then seventy years of age, had come to London on the business, he must have brought Drummond’s MSS., or copies of them, with him.  On the 16th of January 1854-5 there had been registered at Stationers’ Hall, as forthcoming, Drummond’s History of Scotland through the Reigns of the Five Jameses, with a selection of other prose-writings of his, chiefly of a political kind; and the volume did appear immediately, as a handsome small folio, bearing date 1655, and “printed by Henry Hills for Rich.  Tomlins and himself.”  As Henry Hills was one of the printers to his Highness and the Council, the appearance from his press of a volume so full of conservative doctrine, inculcating so strongly the duty of submission to kingly prerogative and to constituted authority, may not be without significance.  Another interesting circumstance about it is that it had appeared under the charge of a London editor, “Mr. Hall of Gray’s Inn,”—­i.e., unless I am mistaken, that Mr. John Hall whom we saw brought in, at L100 a year, to do pieces of literary hackwork for the Council under Milton as long ago as May 1649, and who had been in some such employment for the Council, at least occasionally, ever since (ante p. 177).  Accidental or not, the fact that the editor of Drummond’s Prose Writings, selected by Scotstarvet or by the printer Hills, should have been a servant of the Council of State, and a kind of underling of Milton in that capacity, is at least curious.  But it becomes more curious when taken in connexion, with the fact that the editor of the companion volume, containing the first professedly complete edition of Drummond’s Poems, was Milton’s elder nephew.  This volume, though announced by Mr. Hall in his Introduction to the Prose Volume, did not appear till about a year afterwards, and then as an octavo of 224 pages, with this title, "Poems by that most famous Wit, William Drummond of Hawthornden ...  London, Printed for Rickard Tomlins, at the Sun and Bible, neare Pye-Corner, 1656.”  The volume is dedicated to Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet, and includes about sixty small pieces of Drummond never before published, which Sir John had supplied from the Hawthornden MSS.  Apart from revision of the proofs, Phillips’s editorship consisted in a prose preface, signed “E.P.,” and a set of commendatory verses, signed in full “Edward Phillips.”

[Footnote 1:  Council Order Books, March 9 and March 19, 1654-5.]

Drummond’s Poetry had long been known to Milton in the fragmentary state in which alone it had been till then accessible, i.e. in the successive instalments of it published by Drummond himself in Edinburgh between 1613 and 1638.  There might be proof also that Drummond was one of Milton’s favourites, and regarded by him as one of the sweetest and truest poets that there had been in Great Britain through that age of miscellaneous metrical effort, much of it miscalled Poetry, which included the whole of the laureateship of Ben Jonson and the beginning of that of Davenant.  Accordingly, it is not difficult to suppose that phrases about Drummond from Milton’s own mouth were worked by Phillips into his prose preface to the London edition of the Poems of Drummond.  There is a little hyperbolism in that preface; but the opening definition of Drummond’s genius is exact, and the fitness of some of the phrases quite admirable.  Thus:—­