises if the vorld vold vrit
Must haue againe they selff for to endit.

is somewhat awkward. This could be the mark of the novice, and though it is hardly flattering to say so, it is not out of place among Drummond's first attempts. The subject too of the sonnet might well have been chosen by Drummond—a eulogy to his favourite author, Sir Philip Sidney. (Kastner has the poem titled “In Sr. P. d. R.,” and takes the letters to mean “on Sieur Pierre de Ronsard.”³⁷ Besides misreading Drummond's writing, this supposes more ignorance on his part than I am willing to admit, for surely he would know that Ronsard did not claim the title “Sieur.” The letters, besides, read “In [or “On,” the ‘i’ and the ‘e’ are superimposed] Sr. P. S. k.,” or “In [that is “on”] Sir Philip Sidney Knight,” a usual style of address for the time.) But again, the arguments against Drummond's authorship seem decisive. The two pieces are in fair copy, without emendations, and they are set in the middle of a mass of verse taken from other men. As for the language, Drummond when a young man put whatever he wrote into Scots.

Kastner is more generous in his selections from the second commonplace book, and one can find little excuse beyond carelessness for some of these choices. Besides the Ayton poems already described, he prints three other sonnets, one translation and a number of little epigrams and such like, all of which are of extremely doubtful authenticity. The short verses last mentioned are the least defensible, for these have been taken from Drummond's jestbook or Democritie.

First, let us take the three sonnets “I feare to me such fortune be assigned,” “First in the orient raign'd th' assyrian kings,” and “Great Queene whom to the liberall Heauens propine.”³⁸ These are written out in fair copy in the same place in the MSS (MS. 2060, ff. 292v-293r), but printed in different sections in Kastner's edition. (This is because Kastner separates the posthumous poems according to the date of their first publication.) From their form in the manuscripts the three sonnets must have been copied out at the same time. They do not occur elsewhere, nor do they bear any sign of Drummond's composition. The first sonnet is a lament for the times and for Sir Alexander Falconer or Colonel James Halkerston—little or nothing is known about either³⁹—the second a conventional description of the Four Monarchies, and the third a gently mocking address to the queen, presumably Elizabeth I. If, as I judge, these sonnets are not Drummond's, then from their common position in his manuscripts we might be justified in supposing that they had a common author or source. Taken together, they are an odd lot. The air of disillusionment and despair of the first

Where flatterers, fooles, baudes, fidlers, are rewarded,
Whilst Vertue sterues vnpittied, unregarded.

is like the mood of Drummond's later years, but the sonnet to the queen, to have any point, must have been written before 1603. Here, however, the tone seems foreign to Drummond, and the opinions strange; Drummond after all was just a youth of eighteen in the year of Elizabeth's death. The verse on the Four Monarchies was supposed by Kastner to refer to Sir William Alexander's The Monarchicke Tragedies⁴⁰ (Drummond did have a copy of these), though the subject was a commonplace at that time, and as we saw above, Drummond had already written a sonnet for this work. Without attempting to attach these sonnets to the name of another author—who should be an anglified Scot of Alexander's generation (for an Englishman would probably not have composed the Halkerston piece)—we must remain doubtful of Drummond's authorship.

It seems even less likely that Drummond wrote the verse. “At length heere shee is: wee haue got those bright eyes” (MS. 2060, f.171r)⁴¹ which as the heading in the MS says—is a translation from the French verse “To Anne, the French Queen, new come from Spaine, and applyable to Marye of England, meeting the King at Douer.” Kastner ignores this piece in his notes, which, considering the problems it raises if Drummond is the author, is a tactful decision. Why should Drummond choose to celebrate Mary of England, dead for more than half a century? It seems an inappropriate “application,” when he could have found royal meetings closer to his own time and country. The translation is written in fair copy on the same page as the original, and bearing Ayton's translations in mind, we must again doubt the wisdom of Kastner's judgement. A final argument against Drummond's authorship is that the verse appears to be adapted for The Entertainment of … Prince Charles, and while Drummond borrowed freely from everyone else, he did not as a rule paraphrase himself.

The lines

At length heere shee is: wee haue got those bright eyes.
More shine now our earth than the skyes!

are echoed by

At length we see those eyes,
which cheere both over earth and skies …(42)

and the rest of the stanza is also reminiscent of “To Anne.”

Lastly, there are a number of short poems which are doubtful or spurious beyond question. Drummond probably did write the epigram “S. Andrew, why does thou giue up thy Schooles”⁴³ because, though it is copied out on a page in the second commonplace book (MS. 2060, f. 199v), the page itself looks like a stray, and “S. Andrew” is accompanied by the epigram “Gods iudgements” which occurs again in the Addition (ff. 184r, 187r). Another epigram “Prometheus am I”⁴⁴ is much more doubtful, for it appears on the last leaf of the same commonplace book (f. 300r), along with (for instance) a verse from Philip Rosseter's Booke of ayres, and nowhere else. It is hard to see why David Laing, who included this poem in his selection from the MSS, and whose judgement was usually so reliable, made a mistake here.

Where Kastner used his own judgement he is not to be trusted. He seems to have been in a muddle over the MSS, or at least over that part of the second commonplace book that Drummond called his Democritie. This jestbook is a confused mass of miscellaneous material, a collection of other men's jokes and doggerel rhymes. It is labelled by Drummond on the title-leaf “pasquills apotheames impresas Anagrames epitaphes Epigrames … of this and the late age before,” and this is the description it answers. Knowing Drummond's magpie habits, the sole reason for believing the verse in the Democritie his—that it is in his hand—carries no weight. Nobody who has inspected the MSS with care would consider it a safe source of original verse; indeed, it should be the last place an editor should look for additions to the canon.

It is difficult to account for Kastner's behaviour here, and most difficult to understand why, if he was determined to cull the Democritie for epigrams and the rest, he stopped where he did. Why select only nine pieces, and exclude the rest? He seems to have chosen the epigrams with most point, and ones which might possibly have been written by Drummond (that is, ones that came close to those Drummond did write), leaving aside verses that were too obviously “of the late age before.” He also appears to have favoured epigrams that Drummond transcribed in a careful hand.

The following then should be considered spurious:

Heere lyes a Doctor who with droges and pelfe …

(MS. 2060, ff. 31v, 117v)

Heere lyes a cooke who went to buye ylles …

(f. 31v)

That which preserueth cherries, peares and plumes …

(f. 38r)

A lady in her prime to whom was giuen …

(f. 126r)

Strange in his end, his death most rare and od …

(ff. 126r, 79r)

Killd by ingratitude heere blest within doth rest …

(f. 126r)

Vntymlie Death that neither wouldst conferre …

(f. 31r).⁴⁵

These were found by Kastner in the Democritie, and printed together in his additions to the posthumous poems.

He found, too, in the same place the “madrigal” which he chose to print, “Loue once thy lawes” (f. 63v),⁴⁶ but omitted its accompanying piece, “Loue is a wretched Boy” presumably because it was bawdy. To these spurious poems we can, I think, add the epitaph “Heere lyes a sowre and angry cooke.”⁴⁷ This does appear in Drummond's Addition (MS. 2062, f. 103Br), where it is written at the foot of a composition, but it also occurs in the Democritie (MS. 2060, f. 77v), in amongst other anonymous epigrams. It is improbable that Drummond wrote it himself.

Detailed study of the MSS does nothing to strengthen the claims of the poems of doubtful authenticity. There are five of these: “Lines one the Bischopes,” “For the Kinge,” “Hymns,” Polemo-Middinia, and “To the Reader.”⁴⁸ With the exception of the first and the last, both which I defend later, I believe these to be spurious, for I have found no trace of the smallest part of any of the doubtful poems in the Hawthornden MSS. When one considers that almost every poem written after 1620 (that is, some of the Flowers of Sion, and everything after) occurs in one or more drafts in Drummond's workbook the Addition, it would be extraordinary that if these poems were indeed authentic no trace of their composition survived. This evidence, we should hurry to add, is damning though not conclusive, for certain authentic poems such as the commendatory verse “Paraineticon,”⁴⁹ which prefaced Sir Thomas Kellie's Pallas Armata, are also missing, though on the whole such omissions are few.

The second argument against the doubtful poems (all but the first and the last) is that they are unlike anything else composed by Drummond, alien to his style, thought, and talent. Kastner himself states most of the relevant objections, but he is too tolerant altogether.

The first of the poems, “Lines one the Bishopes,” comes from a manuscript written in the hand of Drummond's contemporary, Sir James Balfour, and is ascribed to Drummond by Balfour. These lines probably are Drummond's: they are written in his style, they express his known opinions, and they are very like some of the satires he wrote in his later years, especially the unprinted pieces “Iames Stuart his replye to a pasquiller” and the attack on Mr. William Jameson. Drummond and Balfour besides were acquaintances, for Balfour appears in at least one of Drummond's lists of intended recipients of copies of his verse.⁵⁰

The second poem—“For the Kinge”—follows on in Balfour's manuscript, and was ascribed to Drummond by the editors of the 1711 Works. Balfour does not name it as Drummond's, but his ascription to “Lines one the Bishopes” might possibly be intended to cover “For the Kinge.” This is a prima facie case for authenticity; what is questionable is that Drummond should write such verse at all. “For the Kinge” consists of six poems on the senses, the whole a bitter, personal, vicious if not treasonable attack on the conduct and morals of King James VI and I. W. C. Ward, the editor immediately preceding Kastner, doubted whether such severe criticism could come from Drummond,⁵¹ and his question is indeed pertinent. Drummond was a confirmed and a profound monarchist, and though a few of his later verses do attack the king or his ministers for their unbecoming public behaviour, there is nothing similar to this private abuse in his authentic work.

The “Hymns,” the third group, were first printed (as far as is known) in The Primer or Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary in English.⁵² They were first published as Drummond's in the Works (1711). While pointing out that “the somewhat colourless language of the hymns is the strongest argument against their ascription to Drummond …” Kastner claims that the weight of the evidence is for their authenticity. He admits that there is no trace of them in the Hawthornden MSS, and that the editors of the Works may have mistakenly printed them from a transcription in Drummond's hand. He argues that Drummond's son (who was responsible for supplying the 1711 editors with their manuscript copy) “can reasonably be presumed to have known what his father wrote …” and that Drummond at one time of his life did write Christian songs and hymns.⁵³ Neither of these arguments is convincing. Drummond's son, Sir William, was a youth of fourteen when Drummond died, and as his diary shows,⁵⁴ he was little interested in literature. One splendidly biased journal writer, Father Richard Augustin Hay, described him in his “Memoires” as a “man of a hideous bulke …” a Justice of the Peace “fitter to set in privat parlors over the glass, whilst healths goe round, and to examine the condition of a pot of ale, which he hath good opportunity to discover, than the circumstances of any debate that comes before him.”⁵⁵ Father Hay may have been prompted by spleen, but there is nothing in Sir William's annotations on his father's MSS to dispel the impression we have of him as an inadequate guide to their contents. His occasional endorsements show no insight and little intelligence, and by 1705—which was about the date that Thomas Ruddiman began to plan his edition—he was an old man.

The second of Kastner's points is that these may be the hymns mentioned by Drummond in a letter to an anonymous correspondent (this letter was printed by Laing in his selections from the MSS).⁵⁶ Drummond's words are

At my last being in your Country, I remember yee regrated the defect want of Christian songs and hymnes in our English language, the neighbour countreyes of France and Germanie hauing the aduantage ouer us herin, which I then wished with you to be interprised by some happy wit, and promised to send vnto you a piece of myne (more showing in affectionate willingnesse than any perfection) on that subject. …

This does sound as though he might have meant these hymns, but it could, of course, refer to any other Christian song or hymn. Laing suggests that Drummond's correspondent was Sir Robert Kerr, whose psalms Drummond read and improved. We know from a letter of Sir William Alexander's that Drummond was a correspondent member of King James' psalm writing school;⁵⁷ it is possible that the piece he referred to in his letter was a psalm. Apart from these objections, there is the awkward problem of the hymns' first appearance in the Primer … of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Drummond had no known contact with or interest in the English Roman Catholic community in France, and it is difficult to see how he could have come to supply the St. Omer printer with this verse. There is nothing in the hymns that would stick in the throat of a Scottish presbyterian (though the last piece, “On the Feast of St. Michael the Arch-Angel,” might be disapproved of), but considered together, these would be unusual compositions for a man of Drummond's beliefs, even taking into account his wide reading and fondness of such authors as Marino. The poems spiritual of the Flowres of Sion are of a more philosophical mood altogether; these hymns are devotional, subdued, colourless, and have none of the startling imagery, the Marinism, of Drummond's authentic pieces. The hymns must owe their presence in the edition of 1711 to an error on the part of the editors, who mistook a transcription in Drummond's own hand for an original composition.

For the first of the remaining two pieces, the macaronic Polemo-Middinia, all that can be said is that these lines are unlike the rest of Drummond's work, that there is no trace of them in his manuscripts, and that there is nothing to connect them with Drummond save post-humous ascription. The Polemo-Middinia was not claimed for Drummond until forty-two years after his death. Drummond's knowledge of the persons and location of the Polemo-Middinia—the fight between the muck-carts of Scotstarvet and Barns—is something we cannot put aside when questioning his authorship, yet the negative evidence of the MSS, with their complete lack of this or any other macaronic verse, is difficult to ignore. Drummond spent a lifetime consciously erasing Scotticisms from his writing, and we can reasonably doubt that he would have plunged himself back into the broadest dialect. Without being able to offer any evidence other than an even closer connection with the locale of the midden-fecht I would suggest Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet as the author; unlike Drummond he was a Latinist with a noted taste for Latin verse. As his Staggering State of the Scottish Statesmen shows, he had the humour, sharp enough, pawky enough. There is nothing in the Polemo-Middinia that demonstrates the master hand at work; Sir John or one of his friends might have managed it.

“To the Readers,” the preface to a 1629 edition of Alexander Montgomerie's The Flyting, was claimed for Drummond by Dr. Rudolf Brotanek in 1896,⁵⁸ on the grounds that it is an expansion of the epigram “Flyting no reason hath, for at this tyme”⁵⁹ which is in the Addition (f. 154r). Two lines in each are particularly close:

Flyting no reason hath, and at this tyme
Heere it not stands by Reason, but by Ryme

from “To the Reader,” matching

Flyting no reason hath, for at this tyme,
It doth not stand with reason, but in ryme

and the joke of the epigram being repeated in

And Lawes were made that none durst flyte in prose;
How calme were then the world? perhaps this Law
Might make some madding wives to stand in aw,
And not in filthy Prose out-roare their men(60)

Without being able to add anything to Brotanek's argument (as given by Kastner) there is indeed a case for accepting this poem as authentic.

This completes my consideration of the possible errors in Kastner's edition. Kastner had, as I have suggested, a clear idea where to draw the line in printing new material from the MSS; he was hardly less opposed than David Laing to the principle of “indiscriminate publication.” He refused like Laing to admit “unfinished productions” to the canon, and his criterion for rejecting these was lack of rhyme. He had firm opinions about what was “unsuited for public view,” and so he passed a number of vulgarities by on the other side. His acquaintance with the MSS themselves was less than he claimed in the preface to his edition, and had he known them better he would not have attributed so many doubtful lines to his author.

Yet a new edition of Drummond's poems is neither likely nor necessary, and the additions and subtractions I have described should only be considered as amendments to Kastner. For all but the post-humous poems Kastner can hardly be faulted; his text is reliable, his commentary knowledgeable and scholarly. If he had studied the MSS in more detail he would have avoided the errors he did make.

The greatest difficulty that an editor of Drummond's verse will meet is deciding what to print from the MSS and what to leave alone. I do not mean by this that the problem of deciding what is and what is not Drummond's is insoluble; indeed, I have shown that close inspection of the arrangement of the MSS gives very firm directions in this respect. What is difficult is to know how much of Drummond's own writing to reproduce. The “unfinished productions” are many, and some are much more unfinished than others. Kastner retrieved only rhyme, while Fogle chose to print several pieces that settled only shakily into metre.

Faced with the confusion in some leaves of the MSS, I believe that all an editor can do is to pick out anything that resembles a poem, if it is in metre, however rough. For the rest, the translations and prose jottings, these can be left alone. But the reader must be told the criteria of the editor's selection, and where he can find the residue. This, finally, is Kastner's chief sin: he implies that he has printed everything, when he has suppressed some things. The reader deserves to be trusted.

Notes

1. Archaeologia Scotica: or, Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, IV (Edinburgh, 1857), 225.

2. Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 16, 1967; Jan. 11, 1968.

3. The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1913), 2 vols. This is afterwards referred to as Kastner.

4. A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden (New York, 1952), pp. 187-209.

5. The Hawthornden MSS, National Library of Scotland, MSS. 2053-2067.

6. See Kastner's bibliography for these and the other editions mentioned below; Kastner, I, lxxxi-lxxxix.

7. Kastner's treatment of variants in his transcription from the Hawthornden MSS was somewhat careless. One item has come to light since he compiled his bibliography, the single-sheet sonnet “This Beautie faire, which Death in Dust did turne …” addressed to Euphemia Kyninghame. See the author's “Drummond of Hawthornden, Miss Euphemia Kyninghame, and the ‘Poems,’” MLR, LX (1965), 494-9.

8. Kastner, I, xii.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid. I, lxxxiii-lxxxvi.

11. Laing gives an account of his labours and the probable history of the MSS, Arch. Scot., IV, 57-62.

12. See for example, MS. 2061, ff. 58v-59v.

13. Poems, by that most famous wit, W. D., ed. Edw. Phillips (London, 1656 and London, 1659).

14. One epigram, “Narcissus,” which Drummond did definitely write—it appeared in the Poems (1616), see Kastner, I, 109—occurs in both the volume of poems (MS. 2062, f. 169r) and the second commonplace book (MS. 2060, f. 130v), but from the look of it the latter leaf is a stray.

15. Fogle, pp. 187-209.

16. MS. 2060, f. 1571

17. MS. 2062, f. 52r. Further references in the text of this chapter are to this volume, unless indicated otherwise.

18. Fogle, p. 192. Fogle's transcription has some minor inaccuracies.

19. Kastner, II, 176; II, 280-81.

20. Fogle, pp. 187-91.

21. MS. 2060, ff. 44r-45r.

22. The Poems of Richard Corbett, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper (Oxford, 1955), p. 6.

23. This verse can be dated fairly precisely: Lord Bruce married Diana Cecil on the 12th November, 1629. She was the widow of Henry de Vere, Earl of Oxford. See The Complete Peerage, V, 41-2.

24. From Warriston he made “vn vrai sot.” MS. 2061, f. 74r.

25. John Donne, Poems, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (Oxford, 1912), I, 431-2.

26. Ibid., I, 430-1.

27. “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. …”

28. Written on A1r of a copy of The Monarchicke Tragedies (London, 1607), STC 344, now in the National Library of Scotland. This copy is shelved as NLS MS. 1692.

29. The sonnet is printed by Fogle, pp. 75-6.

30. Kastner, II, 229.

31. Kastner, II, 394-5.

32. Kastner, II, 270; II, 269.

33. Kastner, II, 407-8.

34. Sir Robert Ayton, The English and Latin Poems, ed. Charles B. Gullans, STS, Fourth Series (Edinburgh, 1963), pp. 164-5.

35. Ibid., pp. 280-2.

36. Kastner, II, 268, II, 186.

37. Kastner, II, 407.

38. Kastner, II, 230; II, 229, II, 269.

39. Kastner identifies the subject of the poem as Colonel James Halkerston, the author of some Latin epigrams included in the Delitiae Poetarum Scotarum, ed. Arthur Johnston (Amsterdam, 1637); II, 395. David Laing thinks that he was Sir Alexander Falconer of Halkertone, a Senator of the College of Justice, made Lord Halkertone in 1647. See Arch. Scot., IV, 102-3.

40. Kastner, II, 394-5.

41. Kastner, II, 274.

42. Kastner, II, 135-6.

43. Kastner, II, 243.

44. Kastner, II, 240.

45. Kastner, II, 284-5.

46. Kastner, II, 279.

47. Kastner, II, 285.

48. Kastner, II, 292-327.

49. Kastner, II, 167-8.

50. MS. 2061, f. 2r.

51. The poems of W. D., ed. W. C. Ward, The Muses Library (London, 1894), II, 328. In Drummond's Works (1711) the poem carries the title “The Five Senses.” In the catalogue Drummond had printed of his gift of books to Edinburgh University Library, the Auctarium bibliothecae Edinburgenae … (Edinburgh, 1627), the title “The fyve Sences” appears, described as a MS. The work has of course disappeared from Edinburgh University Library. See the author's The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, forthcoming), p. 226. If as seems likely these works are one and the same, we have another reason to doubt “For the Kinge”—since the catalogue was made under Drummond's own eye, and he would have claimed his own work.

52. Kastner says the hymns were first printed in the edition of the Primer published at St. Omer by John Heigham in 1619. Neither STC nor Allison and Rogers record a 1619 edition: either Kastner was mistaken in his facts or the copy he saw has now disappeared. The hymns do appear in the 1631 edition, John Heigham, St. Omer, STC 16099, Allison and Rogers 691; and in another issue of this edition, STC 16100, Allison and Rogers 692.

53. Kastner, II, 416-7.

54. Printed in Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, Third Series, VII (Edinburgh, 1941) 11-40.

55. Quoted by David Laing in his edition of William Drummond, Viscount Strathallan's The Genealogy of the Most Noble and Ancient House of Drummond (Edinburgh, 1831), pp. 269-70.

56. Laing, p. 92.

57. Works (1711), p. 151.

58. Kastner, II, 424-5.

59. Kastner, II, 245.

60. Kastner, II, 327.