William Drummond of Hawthornden was a Scotsman whose English poetry--elegant, sensuous, and fluid--established him in his time as Edinburgh's unofficial poet laureate. Tracing the extensive borrowings and derivations in his work, scholars have sometimes overemphasized Drummond's lack of originality; but his intertextual weavings have earned him literary admirers in every century, especially the nineteenth, when several new editions of his poetry were published. Charles Lamb ranks him with Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, and Abraham Cowley as one of the "sweetest" of poets. Although now remembered chiefly for the notes he took of his conversations with Ben Jonson, Drummond was never "sealed of the Tribe of Ben"; the Scotsman's poetry was too aureate and Petrarchan for Jonson's taste. Jonson was of the opinion--duly recorded by Drummond in his record of Jonson's "Informations and maners"--that the laird's verses "were all good ... save that they smelled too much of the...