hand, and said, "His Majesty has sent me ten guineas because I am
poor and live in an alley, go and tell him that his soul lives in an
alley."

He had a pension from the city of London, from several of the nobility
and gentry, and particularly from Mr. Sutton the founder of the
Charterhouse.[5] In his last sickness he often repented of the
profanation of scripture in his plays. He died the 16th of August
1637, in the 63d year of his age, and was interred three days after in
Westminster Abbey; he had several children who survived him.

Ben Johnson conceived so high an opinion of Mr. Drummond of
Hawthornden by the letters which passed between them, that he
undertook a journey into Scotland, and resided some time at
Mr. Drummond's seat there, who has printed the heads of their
conversation, and as it is a curious circumstance to know the opinion
of so great a man as Johnson of his cotemporary writers, these heads
are here inserted.

"Ben, says Mr. Drummond, was eat up with fancies; he told me, that
about the time the Plague raged in London, being in the country at Sir
Robert Cotton's house with old Camden, he saw in a vision his eldest
son, then a young child, and at London, appear unto him, with the mark
of a bloody cross on his forehead, as if it had been cut with a sword;
at which amazed, he prayed unto God, and in the morning he came to
Mr. Camden's chamber to tell him; who persuaded him, it was but an
apprehension, at which he should not be dejected. In the mean time,
there came letters from his wife of the death of that boy in the
plague. He appeared to him, he said, of a manly shape, and of that
growth he thinks he shall be at the resurrection. He said, he spent
many a night in looking at his great toe, about which he had seen
Tartars, and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians fight in his imagination.

"That he had a design to write an epic poem, and was to call it
Chrologia; or the Worthies of his Country, all in couplets, for he
detested all other rhime. He said he had written a discourse on
poetry, both against Campion and Daniel, especially the last, where
he proves couplets to be the best sort of verses." His censure of the
English poets was as follows:

"That Sidney did not keep a decorum, in making every one speak as well
as himself. Spenser's stanza pleased him not, nor his matter; the
meaning of the allegory of the Fairy Queen he delivered in writing
to Sir Walter Raleigh, which was, that by the bleating