y that place long, being in three months after he
was raised to his new dignity, taken away by death[1]. The family of
Drummond in the article of antiquity is inferior to none in Scotland,
where that kind of distinction is very much regarded.

The first years of our author's youth were spent at the high school
at Edinburgh, where the early promises of that extraordinary genius,
which afterwards appeared in him, became very conspicuous. He was in
due time sent to the university of Edinburgh, where after the ordinary
stay, he was made Master of Arts. When his course at the university
was finished, he did not, like the greatest part of giddy students,
give over reading, and vainly imagine they have a sufficient stock of
learning: he had too much sense thus to deceive himself; he knew that
an education at the university is but the ground-work of knowledge,
and that unless a man digests what he has there learned, and
endeavours to produce it into life with advantage, so many years
attendance were but entirely thrown away. Being convinced of this
truth, he continued to read the best authors of antiquity, whom he not
only retained in his memory, but so digested, that he became quite
master of them, and able to make such observations on their genius
and writings, as fully shewed that his judgment had been sufficiently
exercised in reading them.

In the year 1606 his father sent him into France, he being then only
twenty-one years old. He studied at Bourges the civil law, with great
diligence and applause, and was master not only of the dictates of
the professors, but made also his own observations on them, which
occasioned the learned president Lockhart to observe, that if Mr.
Drummond had followed the practice, he might have made the best figure
of any lawyer in his time; but like all other men of wit, he saw more
charms in Euripides, Sophocles, Seneca, and other the illustrious
ancients, than in the dry wranglings of the law; as there have been
often instances of poets, and men of genius being educated to the law,
so here it may not be amiss to observe, that we remember not to
have met with one amongst them who continued in that profession, a
circumstance not much in its favour, and is a kind of proof, that the
professors of it are generally composed of men who are capable of
application, but without genius. Mr. Drummond having, as we have
already observed, a sovereign contempt for the law, applied himself to
the sublimer s