SOURCE: Cummings, Robert. “Drummond's Forth Feasting: A Panegyric for King James in Scotland.” The Seventeenth Century 2, no. 1 (January 1987): 1-18.

In the following essay, Cummings examines Drummond's Forth Feasting as an example of the panegyric verse form. The critic maintains that Drummond innovatively modified the “ethical obligations” of the panegyric form in order to address his philosophical ideas about the monarchy.

‘His censure of my verses was that they were all good … save that they smelled too much of the schools, and were not after the Fancie of the tyme … yett that he wished, to please the King, that piece of Forth-Feasting had been his own.’¹ Jonson, quoted here by Drummond, probably meant not that he would have wished himself to flatter James, but only that the fluidity of Forth Feasting would certainly have gratified the ear of a king, of whose taste he in fact thought little. But...